I Didn't Die, I Just HAD A BABY!!!

On Sunday night, while my mom and I were sewing last minute things for the baby, I started having CONTRACTIONS!  

I sent Jeremy to bed for a few hours, and then we left for the hospital around midnight.

I have never been so excited to be in pain! YAY contractions!

By Monday (8/9/10!) at 2:33 PM, I had my beautiful, amazing, perfect, wonderful daughter.

Josephine Isabelle weighed 7 pounds 13 ounces, and was 21 inches long. I have had no time or energy to write about it or even think about it, and that is not changing now. Instead, I have beautiful pictures to show you.  

Isn't my baby amazing? :)  We sure think so.

I Love You, So GET OUT!

Okay, I know I have been crying about this pregnancy a lot, but GOOD LORD, I am ready to not be pregnant anymore.  I never actually wanted to be pregnant in the first place.  I just wanted a baby.  Jeremy asked me how I would accomplish that, and I told him I had kind of hoped I could squeeze my eyes shut real tight and wish a baby into my arms.  Either that, or some kind of Cabbage Patch scenario:  Oh look, there's our baby growing in a head of cabbage!  Let's pick her up and take her home and ignore her abnormally large head!

{source}

Alas, I went the pregnancy route.  But guess what?  My baby is full term. You know what that means?  GET THIS BABY OUT OF ME!!!  I have been ready for my bundle of joy for months and months, and I am SOOO ready to not be pregnant that it is not even funny.

This is the conversation I've been having with the baby lately:  "Oh, you're all done cooking?  And you can survive outside of my womb?  And you are slowly killing me instead of coming out?  And we have all the essentials for raising you all ready to go?  You know what that means?  GET OUT!!!"

The thing is, Jeremy is TERRIFIED of the baby coming even one second before her 40-week mark.  Seriously.  And he is mad at me for wanting her out.  He even thinks I am hurting her by wishing her out.  Do you know what he DOESN'T know?  That my entire day consists of furiously nesting, crying, sleeping, crying, and crying in my sleep.  He was also not there when the doctor told me the baby was SOO ready to go and was already on the very large side, and if I wanted to try to persuade her to come out, I could do so. And apparently he doesn't know how bad it is to tell a pregnant Veronica her business.

Today he called me on his lunch break, and I was trying to figure out what I could do to help her want to come out.

Me:  I am figuring that she will want to come at the most inconvenient time possible, so if I DON'T pack the hospital bag and I DON'T grade these papers, maybe I will go into labor!!

Jeremy:  Umm, probably not.  She will probably come when she's ready, and I don't think she's ready yet.

Me:  Oh, really?  You don't think she's ready?  Well, I am ready.  And the BOOKS say she is ready.  And the DOCTORS say she is ready.  

Jeremy:  I'm just saying, she will come on her own time.

Me:  Well, for your sake, I sure hope that is soon, because I am just going to get worse and worse every single day, and YOU are the one who has to live with me.

Jeremy:  Really?

Me:  Really what?

Jeremy:  This could get worse?

Me:  You bet your sweet ass it can.  And it will.  Oh, it WILL.

Jeremy:  *silence*

Me:  That's what I thought.

This is going up TONIGHT:

I Made a Boo-boo

I am not really a superstitious person. I am obviously not afraid of black cats ...

(Isn't my cat handsome??)

... I don't mind spilling salt, and if I have to walk under a ladder, I do so with impunity.  


However, there is one little suspicious thing my mom always said that I have found to be SO true.  She has always warned me that you should never start sentences with "It has been forever since ... " or "I have never ... " if you don't want the latter half of the sentence to happen, like, IMMEDIATELY.  


She has warned me against jinxing myself time and again, yet I still do stupid things like say, "Wow, it has been a year since I have been pulled over for speeding" (which is followed by a ticket within the week) or "I can't believe I don't have any stretch marks yet!" (which precipitated the map of New York city that now adorns my stomach).


