Freedom to speak our minds.

Freedom to marry who we choose.

Freedom to choose for our own bodies.

Yes, we are a flawed nation. Deeply divided and the gap is widening. But there are very few places in the world where, once every four years, a peaceful coup d’etat, led by the majority, overturns the government.

I’ve lived in another country.

And I choose this one, warts and all.

Happy July 4th. Enjoy your freedoms today.

My midwife called me 30 minutes before my appointment yesterday morning.

I had one leg in my shorts and the other in the air, The Poo was yelling about wanting to paint, and I had to skip my shower because we were running late.

Did I mention it was 8:45 a.m.?

She asked me if the perinatologist had called yet, about putting me on insulin. I said no, and saying I was annoyed that she was asking me this question when I was going to see her in a half-hour is putting it mildly.

Then she said this:

“Your due date is August 15, right?”

“Umm, yesssss,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, the doc has to go out of town from the seventh to the ninth,” she said.

“Yeah, so?”

“So we have to reschedule your c-section.”

I dropped my toothbrush in the sink and started to pay attention.

Turns out my doc - who I’ve seen exactly once and who gave me contradictory information about my diabetes - has to be out of town for a deposition.

If there are two words in the English language that don’t go together when you are six weeks from having your belly sliced open to extract your child, they are “OB” and “deposition.”

My sister assures me that all doctors get sued, but this is combined with the fact that this afternoon a trusted friend and local doula told me my midwife hates her job because she doesn’t enjoy working for “an insane person.”

Um? That insane person?

THAT IS MY DOCTOR. THE ONE WHO IS ALSO BEING SUED.

I probably over-reacted, but I was pissed and I told my midwife exactly that at my appointment. I wanted that date (08-08-08) and we have five people coming into town for the birth.

And honestly? This has been a hard pregnancy for me. The diabeetus has been tough, and now I am starting to throw ketones, which means I am basically starving myself.

I am very anemic and if my iron falls another another decimal, I’m look at a post-surgery transfusion.

I have a pain in my upper right chest that is excruciating. I can’t walk because my hooha hurts. I can’t breathe, or sleep or even eat a fucking slice of watermelon without getting heartburn so bad it makes me want to cry.

Today I had to buy EXTRA LARGE SHORTS for my EXTRA LARGE ASS.

I’m D-O-N-E. I want this pregnancy over sooner rather than later. Granted, they only want to push my date forward to the 11th, but still.

That is two more days of misery.

More than that, though, is that I am feeling out of control.

I don’t want to have this baby so far from home. In the next 18 months we will adjust to being a family of four, my husband will have to finish his dissertation, and we will have to put our house for sale and move.

Again. Moving here was not my decision, not by a long shot. My husband chose this school, and so we had to live in this town. I was his hostage to fortune.

He’ll tell you that if the opportunity came for me to move somewhere for my dreams, he would drop everything and we’d go. That’s very convenient for him to say, because, frankly, the odds of me landing a job at The New York Times or The Boston Globe ended the day I tendered my resignation from the small-town newspaper I worked at for five years.

And you know what? We have to go where the job is, whether that is back home, Alaska, North Dakota, Michigan, L.A., or Bumblefuck, Georgia.

The one thing, the one single thing I was able to control was the date of my c-section.

I know that sounds so silly. However, I have had enough therapy am self-aware enough to know that, in the end, I feel like I need to be able to control something, just this one little thing.

I can’t even have that.

My midwife is wonderful, and she asked the doctor’s secretary to call the lawyer and try to re-arrange the date of the deposition. She listened to me rant, didn’t laugh when I got teary, and made sure I felt like she understood that I was disappointed, and, most important, why I was disappointed.

So it’s looking like the 11th, instead of my hoped-for lucky day.

Oh, well. Silver lining? Maybe my FIL won’t be able to make it.

The Poo has entered what may very well be my least-favorite phase.

The crying phase.

Every time she commits an infraction and I reprimand her - however gently - she bursts into loud, wailing sobs before I can even finish my sentence.

Yesterday she demanded that we turn the TV on for her, quite rudely. Her manners are apparently on an extended vacation these days, and her umpteenth sassy comment of the day finally drew our stern reactions.

I calmly tried to tell her that nice little girls ask for things they want politely, and she started to cry and scream.

“I DID ask nicely!” she screamed, arms stretched out for a hug. “PLEASE, MOMMY, DON’T YELL AT ME!”

The only person in the room yelling was her.

Click Here To Read The Rest …

I had a lovely post planned for today, an essay about the very few days left in The Poo’s life as an only child.

Instead, all I can think about is sleep.

Sleeeeeeeep.

Delightful, forbidden sleep.

You see, sleep has deserted me. Last night I went to be at 11 p.m. and I was STILL AWAKE at 4 a.m. this morning. Try as I might, I could not find a comfortable position.

Then my pants were bugging me. So I took them off.

My poor, long-suffering husband woke up briefly to note my lower half’s nudity in drowsy surprise. He hasn’t seen that area in many a moon.

