The little man

He is here! After weeks and weeks of waiting, Logan Elliot Miescher-Lerner has arrived. Yesterday was a day of wonder and pain, though with just four hours of labor I should not complain. However, to have this little man in my arms I would go back and have 24 hours a labor. I am overwhelmed with complete glee.

Maybe baby?

All day I've felt a bit ill, like I need to vomit but can't. My gut has been making crazy sounds and my whole body feels off.

venturing downstairs

Lately I've been considering venturing downstairs into the basement. Not that I want to- I'm a bit scared of what it will be like. Today I finally did it an it's dry!!! Whoooo-ho.

To write or not to write

I decided a year or two ago that I was going to go back to school and become a teacher. It seemed quite simple a decision at the time but I never really acted on it until this semester was starting. I went ahead and enrolled in a class I would need to get my certificate and figured that taking one class while pregnant would not be too exausting. I was wrong. However, I will have an A in this class if it kills me.

Dinner Time at the Nightengale

The typical routine is that at 5:00 I get home and feed the dogs. Monkey ignores his food and begs for his 'rub down' and Goose devours his food so fast I almost can't remember if I even fed him. I cook something for Nick and I then it's a free for all for the rest of the evening. Dog walks, homework, work related work, errands to run and whatnot are all options depending on what we need and want to do. Lately I've wanted to do nothing, so when I started to come home feeling so exhausted that I was not even feeding the dogs I wanted Nick to pick up the slack. He could cook for us and I'd feed the dogs. He could do the dishes and I would put them away- that sort of thing. Is this too much to ask?

Stripping of the membranes

So what actually happens when you have your membranes stripped. This lovely procedure involves the OBGYN placing their fingers inside your cervix and swishing them around to break the membranes that reside between the bag of waters and the wall of the cervix. It is supposed to lower the bag of waters and put pressure on the cervix assisting in ripening and hopefully initiating the start of contractions. It feels only a bit more comfortable than it sounds and the worst part is that it does nothing if your body if not ready to give birth. It does not induce labor if the baby is not yet ready to be born. After she stripped my membranes (which ironically enough every time I say it makes me think of the term screwed ones brains out which is exactly what Nick and I did in order to get me into a position where having stripping my membranes was even an option) I thought for sure that I had lost my mucus plug - that lovely bloody snot like plug I've been looking for weeks for. Alas, 8 hours later still no contractions and no other symptoms.

Talking myself into it

I woke up with such a horrendous backache I was positive it was the first signs of labor. However, now I realize that when you run a verticut machine over 3 lots, rake the yard a few times and throw grass seed on everything in sight it's likely to cause a backache, especially when your body has an extra 30 pounds strapped to the front of it. I've been searching for signs of labor so meticulously that all I'm doing is making myself more and more paranoid that it will never happen. Other than very explainable backaches there have been no other symptoms. I'm starting to get very discouraged.

Lessons learned

A few thoughts about renting heavy equipment when your 9 months pregnant, it's very early in the morning, your husband is not a morning person, and you both really have no idea what your doing: don't do it.

This morning we woke up to head to the local hardware store. I'd called yesterday to reserve a verticut and seeding machine so that we could plant grass in our great mud pit. Once we got the machine home Nick got behind the wheel (so to speak) and I got the rake to rake over seed after he had passed over the earth. Now for those of you that don't know a verticuter is like a rototiller but it's does not turn over the ground, instead it has dozens of sharp knives that cut into the dirt to provide aeration and allow for better ground penetration when seeding. So when one is using this machine the last thing you want to hear is them screaming. I heard screaming because Nick was cursing like a sailor and I was positive his foot was gone or at least a finger or two. As I rushed over to him and didn't see pools of blood forming around him or arteries squirting his life onto our yard I realized he was not hurt, just pissed at it being before 9:30 on a weekend and the machine not working the way he wanted it to.

This was, to say the least, the wonderful start to a very long morning.

Waiting and wanting

It's almost 10pm and I cannot help but hope I'll wake up tonight with the most painful contractions ever. God I'm ready to have this baby.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Yesterday Nick and I played good cop bad cop. Not in a bedroom banter sort of way but with the man we had hired to regrade the yard who appeared on our doorstep about 42 hours after he had told me he would arrive. I knew it was him when the doorbell rang because not three hours before I had come home from work to find a new tractor [by new tractor I mean not one of the two tractors that had been sitting in our yard for the last month] in our yard, running and keys in the ignition, but no yard man around. Nick was kind enough to go outside and talk to him and I stayed inside and thought evil thoughts. Nick was nice to him whereas the last time I talked to him and he tried to small talk with me I said "I don't want to talk to you about that, I just want you to finish the damn yard."
Today I am proud to announce that we finally have our yard regraded. Maybe next week I'll venture into the basement.