It is 8:32 pm on July 14th. I am 39 weeks and 5 days pregnant, which is 5 days more pregnant than I ever was with Caroline and 5 days less pregnant than I ever was with Evan. That’s a nice balance. Good symmetry. Seems like the perfect time to have a baby.

Unfortunately, my baby does not seem to agree.

I’m not technically overdue yet (TOMORROW), so I know the complaining about STILL being pregnant is annoying. Plenty of people have been much, much more pregnant and I could end up being one of them. (I REALLY REALLY HOPE NOT.) But unfortunately I let myself think “Oh, I am totally having this baby early!”

It’s not entirely my fault. My doctors all said I was in danger of early labor because of my high fluid levels. I’ve had tons more Braxton-Hicks contractions than with any other baby. This baby has been measuring big for two months and I basically LIVE at the hospital between non-stress tests and scans and regular appointments. My children can literally walk into the ER entrance and get themselves to the maternity ward.

But I should not have gotten my hopes up. People warned me. I just did not listen.

WHY DIDN’T I LISTEN????

I swear if it was ONLY my comfort (or uncomfort) level that I was worried about, I wouldn’t mind waiting a little longer to meet my baby. I never went through this end part with Caroline (I was induced unexpectedly after super surprise pre-eclampsia) so I would probably still be anxious, but I would be OK.

Unfortunately, due to E’s work schedule, I’m on a deadline. If I go a week overdue, he won’t be here for the birth. The moment where we finally find out together if baby #3 is a boy or a girl just…won’t happen. I’ll have to send an email he probably won’t get or a Red Cross message that at least 3 other people will read before him or just wait until he’s home again. He won’t be here to hold my hand or cut the cord or change a single diaper. I won’t be able to scream “WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME?!?!” as I push out a gigantic baby.

I don’t want this to sound TOO dramatic – he’s not going to be gone for months or years. His current work schedule is crazy and unpredictable but it’s not a deployment. He might be on a submarine under the ocean but he won’t be At Sea for more than a couple weeks at a time. The baby certainly won’t remember that he missed the birth but I know E will be so, so sad about it I won’t even be able to give him a hard time for “abandoning me”. I’m still not exactly EXCITED about it.

It would sort of suck to be in the room with just my nurses and the doctor. My mom – who’s here to watch the kids, in theory – has said she’ll fill in and I have friends who would take the kids if I really needed them to, but I’m not thrilled with that idea either. Mom watching the kids makes me being in the hospital much more relaxing. I don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re being terrors, she has to deal with it and love them because they’re her grandkids. Leaving them with someone else would mean lots of worrying instead of soaking up brand-new baby time.

We knew this was a possibility. As much as we tried to plan this baby around the Navy’s schedule, the testing that E’s doing now was supposed to be done in December. The command actually said “Plan your vacations for July and August, since that’s when we’ll be around”. Every time it got pushed back I thought “Ugh, this could be inconvenient” but until literally THIS WEEK I refused to consider E really truly not being here. Right now things are just slightly difficult – he’s not reachable by phone anymore so I have to call some office and they have to get a guy to run down to the pier and find him and then he has to get someone to cover for him and drive back up here to the hospital. But his boat is still tied to the dock, which is good!

I have a non-stress test in the morning (9 am, so possibly as you are reading this) followed by a regular appointment where I’m going to strongly suggest I am interested in them getting the baby the hell out ASAP. I feel like I’m breaking a bunch of birthing rules by even considering an elective induction. Admitting that on any of the pregnancy message boards will get you called a zillion things, none of which sound like “good mother”. But this isn’t my first time around the baby block and I did have a good experience with my last induction. Plus I have tried every single other possible thing to make labor happen on it’s own*** and nothing is working.

Why couldn’t this baby just COOPERATE, YOU GUYS?

Please send me lots of outside baby thoughts and keep your fingers crossed I’m so close tomorrow the doctor says I’m basically IN labor already and that my husband’s boat stays just broken enough that they stay in port and he’s right there with me when we find out if our Team Green baby is a boy or a girl. And so I can yell “WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME?!” as I push out what is probably a truly enormous baby.

