Today I am 38 weeks pregnant and last night was the first night I’ve been in actual pain with regards to contractions. You know that cervical pain I’ve been mentioning? Well I’ve now decided it feels like Tater is poking or clawing at the cervix and that I’ll pop and gush water at any moment as a result, lol.

I know it is kind of a strange way to describe it all and technically Tater isn’t touching my cervix since my bag of water/ membranes are separating her from the actual cervix right now. She isn’t clawing the cervix so to speak but I am pretty sure she is stretching or pushing on it based on what it feels like and I am sure that is how it will feel right before my water breaks.

I am not leaking or bleeding and my membranes are still intact as far as I know but the cervical pain sure got worse than normal last night for a few brief seconds. I would not describe the pain as all encompassing or as debilitating by any means. It was more like a stabbing pain inside me where I think my cervix is. The pain would last a few seconds and then go away, like she was bumping something and it caused a stabbing pain.

Didn’t feel anything contracting or tightening during the stabs of pain (it would come before or after) but I did have some lower abdominal aching and some real back aching that N massaged away while I laid on my side.

It all came on late last night right after the tornado sirens sounded and I went out to secure the bunnies. I was making some spaghetti Alfredo (didn’t have fettuccine noodles) with shrimp and N was almost home from work. I took this video of the coming storm, the lightening was way cool. Make sure your sound isn’t on full blast when you play it though. The sirens are loud!

Anyway, I was having a burst of energy so I took a video, got the animals ready for the storm, was cooking dinner and then I even mopped the kitchen floor because there were ants coming in from somewhere and eating somthing off the floor that you couldn’t see.

I was having a few moments of “nesting” or whatever and then the weird pain and uncomfortableness began. At first I would find relief in sitting down but towards the end sitting or laying just didn’t do the trick. It was not like I was crying or screaming in agony like everyone perceives woman should be. It was annoyingly uncomfortable that is all. Not sure if that is normal or what but that is how I felt.

Oh, and how come nobody talks about the constant constipated feeling of late pregnancy when the baby drops? It is like people are scared to say that it feels like you’ve got a 10 lb shit chillin in there. Some have said it is like sitting on a bowling ball, others say you feel like you are trying to carry a bowing ball between your legs. None of those descriptions seem to fit what I am feeling.

After some internet searching I was able to uncover the fact that feeling like “you have to #2” all the time (when you really don’t) is an early labor sign. Yeah, okay so feeling like you need to crap 24/7 means something is definitely getting ready to come out of there (either baby or poo), got it. Was that so hard to say?

It’s like women are afraid to bluntly discuss the yuck parts of labor and pregnancy because they aren’t lady like or something, LOL. Well I am proud to say I lack that behavioral conditioning and I am all for being real about it.

Oh and anyone else have stabbing pain in the anus/ perennium when they bend over? I know this is related to the 10 lb shit I described above, just putting it out there as pretty annoying in my book.

So yeah, my ass hurts along with my tailbone my pubic bone, my belly skin and occasionally my cervix. I am happy to report no diarrhea or hemorrhoids though, what a silver lining huh?

My hormones are changing too. Just the other day I went from sweating my ass off to freezing ass cold in minutes. I stayed huddled under the covers all day and now I’ve got a cold sore coming in so it seems my body is making the shift from human incubator to no longer incubating spawn. Woot.

We are counting down the hours till we leave for The Farm, can’t wait to get this show on the road and to meet our little girl already!

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In the meantime we have been trying to do things to have fun and to keep busy while we are waiting for Tater to do her last bits of growth and development. Things like putting the house together the way we’ll need it when Tater comes home, unpacking, organizing and even vegetable gardening have been a few of our pastimes these days (other than my excessive napping).

It has sure been quite a critter filled weekend for us though! Late last week we were out in the front yard planting some of the free iris’ we were given. I was working under the tree planting them and N was working under the mailbox.

All of the sudden this frog comes hopping out of the grass at me. I was pretty surprised by it but was also excited because I have never really played with a frog. We didn’t have many water sources in Arizona so in turn we didn’t have many frogs to encounter. Here with the water pond behind our house the frogs are everywhere so I got to play with one for a bit while gardening. Is this a frog or toad though?

