New Year

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2011. Did you know that I'm having a baby this year? More specifically, I'm having a baby sometime this week.

For your totally boring reading pleasure, here is the state of things in our household right now:

- At 39 weeks pregnant, I am definitely ready to have this baby. I wanted the baby to be born in January, for the big-picture-completely-unimportant reason of giving him a teeny bit of distance between the holidays and his birthday. Mission accomplished! But now I need him to come out. The sooner the better.

- I am definitely a big fan of home labor induction techniques. I tried them all with LL, over the course of like three weeks, and none of them worked. (I skipped the castor oil thing, because ew! it just sounds unpleasant, not to mention ineffective, but the rest were fair game.) I'm doing them again now, but given my past experience, I kind of feel like a patsy. Fool me once, you know?

- My cold is still hanging around a bit, which sucks. I'm down to an infrequent cough and mild congestion.

- My mom arrived to help me with LL, and after a nice little incubation period, she caught my cold, so she is currently out for the count. I feel awful for her, because she really wants to be helpful, but she clearly feels really miserable and has zero energy. I'm currently taking care of her more than she's taking care of me (though she did make a pot of matzo ball soup the other day while S and I took LL with us to run some errands and let her rest). We're hoping that she gets better soon, for so many many reasons.

- LL is going through a growth spurt. He's barely sleeping, but he's eating his body weight in food at every meal. We met a huge group of friends for lunch on Thursday. We arrived first, LL was the first one served, and two hours later (yes, two hours) everybody else got tired of chasing their kids around the restaurant, so they left, and LL was still sitting at the table eating. It's ridiculous. He hadn't moved from that high chair for the entire two hours, and was more or less continuously eating that whole time. We finally had to cut him off because we just couldn't sit in the restaurant anymore, and it was way past naptime.

- We're more or less ready for Kermit to arrive. We've purchased all the necessities, things that need assembling or setting up are generally assembled, we have decided on a name (in English, Japanese, and Hebrew). The house is still a little cluttered, but no longer embarrassing. Bags are as packed as they're going to get. The only thing really left to do is install the car seat. Oh, and go into labor. I should make sure that's on the to-do list....

- Wow I'm uncomfortable. Definitely hard to move around these days. And I haven't fallen asleep before 3am in over a week. I'd forgotten what a total insomniac I become during the end of pregnancy. Also, I'm constantly starving.

- Every night around 8:00pm or so, I start having contractions. They're not very strong, but they are consistent, at every 15 minutes, like clockwork. They continue like that for several hours. Except for an occasional strong one, they're not very intense, and they never come any closer together. And then they stop until the next night. What's up with that? (I have been getting an occasional one during the day, too, but they're always in isolation.) S reminded me that the exact same thing happened when I was pregnant with LL, and it went on like that for nearly two weeks, and it never amounted to anything. So really, this is all just annoying.

- For many months now, I have been predicting a birth date of January 2. Not really liking my odds at this point.