Andi Pandi

I have it on very good authority that no baby has ever remained inside their mother for all eternity.  I am starting to believe that I may be going insane from pregnancy.

Last Friday: a few contractions in the morning, cramping, achiness and general pissy mood made me call in sick.  Half way through the day, contractions stopped and I went in to work anyway...sigh.  Steve goes to play poker and calls to check on me and of course: no action.

Saturday: A few contractions, insane nesting instinct has me cleaning the nursery and complaining about cramps and back all at once.  I am just certain the baby is coming.

Sunday: still no baby.  Wake up, go to brunch at the Cheesecake Factory (yummy!), walk around Targhetto and buy the baby's room a bookshelf (which apparently was a buggar to put together...poor steve). 

Monday: two morning contractions and then nothing.  ooooh, except: the return of full-time morning sickness.  so THANKS baby for giving me 12 weeks off of the morning sickness trip...I was almost kinda starting to forget how heinous that felt to need to barf every two hours.

Today: No baby.  Feel like CRAPOLA.  Steve firmly convinced that she will stay in there until full-term or they induce, which ever comes first...

So as you can see, I am wanting her out more badly than she wants out and her will is apparently stronger than mine.

On a happier note though: my mother's roots have been touched up and SHE is ready to be seen in photographs with her first grandchild! 

Today we saw the doc again. (every wednesday from now until eternity it seems).  The fuckers got a new scale in the office. (thank god they replaced that piece of shit that said I gained 8 pounds in two weeks).  With the new scale though (that lies, horribly) it said that i have gained 7 pounds and some ounces in ONE FREAKING WEEK.  I didn't even drink that much chocolate milk this week!

Clearly the New Scale was developed by Hitler as his last act to try to kill the souls of people.

Steve's reaction: (high five!)

Andi's reaction: hysterical mad sobbing while in the bathroom trying to aim a stream of urine into a teeeeeensy little cup that is entirely hidden by the apparent 200 pound sumo wrestler tucked in my tummy. and oh: shame.

So Steve is giggling and stroking my back and telling me that everything is "okay" and i am just sobbing and THEN, THEN they freaking take my blood pressure.  well of course: (i hate to spoil the ending for you) it was high.  der.

Needless to say: we weigh the same.  Steve and I.  Not Dom Deloise and I...Perhaps Shamu and I...

Me in car on way home:  we have to go to Mexico so I can get the illegal Phen/Fen pills after we deliver.

He was sensitive enough to not try to stop me, but did mention some sweet things about everything being "okay" and "not to worry" and "it will all come off".

Okay so even if we were having a "normal pregnancy" (whatever that is), we would still have a month left.  being that our child is enormous, we have about two and a half weeks left is all and everything I have heard is true:  the last part is the worst.  I think that regardless of whether it was four weeks or two weeks, i would be equally as miserable. 

Overheard at my house last night:

"I just don't think you will last until they induce you"

"I would put money on 10 days"

"III would put money on 7 days"

"YOU ARE HUGE!" (always comforting)

"Pass the chili please"

So there you have it: people are betting that I won't make it to my REVISED due date, due to my enormity:

I was going to show you one of the multitude of nasty fat pictures of me from my baby shower, but then found this awesome one of my mom instead:

I have no idea what she was laughing at, but I just love that she is cracking up!

Yesterday the nice ladies at work threw me a baby shower for little Sophie.  I cannot even express how insane this makes you feel.  Like your hormones aren't already in high gear and really messing with you anyway?  WELL, then when super nice people come out of the woodwork to give you things for your unborn child?  EXpecially things that they have made with their own hands?  Good God...the crying...I cried so hard...These women are amazing.  Sophie will be lucky to have them all as her aunties...

My girlfriends dianne and linda decorated the conference room so cute and got the yummiest to-die-for chocolate bavarian cream cake for us to commit Weight Watchers sins with.

One of the nurses that I see every day sitting in the lunch room made this for me, er, SOPHIE on her lunch hours.

Katy had a blanket embroidered with our little girl's name and debra tried mightily to peer around my enormous ass...good luck with that one girl!

This is the one where we all wonder if the wipe warmer is for the baby or for the MAMA??  I say MAMA!!

I am trying to pace myself through this very teeeensy box of junior mints.  This made me think: when was the last time I enjoyed something this much that I wanted to pace myself through it and not rush to the finish?

Answer: Laundry on Saturday.

In some sort of parallel universe where doing laundry is a coveted hobby among the elite well to do, I was totally loving the laundry.  Not because I felt accomplished or like I was doing something that would actually make a difference, but  because I love Gain laundry detergent.  Gain the powder, not Gain the liquid...It turns out that on this particular Saturday I loved Gain the powder so much that I had to actually stop myself from piling a huge handful in my mouth.

Seriously.

Apparently in pregnancy-land there is such a thing as a "pica".  Which is where you want to eat any strange thing you can put your mouth on...You've heard about women eating dirt or swallowing pennies or something random like that?  Mine is Gain the powder.

I was running my hands through it and had that strange "gollum" hypnosis thing going on for like 3 whole minutes.  Thank GOD that I remembered that "oh, yeah, this is poison, don't eat it, stupid".

