i'm not even going to front like i have a lot of new information or insight to document here, but my mind is hard-pressed to make room for anything other than pregnancy thoughts these days.

i finally did stop overbooking myself with dave & buster's frivolity and managed to attend my local hospital's labor and delivery tour. i can't pretend that it gave either me or ian a lot of depth or preparation for the whackness of this upcoming tribulation, but at least we know where to park once we arrive. the childbirth educator was an irritatingly jovial woman who burst into song at random and spent a lot of time reassuring us that the hospital is certified as baby-friendly and mom-friendly. as opposed to overtly hostile to all parties involved, i guess.

but this means my baby doesn't get carted off to a nursery, à la those two episodes of friends that comprise everything i know about childbirth up to now. he won't even need to hang out in that little bin that makes him look like a warmed over buffet entree. i will get to hold him forever, which is simultaneously heartwarming and deeply daunting. i don't really know how to hold a baby, let alone one that has been in this world for 3.4 seconds.

and yes- i know that i will learn and that things will come naturally and instincts will take over, but that's also what they said about playing kickball in first grade yet coach still got disgusted with my continued uselessness and removed me from the game.

like, i'm nearing 38 weeks but i'm still out here feeling like i don't really know anything about pregnancy. today i announced to ian, "i can't tell if i'm having braxton-hicks contractions or if i just have really tight and sexy abs."

but i guess god was like ugh something shitty has to happen to her at least once because it is not okay for someone so physically inept to sail through pregnancy this easily, because while cooking breakfast yesterday, i was assailed with a sudden, violent bout of nausea that resulted in some truly miserable vomiting. who in this world even gets their first episode of morning sickness this late in the third trimester. today, while carefully brushing out my eyelashes, i realize a quadrant of my left eye is terrifyingly bloody. i threw up so hard i gave myself a subconjunctival hemorrhage.

so now i'm nervously stashing ondansetron in my all my purses just in case, but i'm also falling prey to the bullshit lure of dr. google, who speculates (via hundreds of boring pregnancy forum threads) that nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea at the end of third tri is a sign that labor is lurking right around the corner. this is corroborated by a very unscientific idk it's like ur body knows to prepare itself by cleaning everything out.

my body doesn't even know how to maintain a blood pressure that doesn't belong to a 65 year old smoker having a stroke, so i am highly suspicious of this claim- but i relay it to ian all the same.

"how soon around the corner?" he perks up, excited by the prospect of early labor. probably psyched that james may be joining him sooner than expected for his marathon of rupaul's drag race season 8.

"they say 24 to 48 hours, but it's probably bullshit," i tell him. the internet is rife with labor signs superstition. and 37+ weekers eat it up like pregnancy astrology because by term they are all sick and tired and clumsy and swollen and irritable and desperate for an end to an increasingly intolerable stretch of sobriety. i am not immune to the lure of symptom lore- not due to any particular discomfort or misery, but because i am feeling super ready to peace outta work.

my last professional hurdle is a very crucial conference call scheduled on tuesday that i can't skip or delegate. once it's over, i'll begin trying to coax james out of his hermitage with stories about all the cool things he's missing out on.

"your dad and i are marathoning drag race season 8," i'll tell him. "if you don't show up soon, you'll miss snatch game- and i bet you bob's going to be sickening."