Polar Arctic Cold What-Have-You

We’re home today.  A Tuesday.  It’s cold down here, colder than anyone under the age of 40 has ever seen, and schools closed just in case of pipes bursting or buses breaking down.  So I was home Tues and Wed of Christmas week, home Wed of the following week, and now I’m home again Tues.  It’s made for a difficult, lurching start to the year, I must say.  I’m just ready to get going on this maternity leave already, instead of these stops and starts.  By the time I get back ’twill be spring.  Hard to imagine, isn’t it?  I’m looking forward to a period of bodily rest with this new snuggle bug in my arms and out of my lungs – and also looking forward to ramping back up to full time work in April, with a clear straight shot to the end of the year.  The limbo of waiting out the last few weeks while still trying to bill enough hours to stay afloat is kind of driving me batty.  The midweek holidays and school closures are making me battier.

On this chilly day, our “diva” palm tree in the backyard is wrapped in a Harry Potter blanket with a shop-light shining on it.  Poor thing is not cold hardy to these temps, and was also friggin’ expensive.  I hope it doesn’t expire in this extremely non-Southern weather we have happening down here.

I have the laptop open and am keeping an eye on the email, but one just cannot be productive with these children in one’s hair – even though they happen to be playing beautifully together right now.  They are performing some sort of imaginative play revolving around hot lava and  flying matchbox cars.  Though they are mostly self-involved, every time I open a document and start to edit it, they interrupt my groove with a request for juice, or to help fix the Lego airplane that just fell apart, or to “draw a meaner face for my robot, mom.”  Or come up and ask me (as Jack just did) – “Mom, how did Dark Vader turn from Luke’s dad into a bad guy?  Where did he get his light saver?  Why is Yoga a good guy when he looks so scary?”  (All charming pronunciation mistakes his, not mine.)

On the third child front, Baby is wide awake and spread eagle in there.  I have poky baby parts sticking out of all four quadrants of my abdomen right now, plus something (a little baby head?) exerting some unbelievable downward pressure.  I have an ultrasound Wednesday to determine which way he’s pointed, though the doc already felt with his hands a couple of weeks ago and determined him to be headed south, as nature intended.  We shall see if he has stayed that way, or if he has spun himself around in the interim.

I packed my bag Sunday night.  We have a number of friends prepared to take the boys when I go into labor . . . though nearly all of them are dual-career households with kids of their own on all kinds of activity schedules, which complicates the favor we’d have to ask.  In fact, nearly all of them are my coworkers.  I’m keeping a running tally in my mind of everyone’s filing deadlines, so I know who to call first when the time comes.  Ideally, I will either labor all day Saturday or Sunday, starting in the morning and ending around dinnertime – or I will go into labor after dropping the boys off in the morning, and have delivered the beab before they need picked up.  Yeah.  Little Baby.  Let’s make that happen.  No middle-of-the-night stuff, mmmkay?