Then on Saturday we were out on the deck enjoying the warm morning and planting some seeds when we noticed our outdoor cat, Haley, acting a bit odd. Dixie, our dog, was also quite interested in what Haley had going on. It turns out the cat caught a garden snake and was playing it to death.

N rescued it with a rake and we were sad that it’s head and body were bleeding. We grabbed it away from the cat mainly because we wanted to see if we could get some photos of it and figure out what kind of snake it was. The reason we were so curious about the type of snake is because we are pretty sure a much larger snake got Dixie a few weeks ago.

We noticed she was trying to get at something that went under the deck, she dug a huge hole that went under the deck. We also suspect she got bit while digging that hole. She’s been limping and babying her one paw for about 2 weeks. It is getting better now and she is doing fine but we are sure it was a bite of some sort. Hopefully not from a bigger snake!

Anyway, after taking some photos to reference and compare to what we’ve found online we let the poor garden snake slither off to safety. We still have no idea what kind of snake it is.

Haley was a bit bummed to have her torture subject freed but she got over it pretty quick.

We’ve got frogs frolicking in the back yard, snakes slithering in the brush and we even have huge scary spiders crawling through our grass (with egg sacks on their backs) as I discovered while putting a bunny out to run the yard. The critter fun never seemed to end!

The rabbits seem to be loving the supervised play time in the yard and Dixie is getting very good at not going crazy over the rabbits running free. I recorded a few videos of N, Dixie and Maybelle out in the yard.

Here N has a moment with Dixie, he is telling her how she’ll need to watch over Tater soon…

I also recorded a video of some crazy kicking of the belly while we were watching American Idol last week. The lightening is poor but you can still see the jabs and kicks (and you get to hear the song recaps too. LOL).

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Dixie now uses her nifty dog house for shelter from SOME of the elements. At night she does sleep in the dog house and she has figured out how to stay in it when the hard rain is falling. I still find her digging holes in the flower beds and laying on top of the plants for shade and cool, it is not even insanely hot here yet! So, we need to get some fencing around the beds already but having her sleep in her house is good progress.

Hailey is also getting the hang of her cat house outside. Like Dixie she would just lay out on the uncovered deck in the pouring rain and refuse to take shelter in her home. Now she is understanding that her food, water, blankets and the shade all are found in her cat house.

She too will take shelter in there when the weather gets real bad, yay for progress! On the flip side she is still not hopping the 6 foot wooden fence to let herself in and out of our yard. We have to let her though the gate and if she is still wandering the neighborhood and doesn’t get let in by dark she will yowl outside our kitchen window until we let her back in the gate.

So, the outside pets are getting in to the routine of things. We even have the bunnies out there for fresh air, though they do have to be tarped when it rains since their cages aren’t 100% enclosed. The rabbits even take turns “mowing the lawn” from within this movable gated run area we have set up for them. They seem to really like the grass and the room to exercise.

We’ve tried letting them roam the yard free (not together! We don’t want more dead baby bunnies…) but Dixie chases them crazily trying to “herd” them and they can’t handle it for an extended period of time.

So the routine is to feed everyone in the morning. The indoor cats have their food and litter box in the odd closet up in the master bathroom. They get fed (and hopefully scooped) in the morning. We’ve found that keeping their food topped off, by giving them food each morning has cut down on the vomit occurrences. Also, since switching to a food that is not bright orange the vivd shooting vomit has been much less of an issue.

Once the cats are fed we go out to feed the outdoor critters. Dixie still finds comfort in eating her food in her home so we take her a heaping cup of food out there to dump in her bowl, then we top off Hailey’s cat food and we give each of the rabbits some food also.

It is strange but routine is really one of the reasons why everyone is adjusting as well as they have. Having a consistant routine is a comfort for them I think and it makes everything else less scary in this odd time of transition. It is also a bit of parent training for us at the same time. I think kids like routine too huh? We suck at keeping with routines, so the practice is good

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I’ve been trying to bust out some posts in advance that I’ll schedule in June to keep the blog fresh while I am away from the internet waiting for Tater to come. That is the idea at least. If anyone wants to guest post here just sign up as a user and I’ll get you all hooked up to be a contributor.

