I understand now. He just wants to be a July baby. He’s going to be a manly little boy and doesn’t want his birthstone to be a pearl. (Each new doctor who does an ultrasound makes certain to point out his very obvious “boy parts”.) A ruby is a much more suitable birthstone for a little boy.

Jim thinks he’ll be born tomorrow, the first of July. I don’t have any other dates in my head. I had the 21st of June, the 24th and the 27th in my head, but those didn’t happen. Maybe daddy knows better in our case.

Tomorrow would be a great day to have a baby. I’ve been in false/pre/I-don’t-know-what-kind-of labor for a week now, and today these contractions are finally starting to hurt every time. They’ve been consistant, ten minutes apart, for a few hours now – but they’ve done that before and turned out to be nothing. But one thing that must be true is that pain means we’re moving in the right direction. Though I don’t even know how I’ll recognize the real thing when it does happen.

We’ve been to the hospital three times this week. Wednesday for nonstress testing. Thursday for a re-test. They told us to bring all of our hospital bags, just in case. Of course, all the neighbors saw us pack up the car. Then this morning because I thought I might be leaking fluid, my doctor said to go in and get checked out. We packed up the car with all of our stuff again – and it turned out it wasn’t amniotic fluid (I’ll spare you all the exact details). This time we left all the bags in the car, and they’re staying there until we have a baby to take home. The neighbors must think we’re absolute airheads at this point.

So if this pattern were to continue, we would end up there again tomorrow. And since I’m not going back there again to leave without my baby, I’m not going back until his head is half hanging out.

But as uncomfortable as this all is, I am glad my doctors seem to favor a more natural approach. In all these trips to the hospital, it seems women just get induced the second they go overdue. I’ve had several nurses say to me, “Oh you poor girl, they’re torturing you.” But no, it must be better for labor to begin on its own.

So we’re still just hanging out. I’ve been entertaining myself with various birth stories, both funny and terrifying at the same time.

Speaking of terrifying, while in triage this morning, waiting to hear about my fluid or non-fluid issue, watching my little soccer player kick the shit out of his fetal heart monitor, there was another woman who came in already in transition. The curtain around my bed was closed so we could only hear her, and God, it was scary. The pain in her voice, like she was being slowly tortured to death. Is that really going to happen to me? Eeek!

My belly must be a nice place to be.

We’ve been to a few different appointments these past couple of days. He’s been measured (about 7 lbs. 6 oz. right now), his fluid level is good. His non-stress testing went well. The nurse took my blood pressure and it was perfect. “I’m sorry,” she said, about my blood pressure, “I mean I’m not sorry that you have good blood pressure, but it means we have no reason to induce you.”

So I guess he gets to just hang out in there a little while longer.

I have another appointment next week, Wednesday, when I’ll assume that if he hasn’t already come, we’ll talk about induction. But for now, it’s up to him.

I asked, a couple weeks ago, in this post, why even have a landline telephone? When you have a cell phone anyway that is every bit as useful.

I still have my landline telephone, and will probably keep it. I’ve been using a Virgin Mobile phone for the past two or three years, so I assumed (and why shouldn’t I?) that if I upgraded from pay-as-you-go to an actual cell phone company and plan, that the service would be every bit as good, if not better. Boy, was I wrong!

We chose Sprint. I had Sprint back in Toledo about four years ago, before their merger with Nextel. The merger obviously did terrible things to the company because I used to love Sprint. It was the main reason we decided to go with them again.

Maybe this is true of all cell phone companies, though I never had a problem on my little Virgin phone, but coverage is so spotty. Downtown Royal Oak, I get five bars. Outside Jim’s office I get five bars. I guess it just happens to be that there are Sprint towers in those places, because our house is in a dead spot. I have one bar most of the time, which isn’t enough power to make a clear call, and it drops to no bars very often, every ten minutes or so, and the call drops instantly. I tried to have a half-hour conversation with my dad and lost the call three times.

That’s just problem number one.

Their customer service reps don’t speak English well, which means that very likely, they don’t work from here in the US. I have no respect for American companies that ship American jobs overseas just to make an extra buck. People will tell you that it’s good for our economy. How is that exactly? All I know is that the unemployment rate here in Michigan is six or so percent right now. That’s a good two percent above the national average. And with everybody losing auto industry jobs, I’m sure a lot of people would be more than happy to have a call center job.

But besides the fact that I can’t respect them as a company, I only know that their call centers are overseas because we’ve had to call them to fix the mistakes they made setting up our plan three times already. We signed up for an international calling package for which we would be charged $4.00 a month. When Jim went to call his family in England, we discovered that not only did it not work, but we aren’t even eligible to apply for the plan until we’ve been Sprint customers for 90 days. Oh, but they sure did sign us up for it, and the $4.00 charge was right there on our bill for the first and second months. Even though we’re not even eligible to use it.

They credited our account, of course, but I’m sure they were hoping we wouldn’t notice.

