This weekend’s to-do list includes the very real act of opening up the car seat and installing it in the minivan, and probably packing up my hospital bag.  I can do this with all the smugness of someone who has an induction date set for 39 weeks* and thus has fate by the balls.

If you remember, I’ve been listening to Hypnobabies CDs in hopes of having a drug-free labor and while I don’t know if they’ll lead to an “easy, comfortable, and pain free birthing,” I do know I’ve slept better these last couple months than I have in my whole life.  I also know it gets kind of weird when the lady on the tapes says things like, “My pelvis is soft and flexible…” and, “My cervix is as soft as melting butter…”

This pregnancy, I’ve been treated to a symptom I managed to avoid in my other ones and because I am a proper lady I won’t spell it out for you but I will say I’ve made good friends with a tube of Preparation H.  I also cannot walk more than about 50 yards at a time anymore.  My doctor keeps saying, “We’ll‘address’ them after the delivery.”  Yeah, um…not super excited about that one.  Considering that toilet paper feels like broken glass lately, I really don’t want to think about anything down there being “addressed.”

So yeah.  Pregnancy is beautiful.  And if you don’t agree, that’s an issue we’re just going to have to address.

*I have Factor V Leiden, which means my blood gets a little over-excited about clotting, so my OB doesn’t like me to go all 40 weeks.  Sooner equals safer for me and the baby.

About six years ago Kevin signed up to be a bone marrow donor, for no other reason than that he happened to have bone marrow and some people in the world happen to need bone marrow.  He actually got a call right away that he was a match for someone, but the person decided not to go through with the procedure.

A month ago, that person changed her mind.  We don’t know much about her—just that she is a 53-year-old woman with a form of leukemia—but Kevin didn’t even hesitate.

Thanks to modern medicine, Kevin doesn’t have to have his hip cracked open like they used to do (and sometimes still need to do); he just has to go to our local blood bank for shots five days in a row, and the shots trigger his body to make more stem cells.  They cause some bone pain, as he noticed as soon as he got in the car to drive home.  I’m worried about how bad it’s going to get by the fifth shot, but Kevin’s doesn’t seem phased by it.

This Thursday Kevin  will spend eight hours hooked up to a needle while the stem cells are harvested out of his body, then immediately flown to the recipient’s hospital and transferred to her body.  Crazy, eh?

Even crazier is what happens on the recipient’s end.  Last week and this week, she has undergone treatments that will kill off all of her bone marrow.  She will be super susceptible to every ailment known to man, and I can’t imagine the pain she will be going through.  Once her bone marrow is gone, she is completely, 100% dependent on Kevin to give her life.  She will die without his bone marrow.

Hopefully her body accepts it.  If not, they’ll go through the same process in a few months and cross their fingers that it takes the second time.  Kevin’s body will kind of be on-call for her for about a year.

I love how Kevin is doing this for a complete stranger, how he is completely unconcerned for his own comfort, how he doesn’t overthink it, how he just gives.  That’s just how Kevin is.

I love him.

Me: Hey.  Remember Crystal Pepsi?
K: Yup.
(Silence.)
K: Remember jelly bracelets?”
Me:  Yup. 
(Silence)
Me: Remember Moncheechees?
K: Yup.
(Silence)
K: Remember 3-2-1-Contact and the Electric Company?
Me: Yup.

…and so on.  Without saying the rules out loud, we intuitively knew it would be over when one person couldn’t say “Yup.”  It happened when I remembered the Uncola guy from 7-Up.  Remember? 

(Sorry the audio is so horrible on this video.)

Unfortunately, I got disqualified because I somehow remembered something from before my time (the commercial aired in 1975 and I was still in utero).  I have no idea how I remembered something from before my birth, but that is some powerful marketing.

And so we continued, through shoes with kangaroo pockets, the Micro Machines guy, friendship pins, L.A. Gear, ET dolls with frilly dresses, Captain Caveman and Wrigley’s Doublemint twins…until I pulled these little guys out my memory banks:

Shirttails.

Kevin–who was raised by TV and whose parents attempted to name him after Rocky* while his sister was named after Wendy from Peter Pan—stumped!  By me!  Me who watched as much TV in a week as Kevin did in a day!  It felt good.  ‘

Of course, K tried to demean my win by pointing out that Shirttails only aired for one year and he was four years old that year, but still.  It was almost enough to not make me not cranky anymore.

I guess there’s not really much point to all this other than to remind you how few friendship pins you got compared to the other girls in your class.  You know the ones.

As we were leaving the restaurant, I mentioned to Kevin how much more fun this game is going to be when we’re, say, 80 years old:

Me: Remember the porridge we ate for dinner last night?
K: No.  I don’t remember shit!
Me: Ha!  Remember when “shit” was a bad word?

Anyway, next time you’re at dinner with your significant other and you realize you’re the old couple with nothing to talk about, you can start by saying, “Hey, remember that one post by MrsMouthy?”  And enjoy your following ten minutes of conversation.