Connected to the "saying things out loud" jinx is the preparation jinx: If you decide not to take an umbrella with you, it will rain; if you bring your jacket, it will be boiling hot. So yesterday I totally shot myself in the foot. You may or may not know that I still have 4-ish weeks of pregnancy and my doctors just broke the news that my daughter already weighs seven pounds. Yeah. Bloody fantastic. So she can come early and be a normal size or come on (or after) her due date and weigh like 28 pounds. I am hoping for the former.

(look at her -- just growing away in there, and LAUGHING at me.  LAUGHING!  I guarantee it.)

Too bad I just jinxed myself into having a large, late baby. Yeah, as of yesterday, this is what my desk at work looks like:

Those are detailed lesson plans, along with sing-in sheets, handouts (in the order they will be used) and more information than a sub would ever need, for both of my classes, for the next four weeks of class.  

I have four weeks of teaching left and four weeks of pregnancy left, and the possibility that I could go into labor early forced my anxious brain into preparing these packets. But now? The baby will OBVIOUSLY not come early if I am all prepared and covered at work. If there had been a possibility that I would have to take my laptop to type up lesson plans and e-mail them to a sub while in labor, I am sure the baby would come early. She would just LOVE that. I mean, she is my child.  


Damn my organizational skills! I never thought they would betray me! Perhaps there's still a chance ... the all-spicy-food diet starts in two weeks!


P.S.  But is this perhaps worse? A few hours ago, I actually said -- OUT LOUD -- "You know, every pregnant woman has warned me about ___________ (←something people generally don't like to read about). Isn't it awesome that I don't have them?" Oh, baby Jebus. 


P.P.S.  The first person to comment and correctly fill in the blank wins a gold star.


P.P.P.S.  Okay, so maybe not a literal gold star, but like when people say, "Gold star for you!"


P.P.P.P.S.  I changed my mind again. You want a gold star, you got it. Shoot me an e-mail with your address to veronicamarcetti {at} gmail {dot} com and I will mail you a gold star.


P.P.P.P.P.S.  If you earn it.

The End of the Movie is like the Cream Filling in the Oreo

I was watching The Sound of Music the other day and wondering why I don't watch it like every week.  That movie is fantastic.  I also think I didn't take full advantage of it when I was young.  I'm guessing that it was too long for three kids with no attention spans, so we stuck to Disney most of the time.


ANYWAY, as I have gotten older, I have learned that a lot of parents stop the movie while everything is still happy and cut out out the scary running-from-the-Nazis ending.  My parents didn't, because it's the ENDING.  Watching a movie and not getting to see the end is infuriating. Plus, I always liked the music at the end of movies, so I totally would have been on to my mom if she just shut the TV off and claimed that was the end.  All those other kids must be totally gullible and stupid.  


I guess I just don't get it.  I mean, every single Disney movie I ever watched was traumatizing.  Someone SHOT Bambi's mother?!?!?!!  Ursula is going to eat the whole boat and Ariel and Eric will never get to live happily ever after???!?!?!!?  How will the Prince EVER get past that fire and dragon to save Aurora??!?!?!!!???  Same difference.  Pretty much every kid's movie has some sort of sadness and/or scariness so parents can use it as a teaching moment.  I can explain that sometimes there are bad people who want to do bad things to good people.


But, there are some things I can't really explain, so if I COULD skip a scene, I would skip the oldest girl in the orchard with her boyfriend singing "Sixteen going on Seventeen."  I can explain Nazis, but I do NOT want to risk them internalizing that stupid "I'll take care of you" line from that dumbass boyfriend who later becomes a Nazi and then sells them out at the end and almost gets them killed.


I mean, obviously I don't want my little girl(s) to think that a man will take care of them and then have them look forward to that instead of looking forward to taking care of themselves, and I don't want my little boy(s) to think they are Neanderthals. 


You might be thinking that ONE movie is not going to set my child(ren)'s psyche(s) in stone.  Well, I have read enough about serial killers to know that you never know what is going on in their little brains.  I can't take the risk!  


