OMG I am such a bad bad mother. Why haven’t I been using a Prenatal Education System? I obviously my baby is now destined to pump gas for the rest of his life. Forget about college, I’ll be lucky if he gets into preschool.

The pregnancy books say the baby can indeed hear loud noises now, but I certainly hope he doesn’t remember them after birth. Poor child is the son of a sailor, his entire vocabulary will consist of four letter words.

It has been ridiculously cold in Connecticut for almost a week. Long underwear cold. Ski mask cold. My brand new winter coat is totally ineffective cold. If you have any of that global warming lying around, could you send it this way? As my friend Sarrible said, Connecticut is the state where Al Gore dares not tread.

Since it was only in the 20’s outside, I caved in and raised the temperature on the thermostat from the oil-and-cost-saving 60 degrees to the slightly-more-expensive-but-less-likely-to-cause-frostbite 65. There was absolutely no noticeable difference on the first floor. My second floor appears to have moved to the surface of the sun, although I don’t remember walking up any extra stairs. We have to keep the bedroom doors closed (due to my little cat’s absolute burning hatred of E and her desire to urinate on anything he touches) so the heat that should be traveling into the hallway and empty nursery gets trapped in just two rooms. Our new furnace thinks this is hilarious, and continues to pump out heat like it’s life depends on it.

On Saturday night I woke up at 4 am because I thought I was dying. Literally, dying. I once had a fever of 104 that landed me in the emergency room. That felt like a cool fall breeze compared to Saturday night. I lay on the floor of the bathroom for a while as the baby rejected the cookies I had eaten before bed and kicked me over and over in the diaphragm to protest the uncomfortable temperature. Eventually I cooled down enough that the room stopped spinning and I made it downstairs to sleep on the couch. I’ve used the phrase “bun in the oven” for being pregnant but this is the first time I actually thought I might cook my baby. Pregnancy makes you kind of warm anyways, but baby-warmth combined with a suddenly incredibly efficient furnace and five degrees on the thermostat was like the ultimate trifecta of hot.

Just in case you were worried I might actually have damaged my baby, when I took my temperature while lying on the floor panting, it read a slightly low but normal for me 97.2.