I feel like I'm going to pop.

I'm due in 16 days. I don't remember being this physically miserable at the end of my pregnancy with Annabella, but maybe that's because Annabella was so small.

I feel a little guilty for it, since I know a lot of people have trouble getting pregnant and would love to trade places with me, but I really don't like being pregnant. There are some nice things about it, but I'm so ready to just meet this baby already. Or soon, at least.

I finally have my hospital bag mostly packed. The house is basically ready. We still need to clean out the cars and install the infant carseats.

I'm still terrified over how Annabella will handle the change. I hope she will love her sister, at least in time. I hope that she will be happy to have a little playmate. I hope that she will whisper secrets to her sister and hold her hand when she cries and give her tons of kisses. But right now I would settle for Annabella just not hating her sister.

Jason and I are going to go on one last date tonight while we still can, before we are overwhelmed by babyhood again. I'm looking forward to it, but I'm a little afraid that I'm going to end up sleeping through the movie. Putting me in a dark room with comfy seats and expecting me to stay awake might not be smart.

I think all of us are just really tired. Annabella's been cranky, and she's been waking up here and there at night. She'll put herself back to sleep most times, but she's making enough noise to wake the rest of us. And then Jason and I are both having troubles falling back asleep. I think the anxiety level is just up for all of us. I know I'm having a hard time shutting down my thoughts at night, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

That feels like enough rambling for today :)

23 days!

My due date is rapidly approaching. I can't wait!

24 more days

Lest you think I've forgotten my countdown...

I can't believe I'm going to meet my daughter soon. I can't wait! I just hope Annabella forgives me for giving her a sister :)

Can we just pretend today never happened?

Traffic was TERRIBLE this morning. Really bad. So bad that it caused me to be 30 minutes late for my OB appointment. (Note, I was 35 minutes late. I'll accept blame for 5 though.)

I pull into the parking lot, just in time for some truck to back into my car. I maybe could have backed out of the way, but I didn't have time to look behind me and didn't want to hit somebody else. So I laid on my horn instead. I don't know if he tried to stop or not, but he backed into my front bumper. I was pretty much directly behind him, and he claimed I was in his blind spot. He must have a pretty big blind spot... No real damage to the car though, and I'm fine, save for a minute or 2 where my neck felt a little tight.

I go in for my appointment, and because I'm so late, I have to wait forever to be seen. Argh.

When I'm finally seen, the doctor decides that I need to have a 20 minute non-stress test at the clinic, and if that turns out ok, then I need to be monitored for 4 additional hours at labor and delivery. Just to be safe. Just in case my placenta is pulling away due to the fender bender.

The 20-minute stress test takes close to an hour. It's fine.

I go to the hospital. Jason and I grab food before heading over to L&D (they said no rush because the non-stress test was fine.) We go up to L&D. They put us in a room where I have a bed and a TV. I get to watch close to an hour of Grey's Anatomy reruns. This is honestly the highlight of my day. Getting to relax and watch TV in the middle of the day almost never happens. I was a little sad when the nurse came back and said that the doctor decided that I didn't need to stay all that long since the accident was pretty low impact, with it being in a parking lot and all they figured the truck wasn't going all that fast. Everything looked good though, and that's the important part.

But they let me out just in time to make it reasonable for me to go to work. I get to work and deal with some problems that have nothing to do with my team, but keep getting the runaround from the team who should be looking into it. After getting multiple people mad at me (and each other), the other team's manager finally takes it over and figures out the problem. I was talking to the person that should have figured it out pretty much from the start, but instead of actually looking at what I was sending him, he just kept sending me back to my team, trying to blame us for stuff that isn't even close to our area. Nice.

I call home. By this time Jason's picked up Annabella and they should be there. When Jas answers, I can hear her screaming in the background. Apparently nothing will make her happy today. She has a bit of a cold, and really wants us to know how very not happy she is.

I still have a few hours before I can go home because I'm signed up for a preggo water aerobics class. I need to go to it as it's the only thing that's really keeping my back loose. An hour there and my back feels better for a couple days.

But all I want to do is go home to hold Annabella, and to forget the rest of the day away...

Close call

2 posts in one day! Crazy, I know.

So I almost got hit by a truck this weekend. It was a little bit terrifying, and also rage-inducing.

I was walking out of a store in a parking lot. A truck was driving up his lane, and I was in the fire lane. The fire lane at this store is pretty big, giving shoppers lots of room to walk and such. I wasn't paying super close attention to him and kept walking, staying in the fire lane but walking towards his lane. I had no indication anything was wrong until Jason yelled "Amber". I stopped moving and looked back at him to see what the problem was. He said something about the truck and I turned back in time to see his wheel come within a few inches of my foot. He would have hit me if Jason hadn't seen that he was cutting over and yelled for me to stop.

I wish I would have had more nerve at the time to say something to him. He jumped out of his truck and nonchalantly went up to the Redbox, completely oblivious that he'd put me in danger. But I was too shaken at the time, of course blaming myself.

Looking back though, I really don't think this was my fault, even if my head was in the clouds. I mean

1. I was in a parking lot for crying out loud.
2. I was there at a peak time for customers, and there were people everywhere.
3. Pedestrians ALWAYS have the right of way (a lesson I somewhat painfully learned while taking my first driving test...)
4. I was in fire lane, one that he really had no business driving in in the first place.
5. I was not moving quickly. In face, I was very slowly waddling along.
6. I'm pretty easy to see. After all, an 8 months pregnant woman slowly shuffling along is hard to miss.

