An Adventurous Day

Ok ok ok....before you get too excited, my adventure does not include a trip to the hospital or some crazy at-home birth story.  I am, in fact, still pregnant!  Sorry to disappoint...  Now that we have that out of the way, I'll continue on with what turned out to be quite an adventurous Tuesday!  

The day started normally.  I woke with Hubs, made him a lunch, and sent him off to work.  I completed some chores around the house, and then Mama A came by to take me to my doctor's appointment (remember how we sold Hubs' car, so now he's using mine?  Just in case I go into labor we decided it was best for him to have the car every day and I can just lounge around the house and get chauffeured by my mom!).  So we went to the doctor for my 38-week check (to be clear, as of this post I'm 38 weeks and 2 days).  She checked me and I'm still at 1 cm and 60% effaced, but the baby's moved down into my pelvis a little more and is at -1 (we were at -2 last week) station.  The goal is to be between 0-station (baby's head is fully engaged in the pelvis) and +3 (crowning).  She stripped my membranes (wow was that uncomfortable) in an effort to release some prostaglandins and help stir things up a bit.  Sometimes that helps induce labor within 48 hours, so we'll see.  My next appointment is Friday (with the long weekend and the packers coming right when I hit 39 weeks I am going in a few days early, which means two appointments this week!).  I'll keep you posted!

After my appointment, Mom and I went to lunch and I had a spicy chicken sandwich to see if that would help.  Then we went to the mall so she could exchange some shorts for Little Brother that were the wrong size, and I wanted to try on some nightshirts since I really don't have any tee-shirts long enough and it's getting progressively more miserable trying to get comfy enough to fall asleep at night.  So I went into the dressing room, and as Mom was on the sales-floor trying to find me some more options, I checked the panty liner I'd inserted after my appointment (stripping the membranes had left me a little leaky).  I felt like I was leaking through, so I figured that was the best time to change the liners!  Well, as I'm standing buck-naked in the dressing room, trying to change a panty liner without sitting my bare hiney on the yukky vinyl seat, I hear a woman saying to her child, "Get out of there!"  I turn around and half a two year-olds body is underneath my dressing room door staring at me.  While I changed my pad!  The little girl is clearly watching me, and the woman is calmly and sweetly saying, "You can't do that, get out."  The little girl kept telling her mom, "No!  I won't get out.  I'm watching the lady and I want to watch her!"  The mother kept being nice and sweet explaining to her daughter that "The lady wants some privacy, you need to get up like a big girl."  Needless to say, the little girl is still under my dressing room door.  Of course, by this point I am covered again.  Minutes later, my mom comes back and knocks on the door.  I, at 38 weeks pregnant, open the door and the woman and her child are still right at my door, with the little girl still on the floor staring at me.  No embarrassed looks, no "I'm sorry", and definitely no getting away from my dressing room!  My mom and I finally left, with no new nighty for me, because after that, I was just too worked up to even want to try anything on anymore.  And as we walked out, that woman and her child were still lingering by the entrance to the dressing room area!  OK, now I understand little children are curious.  And I'm sure we've all peeked under a dressing room door (although, to my recollection, every door I crawled under led to an empty room)...but if your child is doing something like that, you do not talk sweetly and calmly to your two year-old for a full 15 minutes while hoping she'll eventually get up and move away from the pregnant lady's door.  You pick your child up and remove her (and yourself) from the dressing room so as to alleviate embarrassment when the peeped-upon emerges from the room!  And, if it is impossible to leave the area right away, if you are unfortunate enough to come face-to-face with the person whom your child has been watching undress, you politely apologize!

Yes, I realize I do not have children (yet) and I realize that kids can be embarrassing at times.  I understand when babies cry in restaurants and toddlers sometimes kick the back of my seat in an airplane.  And yes, I even sympathize with the mother trying to wrangle her kid into a cart at the grocery so he's not standing the middle of the aisles blocking other shoppers.  So I am not attempting to judge someone's parenting skills, but come on...this is just plain curtesy!  End rant!

So, by then I thought my adventurous day was over.  I breathed a sigh of relief as Mom and I left the mall and made our way home.  The plan was to head to her house and unload the china and crystal I'd packed to leave with her while we're in California.  I won't need it for the 18 months we'll be there and I don't want to stress over packers chipping anything if I don't need to.  So we started driving home.  And the sky suddenly got pitch black.  And then rain started dumping down at a crazy rate.  And then gusts of wind started blowing leaves and cars all over the road.  We got home and discovered my mom's neighbor had a huge tree down in the middle of her driveway (luckily no cars, houses, or people were in the way) and there was no power.  We raced in the house just as Hubs was calling to see if I was ok.  He'd gotten home from work early and was concerned I might be on the road since I clearly wasn't home.  I told him I was ok, but really didn't want my mom back on the road, so we decided when the rain calmed he'd come over to fetch me.

The storm ended relatively as quickly as it began, although the power remained out, to include traffic lights all over town, making the drive home a bit precarious.  Since we couldn't cook dinner, we decided to take the long way home and pick up a pizza from the one street that still had power.  We got home safely and enjoyed our hot pizza and then decided to go for a walk since the rain had stopped but the power, and therefore the air conditioning, were still out.  I was a bit uncomfortable, still, after having my membranes stripped, but I wanted to keep walking in the event it might help speed things along.  So we stayed in the neighborhood and I soldiered through our walk.  There was a downed power line on the main road, between the two entrances to our neighborhood, so police were blocking the area and diverting traffic through our neighborhood.  Tons of people were outside trying to enjoy what evening breezes the rain and wind might have brought, so we decided to follow suit and take books out on the patio to read.  After all, we have tiki torch oil to use up before we move!

So we read outside for an hour or so, when we heard shouting.  We assumed it was kids playing and didn't think anything of it, but it progressively got louder, and then I heard a lady shout she was calling the police!  We looked across the street and saw it was two grown men fighting and holding each other down on the ground!  Men came running from every direction to pull them apart and within seconds, the cops were there taking statements.  It appears that the man who lives on the corner opposite our house saw the fight in one direction, and hollered for the cops blocking the closed street in the other direction...  So the police were on the scene pretty much immediately!  We later found out it was a case of He-Looked-At-My-Wife-So-I-Kicked-His-Ass...or something equally red-necky along those lines!  Maturity at its finest, folks!

Well, it started getting dark, mosquitos started coming out, and it appeared all the drama of the day was winding down.  So Hubs and I went inside, opened all the windows we felt comfortable opening while we slept, and popped a DVD into his computer, which still had about an hour's worth of juice in it.  I tried like mad to get comfy enough to sleep, but it just wasn't working without A/C, so I went out to the couch to try and steal someone's internet, since our's was still out.  Around 11:30, the power came surging through the house, so I closed all the windows, cranked the air conditioning, and settled back on the couch until I was sleepy enough to crawl into bed with Hubs!

End story.  End rants.  End adventures!  Hopefully soon I'll have a labor and delivery adventure to pass along!  Cross your fingers (but not your legs) for me!!