So you can see that cravings, while not frequent for me, are insanely hard to beat.  Which is why I smoked for 7 years and why I am still bitter that I had to stop.  I was good at smoking.  I liked doing it.  I was not ready to quit.  I blame the freak in the Yukon that had to die.  If he hadn't been all insane two Septembers ago, thinking that if he closed his eyes and came in my lane that he became invisible, I would not have broken so many ribs that my lung collapsed.  AAAnd if my lung hadn't collapsed, I would still be smoking.

If I were still smoking? (andi, where is this going, you were talking about your love for Gain the powder and junior mints?)  I think if I were still smoking I would be much more tolerable and tolerANT.  The TOLERANT part is the hard part.

As you know, you NEVER EVER EVER talk about hating your job on the internet because Poof! they will come and take it away from you.  So: I am NOT going to talk about that.  But I CAN talk about how if I had more tolerance, I would not hate my job so much.  I can also thank God every single night for having some crooked polititians somewhere enact the FMLA law that allows me to be liberated from the insanity and go home for 12 weeks and be with my baby.  (who's ass I don't mind wiping).

okay on wednesday we had an ultrasound and I got to make googley eyes at our little girl for about 15 minutes (damn ultrasound wench did everything waaaaaay too quick and efficient-like).

Okay in this one she looks a little creepy and Halloween-ish.  You can kinda tell that there are two dark holes where her eyes go and then right below there is a smaller round spot where her nose goes and then below that is her mouth and pointy little chin?  do you see it? 

This one is a little trickier, but the big rounded circle thingie in the bottom right corner is her belly and her little face is smooooshed up against it.  There is a little white triangle that is her nose and then her hand is sort of on it's way to her mouth?

Here is your basic generic profile shot of her with her hand in the air all Stalin-like.  you can also see some little patterned white dots...those are the side shot of her ribs.

So after seeing these pics the doc decided that she was ginormous and we should induce!  So, the baby will be here on November 10th, not November 19th as we previously believed!

So: yayaaaaaaa! and gaaaaah! so much to do!

A friend of mine came by today and told me that there just aren't enough belly pics of me in the world right now...ahem...I think that the four that exist are good enough, but as this is (apprently a democracy), I humored her and let her take some nasty pictures of me. 

Let me preface this with a picture of the card my sister sent me three weeks ago that made me laugh and laugh because it was soooo obsurd: (exhibit a)

OOOOH hahaha I said! That is so crazy, so insane!  No one really looks like that! (exhibit b)

So, perhaps my reality is a little skewed right now? (exhibit c)

Black is slimming, right?

Either way, I am happy being all fat.  At least my wrists have stayed the same size (thank god leather watch bands stretch a little).

And I will thank you to please keep all your comments to yourself about the number of coke cans in the back/fore ground and the cookies, candy wrappers etc...trolls left them all there while i was napping under my desk.

Okay so every week i get this email from aol or parenting or the merged aol-parenting people that tell me the little milestones our fetus is having for that particular week...and how much she weighs (approximately) etc.  At first I forwarded them to steve who was always appropriately "that's cool, she's as big as a thumb" or "cool, she's covered in fur".  My pregnant brain forgets that he has been through this not once, but THREE other times, so none of this is really as exciting to him as it is to me....although I am pretty sure that it is really only exciting to the person going through it anyway and husband or not, everyone on earth is just humoring the pathetic pregnant-obsessed lady.  that's okay, I like the humoring, carry on.

So yesterday's thingie was like "blah blah, in your last five weeks, blah blah" and i was like "whaaaaa?" How did this happen?  we are down to five weeks now?  Like seriously, five weeks until an actual baby, a HUMAN baby comes to our house?  (well, i know alot of you out there are going "yeah yeah first time mom, you will be two weeks late like we all were, so just relax and unclench a little already".)  FIVE WEEKS!!

It occured to me that there are several things I wanted to learn or do before this baby came, and i am coming up a little short on checking them off:

1. Learn better spanish, for to teach the baby...um, yeah...that didn't really happen.

2. Learn sign language for to teach the baby...um, again, not really likely.  and besides if i hear one more person in Target say to her infant (who is screaming bloody murder) "use your signs"...I cannot be held responsible for what I say or do to them. (and we dont want the baby born in prison, so I am OFFICIALLY giving up on sign language).

3.  Have a honeymoon.  Okay, well, SOPHIE actually thwarted this plan, but we are going to take one as soon as i get back to my "fighting weight" and that blue shiney bikini in my closet stops haunting me. (i swear, when was i a size 6 again?)

4.  Go home and visit mom and daddy.  They live in the country.  sorta.  the country outside of a town.  a smallish town.  a town so smallish that i can get away with wearing plaid flannel pants to Walmart without brushing my teeth and TOTALLY blend.  It is like my movie-star version of montana...you know how they all "sneak" away to Montana to hide out?  I am hiding out in Missouri.

5.  Go to Dallas, ONE. MORE. TIME...I dont know why.  We got engaged down there.  We used to go to football games and smooch in the stands down there.  We shop at Ikea down there...I think basically because it is Anywhere But Here.