So after I got home and was still pretty shaken up, I wished that I'd at least yelled at him a little. Told him to watch where he was going or something. Stood up for myself in some way. But I didn't. I don't know that it would have helped, but maybe I wouldn't still be a little freaked out if I had.

The experiment...

We had 2 sets of friends over this weekend, each with a baby.

On Saturday, the baby (Blake) was 9 months old. He was crawling and standing and playing with toys. Annabella could have been nicer to him and showed some signs of jealousy, but it wasn't really too bad. She would take her toys and walk away with them whenever Blake showed a little interest (even if she hadn't cared about that toy in a really long time), but when coaxed, she even handed him a ball to play with. So really, Saturday went pretty well.

On Sunday, the baby (Lydia) was 4 months old. And Annabella was NOT happy, not happy at all. She started out pretty uncertain, and showed a lot of signs of just not knowing what to do. At one point Jason was holding Lydia, and Annabella was running at him full force and sort of hit Lydia in the process. Annabella didn't hit her hard, and I don't think she meant to hit her, but Annabella fell apart when Lydia started crying and she saw the look Jason gave her. After that, Annabella needed a lot of comfort and was almost afraid of the baby. She wouldn't even come up and sit next to me while I was holding Lydia. And then when I handed Lydia off, Annabella was firmly planted in my lap needing lots of snuggles.

Lessons learned: Annabella freaks out over other babies crying. Annabella is really not okay with Mommy or Daddy holding other babies. Annabella needed more attention than normal after the babies went away.

And the big takeaway lesson is: We're in for a heap of trouble.

I'm really really worried for Annabella now. Before this weekend, I was convinced that she'd have a hard time losing out on attention and go through some jealousy issues, but I didn't imagine she'd have negative feelings for the baby outside of those. Seeing her so insecure was really tough, and I'm not sure how we'll combat that.

Annabella is the most important person in the world to me, and I'm feeling really pretty darn guilty for putting her through this right now. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a bad decision for her.

Updates

I know it's been forever since I posted. Sorry!

I now have 37 days until my due date. It's starting to feel really close now, which is super exciting. I had a doctor's appointment earlier this week, and he said that if I went into labor now, they wouldn't stop it. Apparently 34 weeks is a magic number for them. He said that there's nothing they couldn't provide outside the body that my body is now providing; so if my body does go into labor, they take the approach that my body knows something they don't and let my body do its thing.

Annabella is doing great. Being her Mommy is really a whole lot of fun. This morning she refused to let me help her put her shorts on. She managed to get her legs into the holes and pull them part way up. I had to help her get them over her butt, at least partly because they were on backwards. She was angry that I helped her even that much!

She's also refusing to sit in her booster seat at most meals these days, instead opting to sit/kneel on the chairs. For the most part she does a good job with this. She's really too short to be good with it for foods like cereal, where she needs to dip her spoon into the bowl and such, but that doesn't stop her from trying. The whole ordeal can be pretty aggravating though because she's also free to move at will. So a birdie on the wall would be apt to hear things like "Annabella, sit on your chair!" or "We don't climb on tables!" or "No, you cannot climb on top of Mommy and eat dinner there!" When she refuses to sit on her chair, I'll tell her that she's telling me she's all done by not sitting on her chair and I'll move her to the floor. A lot of times this works and she'll climb back up onto her chair and sit to eat. But she's learned to be a bit sneaky about it and will sometimes climb up just high enough to grab something and shove it in her mouth.

Jason and I try really hard to sit at the table while we're eating (as long as she's in sight) so that she won't have a reason to believe that it's ok to wander while you eat, but I think we probably need to step up our efforts here even more. We can't really expect her to follow rules she sees us breaking, at least not when it comes to things like this. I know a lot of people just let their kids wander and eat at will, but I don't know how they do it. Annabella is usually covered in food when she eats, and the idea of having peanut butter smeared all throughout the house (and the ensuing bugs that would come) is enough to convince me that this is a rule we need to keep, at least until she's old enough to not make such a mess. Plus, it's really nice to eat together at the table as a family.

I think Annabella is still be behind in her spoken language. She says a lot of words, but they're not very clear. And I don't know that she's using any real phrases yet. I try not to let this bother me, but it does. From what I understand, this is an area that tends to have more variation between kids, but sometimes when I go into daycare I get a little blown away by what her friends are saying. I think some of this is personality (she tends to be quiet in general), and I think some of it is that she's more interested in tuning her fine and gross motor movements, but part of my worries that there might be a legitimate delay there. I guess it's just my job as a Mom to always be worried. If it weren't this, I'm sure it would be something else (not that I don't worry about a whole list of other things too!) Her daycare teachers assure me she's fine, and that they'd only be worried about it if her receptive language wasn't as good as it is. And her pediatrician also said she was fine at her 1.5 year appointment. I guess I'll just make sure to grill him about it again at her 2 year checkup.

I know there's a lot more that I've been wanting to say, but this is getting long enough as it is. Plus, my memory is shot these days. Baby brain for the win!