still baby free

My silence is explained by the presence of a houseguest, my MIL. We have cable internet, so it's wired and the PC is in the living room. This leaves me no real opportunity to blog while I have a guest in the house.

I'm actually poaching a signal in my bedroom right now. See, I'm bored. So I thought I'd blog.

This visit has been better than most, I must say. I do wish, however, that my MIL knew how to be a guest. She has such a tendency to take over all of my normal duties that I end up sitting in a corner with nothing to do. Take this morning. I am up early--have been sleeping in--but where I let my kids play and doze until they decide to come out and have breakfast, I just saw her walk in there and turn on the light to wake them up.

Dude, no wonder they have been so exhausted. That's my first thought. More to the point, I would have tended to them in my own time, but she usurped that. Meanwhile, she's unloading the dishes, which I might have done if I were here on my own. I do usually do that in the morning.

And that leaves me with....hmmm nothing to do.

I should not complain about having nothing to do, I realize this. But maybe you understand. It doesn't feel that good to have someone else take over your place, even for a little while. At least, not to me.

I don't want to overstate my case. We have definitely achieved a better balance this time. That's in part because there are some things I've asked her not to do or rather asked her to let me do. So I can't say I feel like she's completely taken over my household. However, after observing my daily tasks for the first day or so, I do feel like she's co-opted most of those things, leaving me...well, sitting in the corner.

But whatever. This is not at all what I thought I was going to say when I logged on this morning. I was going to say something about having this baby. I am going to have a baby. In a week or so. Crazy. But no baby yet. Contractions but no baby. No surprise there. My labors start with a long build up of hours of on again off again mildly to moderately painful contractions. After that, my water will break and I will experience hours of moderately to seriously painful contractions. And by hours I mean 8 or 10. At that point, someone will check and I will be all of two centimeters dilated. At least, this is how it will go if my previous labor experiences are any indication.

It's going to be awesome. No, wait. It isn't. And the first person who tells me it will be different this time or that I'm somehow going to make it painful by believing that it will be painful gets killed. I swear.