Also, I probably won't beat them with a rubber hose and encourage them to dress up in clown make-up and teach them how to bury things without leaving a trace.  It's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to raising a non-serial killer.

In all Honesty, My Money is on Scenario #3

I have come to the startling conclusion that the child in my womb .... is NOT my child.


I know, I know.  This sounds highly impossible, but stay with me here.


I have been suspecting this for some time now, ESPECIALLY after I realized that the baby detested tomatoes and garlic and would not allow me to eat either.  Ummm ... that is like 50% of my diet.  And any Italian baby would NEVER reject tomatoes or garlic in the womb.  This is highly suspicious, people.  


The baby now also hates lettuce, which I guess could come from Jeremy's wackadoo "I hate vegetables" genes, but I found this suspicious as well.


Finally, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place the other day when I realized ... you will NEVER believe this ... the baby is REFUSING SUGAR. Yes, refined, delicious, fantastic sugar.  She punished me for TWELVE HOURS after eating a cookie and then for another TWELVE HOURS for eating two sour gummi worms (Yes, I knew the sugar is what made me sick the first day and then I repeated the experiment the second day with sour gummi worms because I had to be absolutely sure.  You would too if you loved sugar as much as I do.)


Like I said -- this is the last straw.  This is not my baby that I have been nourishing and sheltering all these long months.  Many of you are probably thinking at this point, "Veronica, how could it NOT be your baby?  Does science work like that?"


Well guess what, folks:  Not everything can be explained by science.  


Here is what I worked out so far.  After some serious consideration, I have narrowed it down to three possible scenarios.


SCENARIO #1:  This is Jeremy and someone else's baby and he is just using me as a free incubator.


Okay, so science is involved in this one.  Without getting into too many details here, I might have someone else's eggs inside me right now.  The big question is, why would Jeremy go to all the trouble when I have eggs of my own?  


Simple.  Jeremy was not impressed with what I had to offer his children genetically, so he found someone more likely than I to give him the super-children he desires.  I always wondered why he claimed to want to have children with me, what with my cavities, history of acne, allergies, "large frame," terrible vision, unstoppable clumsiness, lack of athleticism, anxiety, and teeth that could only be repaired by braces.  


It all makes sense -- he wanted a baby more like him, with 20/20 vision, no cavities, no allergies, He-Man muscle tone, and 2% body fat.

OR

SCENARIO #2:  I have two words for you: ALIEN BABY.


It wouldn't be very hard.  You've seen it a million times in movies, and perhaps even in real life.  I am sleeping soundly (which I do), an alien sneaks in and pops a baby alien inside me.


And it would make SOO much sense, because Jeremy has been onto those aliens all along.  When people say ridiculous things like "It was just a weather balloon" or "Area 51 doesn't exist," Jeremy is right there to defend the existence of his alien friends.  It seems to me that perhaps they are rewarding him for his loyalty with a little alien baby to raise and love.

OR

SCENARIO #3:  Ghost baby.


Okay, I know some people just stopped reading, but I have a great explanation for this one, and I PROMISE you, it is TOTALLY possible. Totes.  


Our landlord SWEARS that this house is haunted (she was nice enough to tell us before we moved in though, in case we were scaredy cats who couldn't handle a little ghost action).  However, we have never witnessed any supernatural behavior, even though we have been totally open to it and have even encouraged it from time to time.  


The ghost just didn't seem to want to meet us, and at first I thought it was because it didn't like us, but NOW I think it is probably because it was lulling us into a false sense of security so it could ENTER MY BODY AND BE REBORN.  This is like the world's smartest ghost.  It's the best idea I can think of if you are stuck in the "in-between" and can't move on.  Instead of moving on, you could go back to earth and start over!  Genius!!


Okay, I need your votes, and I need them pronto, because I need to start investigating and weighing my options.  Comment away people. (Getting comments is the only thing that helps me sleep at night. For realsies.)