I’m scheduling this to post at 7 am on Tuesday. Let’s hope that right now I’m already in the hospital having my baby and posting boring Instagrams of my IV all over social media (soon to be followed by adorable baby pics!)

*** The only things I haven’t tried are castor oil and black/blue cohosh. I’m not sure I can handle the side effects of castor oil and even Googling cohosh makes the internet freak the hell out about safety. But if my OB says “Sorry, one more week before we’ll talk about induction” I see a castor oil lemonade in my future.

We are having nap problems, part of which is totally my own fault – but that doesn’t make it suck any less. A few weeks ago when Caroline started fighting naps, I let her pick which bed she slept in. Sometimes it was her bed, sometimes it was Evan’s bed, sometimes it was the guest bed, and sometimes it was my bed. One day she was up in my bedroom and found the iPad under the pillow. Since she was born in a world that has never been without iPads (OMG flying cars are totally next) she unlocked it, found her app folder and watched Mickey Mouse until she fell asleep. I heard her over the monitor and thought it was funny – “Ha ha ha what a clever baby, how cute that she’s watching her show! And also that nap was so easy!”

You can probably see where this is going. I let her get away with using the iPad before naps as long as she was going to bed with no complaints. It was just so eeeeeeasy to say “Naptime, Caroline!” and have her run happily upstairs and jump into bed to lie down. She never made a peep and would fall asleep really fast. Since it happened RIGHT at the same time Evan stopped napping altogether I just…didn’t have the energy to fight it. Trust me, letting technology put my kid to sleep is LOW on the scale of “Thing I Feel Guilty About As A Mother.”

So anyways, this system worked fine – GREAT even – for a while. But for the last few days she’s been spending longer and longer messing around with the Disney Junior app and less and less time actually sleeping. She does eventually fall asleep – around 3:30 – but then I have to wake her up after an hour so she’ll go back to sleep at bedtime. I thought maybe she was just getting to an age where she didn’t need a nap anymore but AHAHAHHA NO ABSOLUTELY NOT. We tried it on Wednesday and she was a wreck by 6:30. Giving her a bath was like trying to wash a rabid cat and twice as noisy. It took her a full day to recover from missing just one nap. But on the other hand, if she’s basically just going to watch TV all afternoon I could at least keep her downstairs where I can interact with her (or, you know, we could do puzzles or she and Evan can run in circles and try to ride the dog. Again).

I suppose the first thing I should do is just STOP letting her have the iPad, but I’m dreading the screaming. There is already a LOT of angry child in this house and this is one the few things we DON’T fight about. But the current system isn’t exactly working either and I’d rather work on changing it now then a month from now when it would be even harder to stop. Any suggestions for my totally, completely, ridiculously first world problem?

Being three years old is really hard. Parenting someone who is three years old is also really hard. Yesterday was one of those days where “hard” turned into “damn near impossible” and I considered just letting my kid grow up to be a selfish, inconsiderate jerk. It would be so much easier.

By 9:30 am Evan and I were both grumpy and whiny. Ten minutes later I was hissing at him to START LISTENING and FIX YOUR ATTITUDE or we would leave gymnastics immediately and he would go home for an extra-serious-in-your-room-full-10-minute-time-out. Ninety seconds later I had to follow through with my threat and drag him kicking and screaming out of the building.

Literally kicking and screaming. Barefoot, since he punched me in the face when I tried to put his shoes on. I pinned him under one arm and led a very sad and confused Caroline with my other hand to the car, where I briefly considered just LEAVING Evan so his sister could finish class. I did not leave him in the car, but I did stand behind the van for 90 seconds taking deep breaths after I strapped him in. Getting punched in the face by your kid is the kind of low point that requires deep, cleansing breaths. They don’t do much to improve your day but at least you can feel in control of SOMETHING, even if it is your own lungs. Take that, lungs! You’re not the boss of me!