6.  Learn how to cook something.  My friend carrie is attempting to help me with this, but I have to tell you, I am gonna look pretty rough for about two months and leaving the house is going to be Not Fun, so I am going to have to learn how to cook something because my sweet husband will only survive on applesauce and cereal for so long.  (on the upside, i can bake the HELL outta some stuff, and we will not STARVE or anything, just be obese and continue to be haunted by the blue bikini).

7.  God, this is embarressing:  I need to learn some bedtime stories and some children's prayers.  For the nights when Steve can't be there to coach me through it, I need to learn this stuff...I suck.  I know.

8.  Make curtains for the kitchen. (there is a small, very small chance that i may get this done still...very small.)

Okay I think you get the idea.  I am not totally unprepared to be a parent, but did not realize that we would go from like 20 weeks pregnant to 35 in the course of like one minute.  (although if you check out this belly, you would be all "um, girl, that did NOT happen overnight...").

Okay my pretties, I am so sorry that I haven't been blogging lately.  I have started a couple times and it just comes out sooo bitchy (thank you pregnancy hormones for making me so very pleasant) that I have just been scrapping it and leaving you staring at this boring story about my ass.  nice.  sorry.

So, I DO actually have something funny to tell you.  At least I think it is funny.  Maybe it isn't really funny though, but either way, I am determined to post SOMETHING, ANYTHING here to entertain you so that these weee little numbers dont shrink anymore than they have.

So we're having a baby.  That will have to sit in an enormous car-seat thingie.  That HAS to be in the back seat of a car.  Prolly MY car. (mostly).  sooo....I drive a two door car.  Which means that i either have to take the baby out of the carseat everytime we get in and out (thereby bumping either my head or hers every single time and teaching her vulgar language at an extremely early age) OOOOR: get a car with four doors.  voila.  Those are my options: swearing like a sailor in front of my infant OR different car.

It turns out that the Different Car option only shields her a little because the swearing is still taking place, only she can't really hear it because her ears are full of amniotic fluid. (lucky little girl).  Like when your mom would come and yell at you at the pool, and you heard like muffled anger, but your head was under water, so you really weren't getting the full message...but you knew that as soon as you ran out of air and had to come up that you were gonna get an ear-full.

So i went to the dealership yesterday to test drive a slightly used (one year old) car like mine with four doors instead of two.  I got in the car thinking "this will be exactly like my car, so I should totally love it".  WRONG.

I got in and it smelled funny.  I tried to keep an open mind because currently the only thing that smells GOOD to me is bleach.  So i assumed it was just me and my pregnant nose getting in the way.  But as we were driving I came up with this huge scenario as to why this blasted car that i SHOULD love smells so offensive:

There was a man who wore the cheapest cologne available.  And he cheated on his wife and she threw him out and he had to LIVE in the car.  Until one day she took him back and he thought "shit, i better clean this car up" so he grabbed a can of LEMON PLEDGE and tried to clean it with that.  So the resulting combination is: man-whore cologne plus lemon pledge.  nice, huh?

So I managed to tune out her entire spiel about "traction control" and "drive differentials" and words that sound like that because I was so caught up with the whole "man-whore-lemon-pledge" concept that I really couldn't be bothered to hear her.

Against any sort of better judgement I went along when she said "lets go talk some numbers". because, after all, i have to have a car with four doors, right?  and I am not really looking forward to this anyway, so I may as well just get it done.  So we went to her office and i gave her my bright idea: two numbers.  First number: how much i want for my goddess-mobile in pristine condition and second number: how much the man-whore-pledge-mobile is worth to me.

Car Dealer: ha.

Me: you ha. (rubs belly defiantly)

Twenty minutes later she comes back shaking her head (like they teach that in used-car land or something). and says this: "oasidh oihoiha;osedh fhjlslkh $776798 khngdlsiahgisdhj ff 7564 months ldjkhogfius;ha tl".

Me: (stares blankly ahead.)

Me: I gave you my offer in english, what is this?  and why would someone finance their car until their unborn fetus is in college?

Car Dealer: well what is your payment now?

Me: 330 dollars.

Car Dealer: HOW DID YOU GET THAT?

Me: I am a grown up and had a down payment.

Car Dealer: (confused) oh.

Then, because I am a total grown up, I start crying.  And mumbling something about how my car is way better than theirs anyway and that their car smells funny!! and then it occurs to me that I am not in a padded cell by myself and I should LEAVE THE DEALERSHIP. (wish my brain could have had that thought about three minutes earlier).

So I went home.  and drank chocolate milk.  and missed my husband who had to be away.  and begged him to rescue me from car-buying hell when he called to say goodnight.  (and then woke up this morning and continued to bitch about it and pet my dash fondly and whisper sweet nothings to my sweet little baby-car who does not deserve this treatment at all).

Me buying the goddess-mobile. (notice both legs in casts from car accident two months previous? yeah, I didnt get to actually drive my car for like two months after we bought it!  They would just wheel my wheelchair out to the garage and let me LOOK at it for a few minutes at a time...dang I am gonna miss this car...)