With Pregnancy Comes Worry and… the Stupid Thing of the Day

My posting time is all off. I used to post every evening right before dinner or even while I was making dinner. But then I went to Paris and my timing is completely screwy. At first I was waking up at dawn and going to bed at 5 in the afternoon. Now I’m going to bed at 10:30 and waking up at 8. What is wrong with me!!! My old corporate self is rolling over in her grave. What kind of morning-person-freak-that-I-am sleeps past 7:30? Why, back in the day I’d be completely dressed for work, teeth brushed and watering the plants by now.

Gone are those days. I don’t know if it’s because I’m pregnant and I get tired at the strangest times (like when I’m driving in traffic on the 405 at 3 in the afternoon) or if I never really got off my Paris time schedule or if gradually over time without a strict schedule I’ve adapted to Toby’s schedule which is go to bed at 4 in the morning and think about waking up when the phone starts ringing off the hook. Whatever it is, I’m screwy.

I’m also sick. And worried. I worry all the time now. Wait, I worried all the time before too. That hasn’t changed. I take after my grandmother, the worry wart. I’m worried that I’m killing my baby. First off I got food poisoning. I spared you and didn’t blog about that but it was pretty bad. At first I thought it was morning sickness, but it wasn’t. Then I got the crispiest sunburn ever in Cambria. I haven’t gotten a sunburn that bad since forever. They say your biggest organ is your skin so I feel terrible that I went and weakened a good 75% of my body. I’m sure the baby loved sharing my resources with my skin cells that have been scrambling to repair themselves ever since. AND THEN… I went and caught a stupid cold virus. I was hoping it was allergies because I heard a tale from a mom about how she suddenly got allergies out of no where when she was pregnant. BUT NO… the nasal drip moved onto a sore throat and now one side of my head completely clogged up with snot. Poor me.

But wait, The poor baby! Of course I googled whether or not a cold virus can cause birth defects and the chances look pretty slim but it did say a high fever is bad. A high fever!!!!! Like how I felt when I was laying on the floor sweating and grasping my guts because I had the mother of all cramping from food poisoning? And then the 102 degree trip home in Toby’s Eurovan with no air conditioning? (It’s broke) I’ve been feverish for days and days! I’m sure that my baby is deforming as I type this.

The worry! The worry! Is this what it’s like to be a parent!!! Maybe if I write about it will that make it not come true? I read somewhere that that is why Steven King writes such gruesome tales.

Along with the worry comes the stupidity. Today’s “stupid thing of the day” is actually something that happened a few weeks ago but it has just recently been revealed to me how stupid I really am. I’ve been reading babycenter.com studiously and watching for every symptom. (It’s come to a point where I might wonder if babycenter.com is a bad thing because I’m very susceptible to the power of suggestion.) They say that when you are pregnant you can become very moody. Just like PMS. (Yay! We all love PMS so much.) You may experience rage issues and find yourself snapping at the slightest thing. Snapping? Who me? Snap?

Imagine this, I’m alone at the laundromat doing loads and loads of laundry left over from my trip to Paris and the fact that I wait until the very last minute to do the chore. The laundromat has recently been taken over by new owners and they’ve added a few upgrades. One of these upgrades is a camera that spies on us while we do laundry. It’s hidden in an old garage sale oil painting of the Arch de Triumph. Funny no?

So I’m doing my laundry and folding and folding and folding and there is this irritating ringing sound coming from the Fluff and Fold office in the back that is clearly locked up for the day and nobody is there to answer the phone. At first I think about how much business they are losing because the thing is just ringing off the hook and then I start thinking that maybe their customers are on crack because as soon as it stops ringing after the sixteenth time, there’s a three second pause and it starts all over again. The ringing and the ringing… after a while it starts to drive me crazy. I start to claw out my eyeballs and then I get the bright idea to pantomime to the hidden camera that their phone is ringing off the hook and I’m going looney. You can imagine my antics. I was alone and pregnant. After about ten minutes of that I decide to scrawl a note on a piece of paper and slip it under their office door. I don’t know what I wrote but I think it went something like, “your phone is ringing so much it is making me want to kill myself.” As if that wasn’t enough I then decided to get my cell phone out and call their emergency number and leave a message about how the ringing was driving me crazy. Obviously by this time they could hear the craziness in my voice.

Speed forward to yesterday when I’m back at the laundromat again. This time the owners are there. They are chatting it up with their customers. They are nice friendly folks. In fact the man is actually telling tales of what he has seen on his surveillance camera. At this point I interrupt and ask him if he saw me making a fool of myself trying to tell him that his phone was ringing for two hours straight.

“Oh!” he exclaims, hands up in the air. “You’re the phone ringing woman! I was hoping I could get a chance to talk to you!!!” I guess he didn’t recognize me from the video. I proceed to tell him about the horrible ringing and he stops and looks me in the eye and says, “You know, that wasn’t our phone ringing. That was the radio program. They were having a telethon that day and between songs, while the deejay talked you could hear the phones ringing in the background.”

WHAT!!!! I completely lost my marbles over a radio program? I was shocked. I was embarrassed. I wanted to crawl into a hole. I must have a really really low threshold for irritation. And I’m so not ever going to listen to that radio station if I can help it. What kind of crack idea is that to irritate the beep out of people with the sound of phones ringing?

p.s. Sorry such a long post. And $#@!!!! Thank you for all the well wishes and comments! Thank you! You really do know how to make a girl feel special.