The Waiting Game

Normally I pride myself on my patience...that is, my outward patience. I have decided that I'm actually not a patient person but I'm good at faking it most days. Like when I'm at the grocery store and the clerk decides to inspect and comment on each item I place on the belt....What I'm not good at faking is patience over Anjuli's impending arrival. If I knew a day...I could patiently wait, right? But each day starts with,"Boy, I feel terrible" or "Boy, I feel great!".....followed by,"What if this is it?" I've had a lot of those lately and I think Lou is more than humanly patient because he gets to listen to all my hormone crazed reasoning over why or why not I'm in early labor, pre-labor, maybe going to have labor???? pretty much throughout each day, at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Due date is Wednesday the 3rd, today is April 1st and I've been having contractions throughout the day, but not regularly. This makes me excited! My friend Lindsay and I walked this morning (she's 3 weeks behind me in her pregnancy) for 2 miles and I was psyched because I ached from back to front and back again...only time in my life that I get excited about hurting so badly! No baby in sight yet...but the night is young, haha! When I saw the doctor 2 weeks ago I was a centimeter dilated and 50% effaced but my next appointment is Wednesday and I feel like she's been moving lower and lower down each day. She was head down and snugly planted but you'd never guess that from the kicking and acrobatics that go on non-stop!
Last week we got the "slate" with the list of next duty stations after graduation. Lou's graduation from Military Intelligence Captains Career Course is May 31st and the slate basically gives the students 20-30 different assignment possibilities at various forts in the US and overseas. You choose your "top ten" choices and explain why you're requesting them in the paperwork submitted to the branch manager. Just because you want a location doesn't guarantee that you will be assigned there....or even anywhere in your top ten. It really depends on the army's needs and your perceived skills....plus some random who knows what thrown in to make it interesting, lol. Our slate was pretty dismal by most standards....with overseas assignments being all in Korea. The CONUS (continental united states) stations ranged from Ft. Drum in NY to Ft. Richardson in AK! We were supposed to hear back about our assignment on Friday, but since it was Good Friday no ones' hopes were too high. The army tends to give out information that changes from one briefing to the next.....and the only constant in our lives is that nothing is constant. :) Instead, the assignments came out today and we will be staying at Fort Huachuca until December! Lou had requested a class after graduation in order to allow for Anjuli to be older during our next move...and they assigned him to a Military Counter Intelligence course which runs from July-December 2013. This will be good for his resume and career goals, but it will mean a very WARM summer for us. :) Fortunately, unlike Kentucky the humidity is next to nil so it will probably feel cooler than summer 2012 was! So, what this means as far as our next assignment??? We probably won't know where we're headed next until November. And that's ok.
So....that's the latest on our little family..for tonight. Tomorrow there might be big news, but until then....... we wait. :)
Update: this is the next day (Tuesday)... Well, today was almost an exact opposite of yesterday. I woke up with plans to walk, go to Bible study and clean out the refrigerator in prep for Lou's weekly shopping trip. Its been great to make a list and hand it over, knowing that he will be back in less than an hour from the commissary. Man on a mission, let me tell you! Instead, I barely climbed out of bed in time to throw together breakfast, began crying at the breakfast table, and ended up spending most of my morning lying in a lawn chair in our enclosed courtyard, trying to sleep through contractions. Lou's idea...he knows how much I love the sun and usually its a winner. Today everything hurt so much and I was so exhausted I couldn't focus on even the basics. I ended up showering and crawling back into bed at 11am, only to wake up at 5:30 with stronger contractions. I also had this overwhelming craving for fried chicken, even though I know,"Eat light if you think you're in labor" is one of the 5 basic labor rules. Lou ran out to Burger King, which is less than 3 blocks away and brought back those "crazy bad for you" but delicious chicken strips, fries and a coke. I don't know if it was a mixture of hormones and pain from contractions or just pure hunger after not having eaten today, but I was a hysterical mess tonight. Sobbing about the house being dirty, being in pain, not being able to eat without getting nauseated, not having done anything all day, not having any makeup on or my hair fixed, failing to answer friends' text messages....you name it, I cried about it. I'm so blessed to have Lou here for me, in spite of my craziness he holds me and assures me that he loves me just the same...and that can do a lot for a pregnant woman's morale. :) That and chicken from Burger King. These contractions have been frustrating because I can't seem to time them. There's no tidy "oh, its starting" moment, only a "I can't breathe" feeling at some point followed by "wait a minute, I can breathe again" realization later on. I can't tell by pressing my abdomen because (not to brag) the doctor affirmed my conviction that I have really hard abdominal muscles in general...so they always feel hard. Before I got pregnant my stomach was the flat part of my body, nice and toned unlike most of the rest of me, though through no virtue or dedicated exercises of my own. Now, it remains rock hard even though its 12" wider than it was pre-pregnancy. All this to say that I spent most of tonight walking back and forth through the house, deep breathing, and then at 10pm was seized with an urgent need to clean the bathrooms and mop the floors. And yes, I did it. And then the contractions stopped. So.....the bathrooms look sparkling clean now, which is nice because part of my crying session was related to our staying in this house for another 8 months.  It IS a good thing to be staying until December, but the realities of the old housing aren't glamorous. There's no regulation of heat/cold, no insulation, the paint is 15-20 layers' thick with peeling at every seam/doorway/window, the floors are stained and chipped plastic tile, impossible to keep clean, all the exterior walls are concrete and make decorating a challenge, and the cockroaches in Arizona are drain roaches, which means that unless you pour bleach down all the drains and close them each night....you're going to see roaches. These aren't insurmountable challenges, but with the door closed to our leaving in June/July for new horizons and a new duty station, today they seemed so.
Anyway friends, I know you have been wondering and emailing about Baby Girl...so I thought I'd update the blog before the big event occurred, just to let you know it hasn't happened yet! Lord willing, we'll be holding Anjuli by the end of this week as I'm very ready to meet her and also be un-pregnant. :)
Love,
Kim