*K’s parents were going to name him Rocco (after Rocky) until the grandparents weighed in and said they couldn’t name a kid that, so Rocco was demoted to Kevin’s middle name.  Flash forward 30-some years to their great grandchild—our Rocco.  For the whole first year of Rocco’s life, Kevin’s grandparents would ask during every phone conversation, “How’s the baby?  And what’s his name really?)

This weekend I made it my mission to sort through baby clothes.  I had already gone through one big plastic tub but I felt I was missing a couple things so I sent Kevin into the attic to see if maybe we had another tub up there.  He handed down one…two…three…FOUR FRIGGIN’ TUBS.  I started crying right then.

Of course, when Kevin was in the attic Rocco remembered about the Christmas train we set up around the tree this year and he got his panties all in a bunch wanting it down.  It’s set up again and now he keeps asking where the Christmas tree is and when Santa’s going to come.

But I digress.  See this here?  This is kind of freaking me out.

It’s the beginnings of me packing a hospital bag.  And if I’m packing a hospital bag, that must mean this baby is coming sometime in the next few weeks.  And if the baby is coming in the next few weeks then I’ve got to get back to sorting through the four boxes of 0-3 month clothes.

I bid you adieu.

1.  Sounds of loud gum chewing RIGHT next to my ear
2.  Not having enough time to blog (how did I used to do it?)
3.  A 2-year-old who repeats the same question over 50 times in a row and expects the exact same answer in a friendly tone of voice from you each time or he goes all ape shit on you
4.  That poop really, really stinks.  I mean, it seriously smells extremely bad and frankly, I’m sick of it.
5.  A 6-year-old who licks his fingers at the dinner table and also wipes them on his clothes
6. The lack of silver-leaf nightstands available to the general public
7.  The fact that I lost both pairs of glasses and have to go get some new ones
8.  The smell of Abercrombie & Fitch’s cologne that they pipe through their a/c system.  It makes me want to throw up when I’m at the mall, and also anytime I hug my kids for two days afterwards if they went to the mall and walked anywhere near the store
9.   That it’s 3:15 in the afternoon and the sun is already setting
10.  That I have one funny post and one interesting one to write but instead I wrote this one

The really lame thing about this list is that I just read my friend’s blog post about what it’s like to be slowly going blind and she has some super real reasons to be cranky, but I’m pretty sure I am crankier than her right now over these incredibly stupid things.

There.  I hope now you’re cranky too.

I’d like to publicly thank my oldest sister who read my blog post about how I wished my pantry were clean so my nesting instinct could be fulfilled, but I didn’t feel like cleaning it myself.  She made a convincing argument over the phone that she was bored out of her mind and her boredom could only be cured by cleaning someone else’s pantry while the someone else held her adorable four-month-old baby.  That was incredible!

But even without the pantry to worry about, I am kind of panicking about Guglielmo’s pending birth and all the things that need to get done before he comes.  Kevin and I have a lot of conversations like this lately:

Me: We’re going to spend all weekend getting ready for Baby.  We need to buy sheer curtains for the master bedroom, alphabetize the spice cupboard, and repurpose our old rain gutters as cable management tools.  Got it?
Kevin: Whatever.  I’m heading out to buy a car seat and some newborn diapers.
Me:  What?  What on earth does that have to do with anything?

If only I could be as realistic and practical as my friend who, when asked if she was ready for her baby to be born, answered, “I have boobs and onesies.  What else do I need?”

But still.  I’d love to see her spice cupboard.

Yesterday I went for a walk and sent Kevin to the store to buy some  HOLY CHEESESTEAKS WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A BABY IN  A MONTH necessities.  He came back with that…and also this:

Kevin told Rocco that all he has to do is poop on the toilet once—ONCE—and he can get this big, huge, obnoxious, gigantic train set.  It will go so nicely with our four other big, huge, obnoxious, gigantic train sets.

This comes two weeks after Christmas, after having filled up our biggest-size recycling can three times with toy boxes and toy packaging.  After a Christmas where our two kids got more presents collectively than me and my four siblings ever got at any one Christmas—from the looks of our house, even more presents than we got at all Christmases ever.

This comes after spending a week finding old toys and books to give to Goodwill so we have room for the new toys.  The house is still stuffed to the max with junk that barely gets played with, and plus we have to make more room for all the gear that comes with having a baby—bassinet, swing, toys, baby bathtub, play mat, high chair, etc. etc.

So.  I told myself maybe, maybe I would forgive my husband if his plan worked—if Rocco magically started pooping on the toilet and we all lived happily ever after the end. 

Rocco walked all over the house yesterday morning, hysterical because he wanted to go poop but didn’t have any poop to do, and then at 1PM he went to the bathroom and squeezed this out.

If one little chocolate chip of a poop earns one living room-sized train set, I don’t know what Kevin’s going to get him for his first full-blown toilet poop.

Probably all of Disneyland.