The rest of the morning was just as bad. We both used our angry voices. He threw things. We both cried. He asked for a hug and I said no. It was not my proudest moment. After we both calmed down and had a snuggle and said we were sorry we talked about his feelings and why he was upset. He wasn’t really sure, but was worried Daddy was going to be mad so I assured him we still loved him even if he sometimes acted naughty. We talked a lot about being angry and how to express those feelings without hurting people. We agreed using kind voices was much nicer and that we would be friends and love each other forever and watch Little Einsteins during quiet time.

Then we had lunch.

“Mommy, I don’t feel empty anymore!” says Evan.

“Empty?” says Mommy.

“Yeah! I was empty and sad. Now I FULL so I happy!”

*FACEPALM*

Hungry. My kid was HUNGRY. He melted down because I didn’t feed him enough breakfast. HOURS of fighting that could have been prevented with a bowl of fricking cereal.

Sometimes being three years old is really hard because your mother is an idiot.

Badge Code:
I stopped taking my Zoloft back in June simply because I ran out. I kept meaning to make a follow up appointment to talk to my doctor about a refill, but as each day went by I felt better and warmer and happier and decided it was as good a time as any to stop. It wasn’t necessarily a smart, well thought out, medically advised decision. There was just so much going on – so many adventures, so many trips, so much SUNSHINE – that I forgot to make the appointment and before I knew it I was too busy to feel sad and frustrated and angry all the time.

It wasn’t an act of God or a miracle that I felt better. My anxiety reached an all-time high when Caroline was about 15 months old, which was exactly when we began weaning. A few people reached out to tell me they had experienced the same crazy hormone fluctuations and depression when they had stopped breastfeeding. It turns out it’s an actual thing, although not something that’s extremely well known.

The Zoloft got me through weaning and over that hormonal bump that made me feel like I was losing my mind. It was like a key and a sliver of light under the door I was banging my head against, trying to figure out how to escape my frustration.

Besides the medication, using hemp flower for anxiety  and the light (sunshine, brightness, longer days) made a huge difference. I used to roll my eyes at people who claimed Seasonal Affective Disorder with their sunlamps and their dread of winter. How can that be a real thing?

My apologies to everyone who I ever secretly thought was making it up, since there is no doubt in my mind that the short dark days played a huge part in my anxiety.

Maybe it’s an actual vitamin D deficiency or maybe it’s a feeling-the-sunshine-on-my-skin-makes-me-happy deficiency, but when the days warm up and we spend more time outside I am always better. A better mom, a better wife, a better person. The lightness makes me lighter.

With Labor Day weekend behind us the evenings getting shorter by the day and I’m starting to worry a little bit. September and October are beautiful, fun-filled months for us in New England. There’s still plenty of time to spend outside, plenty of apples to be picked, the perfect pumpkins to find for jack-o-lanterns, hay mazes to explore.

But beyond that, there’s winter. Cold. Dark. The stress of the holidays. Although December might be my very favorite month now (Caroline’s birthday AND Christmas!) there’s no doubt trying to split up family time and E’s crazy work schedule and weather-related delays and cancellations and ruined travel plans can crush my festive spirit pretty quickly. I’m feeling a little stressed just thinking about it. And the heating bill. And the snow. And now my eye is twitching.

I’m thinking I should probably go ahead and make an appointment now to talk to my doctor, rather than waiting until I get overwhelmed and the thought of adding one more thing to my plate makes me want to just curl up under the covers and cry. I don’t necessarily want to restart the Zoloft (or anything else) now. I’d like to be prescription free when we start trying for baby #3 if possible, although I’m also a little worried pregnancy could do what weaning did and things might get out of control again quickly. But I think it’s a good door to have open.

So for now I’m floating through the end of summer, mindful of what’s coming but not letting it overshadow these beautiful days. This weekend is the best weekend of the year around here (Greek Festival and Italian Food Festival within walking distance, town fair in our old town) and my biggest problem is we have too many friends to hang out with. It’s a pleasant kind of busy-ness, rather than the overwhelming kind. Let’s hope I can recognize the difference if and when it comes and know enough to ask for help.

