I am enormous and tired, but there is no movement toward birth.  I am a mere two weeks from my due date (my first baby was born three weeks before the due date), but have not had the tiniest twinge of a contraction for weeks.  This baby is in no hurry.

My home is a wreck, and it is really bothering me.  Any day now I will need to have other people in my home to help with my kids, and I hate the idea of anyone seeing it in its current awful state.  But I am so large and slow and tired and surrounded by demanding little people that I don’t see how I can possibly get it respectably cleaned before the birth.

To make matters worse, Az will be working almost double his usual schedule next week.  His boss scheduled him for certification training.  Yup.  Right before my due date.  I am not sure if it was cluelessness on his boss’s part or something more deliberate.  We’ll hope I can manage the kids on my own for that long without my blood pressure spiking again.

Except for a spurt of self-pity when the kids get whiny, I am in remarkably good spirits for me, for so late in the pregnancy.  I have not felt the despair and misery that I felt with my last pregnancy.  I am living in limbo right now, and handling it better than I have in the past.

Apologies for the boring, newsy posts lately.  I have a few thinking posts in draft form that will see the light of day soon.  I just wanted to keep you updated on my (non-)progress toward birth.  I’ll let you know when the time comes.

I cut Az the Husband’s hair today.  A few years ago, he opted for the 1/4 inch buzz-cut and full, old-man beard, like Jeff Bridges in Iron Man.  It’s a look that suits him, and it keeps haircuts cheap because I can do them at home.

Usually I wait to cut his hair until the kids are in bed.  It’s a little easier without small ones reaching for electrical cords or scissors.  But today I cut his hair in front of the children. The baby crawled on the floor and watched, open-mouthed as clumps of Daddy’s hair fell to the floor.  Four-year-old JellyBean ignored us, and three-year-old Sweetpea was upset.

Sweetpea does not like getting her own hair cut.  She squirms and cries and objects, and I find myself saying really loving things through gritted teeth like, “If you don’t hold still, I am going to strap your head to the chair.”  And that’s just for a trim of the bangs.  So Sweetpea watched Daddy get his hair cut, and she got more and more agitated.

“You should not DO that, Mommy!”

“Why not, honey?  Daddy doesn’t mind getting his hair cut.  He likes getting his hair cut.”

“NO, HE DOESN’T!”

“Yes, I do, sweetie.  Look, I’m not crying at all.”

“NO!”

Daddy was not to be believed.  His claim that he liked haircuts was flatly contrary to a basic law of the universe: HAIRCUTS ARE AWFUL.  No credence could be given to such outrageous contradictions of known realities.  He must, in short, be lying or be crazy.  Such is the confidence of a three-year-old.

I am noticing some similarities between my little girl and the tenor of the political pundits on blogs, tv and radio this summer.  They seem very certain that the opposing side cannot possibly mean the things they say they mean, and must be deceitful or stupid or evil or deranged.

So please excuse me this election season if, when presented with campaign propaganda, you overhear me muttering, “But he DOES like haircuts.”

I must just be crazy.  Or maybe lying.

Yesterday I went in for my weekly check-up.  I have been using the same OBGYN practice for the last three pregnancies, and by now the doctors are very familiar to me.  There are four of them, and I see all four during the course of a pregnancy.  My baby will be delivered by whichever of them happens to be on call at the time.

It is a good practice with knowledgeable and reliable doctors, but each has his or her quirks.  This one talks too much and must be interrupted if I want to make sure she understands a problem.  That one almost never blinks.  This one has a great bedside manner but is uncomfortable discussing weight issues.  And the doctor I saw yesterday is the most likely to have the facts at his fingertips if I want to discuss the latest pregnancy study, but he is very rigid about rules.

So yesterday I was examined by Dr. Rules and I made the mistake of saying that the baby does not move very much.  He immediately started saying DECREASED MOVEMENT in big capital letters and insisted that I have the baby monitored.  I explained that it was not “decreased movement,” that this baby had never moved very much, and he asked about my kick counts.  I do not do kick counts with this baby because if I actually called the doctor every time I could not get 10 kicks in an hour, I would be calling the doctor every single day. This is a docile, sleepy baby, at least in the womb.

The two doctors at this practice who have actually carried babies in their own wombs are completely unbothered by the sedentary nature of this baby and comfortably tell me to call only if she begins moving less than customary.  But Dr. Rules was having none of it, so he ordered me to be hooked up to the monitor so they could measure the baby’s movement and heart rate for twenty minutes.

Of course, the nurse could not get a reading from the baby if I lay in a remotely comfortable position, so she made me lie on my back.  Lying on my back during pregnancy hurts and it makes breathing difficult.  But HEY! I’m just the gestating mother! Why should I need to breathe?

After fifteen minutes of back-lying torture which revved up my heartburn, made my stomach muscles cramp, raised my blood pressure and gave me sciatic twinges, I was growling phrases like “know-it-all doctors” and “over-medicalized births” and “stupid waste of my time.”  They concluded that OH! the baby hardly moves at all, so they brought out the buzzer to wake her up enough to kick to their satisfaction.  Then they finally released me.

I was grumpy about the whole thing, and I will remember next time to fake it when Dr. Rules asks me about kick counts.  I will also fortify myself with lots of Hathor the Cow Goddess before my next appointment.

In the meantime, you can also read my thoughts on pregnancy at my latest 5MFP post, where I growl considerably less about it.

I spent a lousy day in the hospital being tested for preeclampsia.  I don’t have it (yet), but my blood pressure is high and I am helplessly pukey a couple of nights a week.  I wrote a post for 5 Minutes for Parenting about my thoughts on the matter.

The Toddled Dredge blog is getting a little dusty.  At this stage of pregnancy, I’m afraid survival is about all I can manage.  Even the usual insistence it takes to get computer time for myself seems currently beyond my stamina.  There are only a few weeks of pregnancy left (please, God), and then things should get a little better.  It’s not easy to blog with a newborn either, but the inviolate house rule around here is that, since nursing is the world’s most boring activity, the Breastfeeding Woman gets the computer.  Every time.  No exceptions.  Deal.  The whining of a four-year-old who loves PBSkids.org a little too much will NOT be tolerated.

In the meantime, I just finished re-reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (wonderful!), I watched all of the episodes of Burn Notice on hulu.com, and I have a decent man crush on Dangerous Davies from the BBC series The Last Detective.  If only he would ditch his annoying friend Mod, we could be very happy together.

As long as he doesn’t mind an enormous pregnant woman who can’t keep her food down.  Because really, what’s more attractive than that?

Today at the park I removed a tiny, tiny spider from PoppySeed’s eyelashes.

When I thought about passing on family traditions, I never thought this woud be one.