My first real scare

My mom drove down to spend the day with me yesterday, and we ran some errands, went to Weber's for lunch (mmm....), made meatballs. It was nice. It was a throwback to the days when I was a kid, home from school after my surgery, when I spent all day sitting around with my mom, my grandmother and my Aunt Maggie, listening to them gossip, waiting for Aunt Maggie to go pick up Anthony and Angela from school. I used to think, This is what I want to be when I grow up. This is what being a mommy is all about.

Obviously, I haven't added the baby to my equation just yet, but I am loving the stay-at-home part. There's nothing better than waking up and knowing that you could start (or finish!) any of those projects you think about when you're sitting in your cubicle, and you have to pull out a piece of paper to write them down so you don't forget to squish them all into your Saturday/Sunday morning errands. I'm an adult, and I pay for my house, and now I'm getting to spend some time here.

So my mom and I made the meatballs, but, because I didn't have any fresh garlic in the house and we weren't going to go back to the store at that point, we couldn't make the gravy or lasagna. Which meant that, after my mom left and Bill got home, we had to figure out dinner. The horrible back-and-forth of "What do you want for dinner?" and "I don't care. What do you feel like eating?" Since I'd had a cheeseburger and fries (with cheese) for lunch, I thought maybe I should go healthy for dinner. Bill whipped up a delicious salad with warm chicken that totally satisfied my nine-month long craving for the Caesar salad I can't have.

But I've been dreaming about ice cream, and Bill suggested an ice cream sundae to go with my healthy dinner. And how about a movie? That sounded like a nice date night to me.

We crated the dog and headed out to Collingswood. Because we don't fuck around, we made it to The Pop Shop, parked, sat at the counter, ordered, scarfed the ice cream, paid the bill and were on our way back to the car in about a half hour.

I'm going to stop here to describe our sundae, because it's just that good. Two scoops of vanilla and one scoop of chocolate hard ice cream, drizzled with peanut butter sauce, covered with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Reese's Pieces, and topped with whipped cream and two perfect bright red cherries. Amazing.

OK, back to the story. We wanted to see The Hangover, because we've been meaning to see it for a while and just haven't gotten around to it. Also, one of Bill's buddies at work is just about to have a baby -- his wife is due with their first child two days before us -- and they have a friend who saw The Hangover, and she went into labor within 48 hours. We were thinking that it would be a great case study for the producers, or at least something to get us all on Good Morning America or something. (So far, no such luck for us or for Bill's buddy from work.)

We drove over to the Loews in Cherry Hill and checked out the times -- we were about an hour early. So we headed across the parking lot to Target and browsed the baby aisles for about a half hour, and then went back to the theater and bought our tickets.

For those of you who haven't seen this movie yet, you should. It's awesome. Not one of those movies where you're laughing from the beginning until roll of the credits, but it's a good story, and it's just crazy. We loved it.

What I did not love, however, were the contractions I had the entire time we were watching the movie. They weren't painful, but they definitely were contractions -- my first grouping of contractions. And I had this uncomfortable stretching feeling as the child tried to push itself through my skin. That's what it felt like anyway.

Bill and I left the movie theater pretty sure that we'd be back on the road in a few hours, on the way to the hospital in the middle of the night. I was terrified. Alone in my own personal hell.

Yes, the baby is the most wonderful and perfect gift that God could have ever given us, and we both are ecstatic for the little one to come into the world. But I am not, in any way, excited about this "wonderful experience" that will bring me more pain than I've ever known. I'm just not excited for it. Excuse me for living. And right up until that magical moment when this miracle arrives and Bill and I forget anything else that ever was important to concentrate all of our energy on this baby until we die, I am going to be miserable and scared and there's not going to be a thing that anybody else can do to help me. Because my body is going to push out this baby whether I want it to or not. I can only hope that the drugs I'm going to demand as soon as I walk through those hospital doors do what they're supposed to do.