I feel like this cat knows everything I wish I did about life.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately writing two paragraph blog posts in my head and then promptly forgetting them. It’s mostly due to the fact that I’m doing all my brainstorming in the middle of the night when I a) can’t fall asleep to begin with or b) can’t fall BACK asleep after waking up for no apparent reason. This pregnancy is doing weird weird things to my internal clock and thermometer and electrical system and pretty much any other part of me that could be compared to something mechanical. When the weather changed suddenly last week and the barometric pressure went way down (or up or lopsided or whatever it is that happens when it goes from mild and humid to clear and cool) I woke up twitching from head to toe feeling like my skin was trying to crawl off my body. It was rather unpleasant. And not at all conducive to sleeping. So I stay up too late and toss and turn all night and then totally crash during Baby Evan’s nap time which means I stay up even later the next night and get even less sleep and am more exhausted so the vicious cycle continues forever and ever amen.

I felt the same way last pregnancy, only then I wasn’t chasing a toddler around all day so napping wasn’t really a problem so much as a glorious, wonderful way of life. I’m hoping if I can make it through the rest of this week sans nap and with a 10 pm bedtime my body will readjust and I can start stocking up on zzzzz’s while I still can – that number on my pregnancy ticker ain’t getting any bigger and it has DEFINITELY not been long enough since I had an infant around that I’ve forgotten what that’s like. Ugh.

My exhaustion is making every other little tiny annoyance in my life seem like a Huge Deal this week, which is just making it harder for me to relax. Huge Deal #1 is that I’m still laptopless after almost a month because we’re still deciding if we can afford to buy E a new computer or if I should just buy ANOTHER power cord for my clearly defective yet much beloved HP. So we’re “sharing” one laptop, and by “sharing” I mean I’m currently up writing blog posts at 1:20 am because it’s pretty much the only time of day E isn’t involved in some vitally important online game that he tries to guilt trip me into not nagging him about by claiming he’s “spending time” with his brother and his dad. To which I say: THAT’S WHAT PHONES ARE FOR. Because, obviously, I NEED to get online to comment on all my internet friends’ blogs and whine about things on my own. Priorities, people.

Huge Deal #2 is more bullshit with one of our worst purchases ever – E’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. Go ahead, Google “problem with my 2004 Jeep” and come back in 12 hours when you finish reading eight bazillionty forum posts about stupid problems like windshield wipers that don’t work and cruise control that fails every time it rains and the ridiculous trash they call the “heating system” but I’m pretty sure is just a hamster on a wheel working a little fan that costs $1000 every time we have to have it replaced. Which has been twice. So far. But most ridiculous of all is the windows that simply FALL INTO THE DOOR at random times and then can’t be fixed without taken the entire panel apart. It’s because some genius made the little piece that holds up the electric window out of cheap ass plastic. So the piece itself costs like $7 but the work costs $500 plus two days of being a single car family in an area that does not lend itself to single-car-ness. Did I mention this is at LEAST the second time we’ve had the window fall? I’m pretty sure it’s happened to both the driver’s and passenger’s windows once before but E thinks this is the first time on the driver’s side. He’s been driving the Jeep around with the window down for weeks now rather than getting it fixed (I think we were both secretly hoping it would just sort of…self-heal or something).  I could complain about this for another fifty years (I hate our dealership! Taking my car to work is a HUGE pain for E because of security! Being housebound with a toddler in the rain is the 8th circle of hell!) but let’s just sum up by saying the weather report for the rest of the week is so grim we’re going to bite the bullet and take the Jeep in for repairs today so I’ll be Mr. Grumpy Pants for the next few days. 8th circle of hell here I come.

Huge Deal #3 is..oh nevermind. Whatever. Let’s just say I’m annoyed at myself and annoyed at the world and annoyed at my husband and pretty much nothing is going to change that right now besides a good night’s sleep and a day without being smacked in the face by my child. And maybe a few hours of peace to get the house clean so I can stop feeling like I’m YEARS behind on my to-do list. I’d settle for weeks. The best case scenario is days. I’m exhausted already just thinking about it.