Okay, so over the weekend we did get lots done, as usual… For starters we wrangled the freecycle dog home through our back gate so now Dixie has an even nicer shelter to enjoy. Problem is Haily, the outdoor cat, is smarter than Dixie and she manages to take over the dog house every time. Dixie refuses to fight for it and just sleeps out on the deck.

Mind you Hailey has her own house that we built but she refuses to use it unless absolutely necessary. So when we go out and lure her out of Dixie’s home, Dixie can use it but it seems every time the rain starts to fall or when it gets windy Hailey is in the dog house and Dixie is outside… I give up! If the dog doesn’t want care to fight for her home that is her bad, right?

We also went by the old place to do some deep cleaning. We spent 3 hours there doing the kitchen and basement. We’ve only got a few rooms left to do now and then we’ll be totally done with that shit hole. Yay. Oh and while the cleaning was happening guess what we discovered growing on top of the basement carpet and up the outside of the wood paneling in the corner…

MOLD!!!

Yep, you can see it with your own two eyes just growing right on top of all the carpet and wood siding. We had a freestanding shelf in that corner holding my business stuff but once we moved all our things out of the basement and began vacuuming we spotted the fairly big moldy corner. N took some photos of it on his iPhone. I’ll share them soon.

It’s been over a month since we met with the slumlady and started the ball rolling on having them sign our mutual release letter. They’ve been avoiding us now for over a month and N has begun the harassing phone calls to them again. We’ve not paid them April’s rent and are trying to set up a meeting time to turn over the keys and complete the final walk though. It seems they could care less, still.

Last night N put the freecycle crib together in Tater’s room. It was an interesting process since it’s an older crib that needs work, plus the assembly instructions were nonexistent so we were winging it so to speak. It is now pieced together, just needs some wood glue and some screws tightened. We’ll buy a crib mattress for it sometime after Tater is here if we still haven’t found anything better/ safer.

We spent Sunday thrift store hopping. We were window shopping for a washing machine since come May 1 we will have no way to wash clothes (other than a laundry mat), we also thought we would keep our eyes peeled for some necessities for Tater while we were there. Things like cloth diapers, receiving blankets and a variety of sized onesies.

We managed to find some clothes and a few receiving blankets that we spent $6.00 on. We didn’t see any pack n’ play’s or newborn sleeping solutions and we didn’t see any washing machines either. We plan to keep looking, hopefully we’ll find all that we need in due time.

It’s was a windy, rainy weekend but we still managed to get some good progress made! We even found a work around for our failing external hard drive (I’ll post more on this later) and N painted my toenails for me since I can no longer reach them. Isn’t he a trooper?

We took my blood pressure at the grocery store and it was 108/70, I am still not swelling or having any heart racing or blood sugar issues. I haven’t weighed myself since we moved in, the scale is still missing but I feel like I’ve gained a few (5 or so) pounds. LOL. What do you think?

We’ve got a shower in our honor taking place in Phoenix, AZ courtesy of Krystal on May 2nd that we are getting excited about. We’ll be there via video conference to talk to and enjoy everyone’s company. If you are going to be out that direction and haven’t already received an invite shoot me an email and I’ll hook you up with the details.

We’ve also got a web baby shower going on right now and a live shower chat scheduled courtesy of another bloggy friend, Maiden53, that you can check it out here.

Don’t forget to put your dollar in and place your baby weight bet! Remember 2 winners split the pool of cash so the more people who enter the better it is for YOUR pocket book, lol.

Okay, I am off to try finishing those 3 blog posts and I’ve got to feed the animals and such. Have a good monday everyone!

Oh, and if you aren’t afraid to see how an actual homebirth was featured in a commercial check out this video. Thanks Ryan and Kari for blogging this! Don’t worry it is peaceful and beautiful. Just graphic, shows nudity and you know a baby coming out from down there:

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