I have nothing good to say about this experience so far. Well, I guess my husband’s camera phone is pretty handy, but that really has nothing to do with Sprint, does it? Maybe it’s a local thing. I don’t know how Sprint service is anywhere else, but I’ll say this. If you’re looking for a new cell phone, and you live in Michigan, run screaming bloody murder away from Sprint.

I hear Cingular is nice around here. But of course, I hear that after we’ve signed a two-year contract with Sprint.

45 minutes left in the day, the 25th of June, 2005. I’m still pregnant. Not in labor. I’m having contractions, but they’re more a tease than anything else, unpredictable, weak. They’ve been coming sort-of randomly since Thursday night.

I think we can be sure now that he’s not going to make it on time. Late – I should have known that any child of mine would be late. I can’t be on time to anything, why should he?

Not only is my English husband about to be the father of a real live Michigan-born American, but Jim got his Michigan State Driver’s License last night. And he drives like a real Detroiter! Just now I sent him off to work – packed his lunch, kissed him goodbye – off on his own, and it felt a little weird to let him go. He’d better pay attention at those green light left turns – green doesn’t always mean go!

It’s perfect timing I think. I’m way too pregnant to even exist anymore. My baby is grotesquely huge. I swear he’s going to be a ten-pounder (though I guess every woman who’s nine months pregnant probably feels that way). From this point on I’m going to sit at home in my pajamas until he comes. Three more days, but I don’t think he’s in any hurry. He’s too comfortable in there. I’ll be optimistic and assume he wants to surprise me – no signs or symptoms, and then boom, labor!

And I refuse to drink castor oil! All these things people think to do when they’re one or two weeks past their due date, thinking it’ll make the baby come. If it works, they’ll swear it made them go into labor. Could it just be that maybe they were past due and their baby was finally ready?

I am so ready to have this baby. I am so ready to have my body back again (well, except for the boobs. he’s got a lease out on those for a few more months still). I want to run. Have a rum and coke. Sleep comfortably again, even if it is two hours at a time in between feedings. To lose my baby weight and wear my cute clothes again. Wear my heels again. Have a margarita. Carry a basket of laundry for myself. To groom my lady parts without using a mirror. Have a glass of wine (not an alcoholic, really, I just have a healthy appreciation for my liquor).

All of my pregnancy books say, “Try to enjoy these last few weeks of pregnancy. You and your baby will never be this close again!” Let me tell you, being 8 3/4 months pregnant is not something to be enjoyed. It’s something to be endured. And when I’m holding him, in my arms, outside of my body, that will be very much close enough. But I do find myself, in rare moments, thinking hey, this isn’t so bad. Especially for what I’m getting out of it. I guess that’s how women are able to have more than one, isn’t it?

I’ve been trying to think of all the things I might want to do in these next 12 or so days that I wont be able to do again for a very long time. You would think sleeping would be one of those things, but that’s just not working out so well. Everything aches. With or without any amount of pillows, on my side, sitting up, on the couch. I have to switch sides exactly every two hours because it feels like my hips and pelvic bones are being torn apart (hey, I guess they really are), and it’s a major accomplishment to roll over in bed at this point.

So besides sleeping, I figure that seeing grownup movies in a theater is probably something we wont be able to do for a long while. We went to see X-Men: The Last Stand over the weekend. It was good, but uncomfortably loud. The whole time I tried to cover my so-huge belly with my hands, thinking maybe I could block some of the noise, worried that it was hurting the baby’s ears. So we want to go again before he comes, maybe something quieter this time. A chick-flick or something.

I can’t think of anything else I’d want to do before officially becoming a parent. Anything that doesn’t involve irresponsibility or possible bodily harm (like bungee jumping). Because the truth is, I already am a parent. If I wanted to do anything like that I would have had to do it before I got pregnant. Now I’m locked into an 18-year contract.

But really I think there’s probably more I can’t do now, pregnant, than there will be when he’s born.

I pay $45 a month for my landline phone so that telemarketers can harass me. Telemarketers never call my cell phone. My family only ever calls me on my cell phone. So I hardly ever answer the house phone because I know there’s a 99% chance it’s someone I don’t want to talk to. And it’s not like our baby is going to be wanting to talk on the phone regularly until he’s at least 10 or so.

I’m wondering how many people get by on just having cell phones. Especially now that most companies include free in-network calling, free nights and weekends, and free nationwide long distance, is there really any reason to have a landline phone at all? We can even get set up for a worldwide long distance plan (so Jim can call home to England) that costs the same monthly charge and gets us the same rates as the one we have on our landline.

Here would be my worries – what if there’s an emergency and you needed to dial 911? Will they have trouble knowing exactly where you are? Because as far as I know, when you dial 911 from a landline, your address comes up on their screen, doesn’t it?

And then what do we do when our baby is old enough to be left with a babysitter? How would she call us if she needed to, unless we gave her one of our cell phones before we left? We can’t just assume she has one of her own.

So chime in people, what do you think?