I wrapped my hips around my huge pregnancy pillow and squeezed my eyes shut, praying for peaceful oblivian.

Then The Poo screamed from her bed.

Driving home from Wal-Mart this morning with The Poo’s summer-camp snack for tomorrow rattling around in the cargo bay of my minivan, I watched the suburban landscape roll by.

Houses rose up out of the corn fields with tiresome similarity and I opened my back door to see markers and crayons all over the floor. The sitter and The Poo left them there in their haste to move on to another game.

My day so far has been filled with chores and writing and waiting for carpet installers. I briefly browsed online for baby bottles, as this one-horse ‘burg my husband chose to study in doesn’t even have a decent baby-supply store.

Just for a moment today, I caught an angle of the sun that reminded me of The Cape.

Of hydrangea next to white porch railings and sand in my shoes.

Of the green snake of Herring Run and the scent of salt after dinner.

Of Emack & Bolio’s and the moonrise over Chatham Harbor.

The day of my confinement is tomorrow. After July 1, I am no longer allowed to venture past the borders of my restricted existence in Chambana.

Most days I feel fine, most days I am happy with my role as writer, wife and mother.

But today?

Today I feel as though all the shine has rubbed off, and that, at long last, the worst has happened.

That I have become a total bore.

Hey, y’all.

How’s your Sunday?

I, as I will be for the next three weeks or so, am on my own for the day. Mr. C has qualifying exams this month, and then he goes to Italy for a week, so he is at the office studying and preparing his presentations.

The good news is that my MIL will be here while he is in Bologna. The bad news is that my MIL will be here while he is in Bologna.

I kid, I kid. Seriously, she will help.

In the meantime, I’m fending for myself on the weekends. So today, we’re making a Very Exciting Excursion to the grocery store. Yippee!

*sigh*

I’m also working my ass off, with nine (NINE) columns due between now and Aug. 4. I’m stocking up on Tylenol and babysitter hours, yo.

Speaking of my column, anyone out there gone camping with the kids lately?

My idea of camping is the Holiday Inn, so I’m at kind of a loss as to advice to give to anyone considering a camping trip this summer. So if you have any advice or even tales of woe, shoot me an email and I’ll put your name in lights.

Now I’m off to buy batteries and graham crackers. I know you are so jealous of my glamorous life.

I had a follow-up appointment with the midwife this morning, and while I was discussing the insulin/no insulin question with her (yes to insulin, boo hiss), my cell phone rang.

“Do we have any other eggs?” my husband asked.

“Eggs?” I replied.

“Yeah, eggs. These eggs say they are expired.”

“You can use eggs after their expiration date,” I said. “I used them yesterday, they’re fine.”

We hung up.

I was too entrenched in the conversation with my midwife to ask why in the world Mr. C cared about eggs at 9:30 on a Saturday morning.

You see, by our collective estimation, Mr. C has not made himself something hot to eat since 1997 - the year we met.

Nor has he done laundry since that fateful year.

Why, you ask? That’s easy.

BECAUSE I WAS AN IDIOT.

I was so very, very happy to finally meet someone I really liked that I immediately plied him with homemade meals and offered to do his laundry in the washer and dryer that were in my apartment at the time.

I know, right? Dumbass.

When I got home this morning The Poo and her daddy sat on the floor building a castle, both still in their PJs.

“So what did you need an egg for?” I asked.

My husband smiled his Cheshire-cat smile.

“I made myself an egg,” he said.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I stared stupidly at him. He just grinned.

I dropped it after that exchange, but what he doesn’t know is that his surprising display of competence can - and oh, it will, friends - be used against him.

Oh, yes, yes, it will.

Back when I switched over to self-hosted and Wordpress, I left an awful lot of posts behind at my old place.

I’ve been blogging for almost three years now, and back at the ol’ Blogger blog, there are more than 500 posts chronicling my life with Mr. C and The Poo prior to the launch of my present home here at the new and improved CAC.

I had some time yesterday to escape to the coffeehouse and do some work. I fired off my questions for my expert source for my next column, and then I had a few hours to kill before the babysitter needed to get home.

I took advantage of that time to bring over a bunch of old posts and fill out my archives with essays that I feel really should be part of my history here.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep going with this little project, and I don’t know how easy it will be to keep up the pace of near-daily posting once Shaggy Boy arrives next month.

That said, I can’t see my life with without it. Even if blogging has reached its peak, even if nothing else ever comes of it, writing here has been a lifeline for me.

The ease of publishing without having to jump through hoops, without having to pass some subjective litmus test from some faceless editor, has been a dream come true.

How many times when I was a reporter did I dream of having my very own daily lifestyle column? How many times did I close my eyes and blow out my birthday candles and wish with all my might that I would suddenly become Anna Quindlen?

Anna Quindlen I am not.

But I am Mrs. Chicken.

And that is A-OK with me.

I love writing here, and I especially love being able to flip back through my archives and see how my life has evolved these past three years.

So bear with me, will you? You may see some Vintage CAC pop up in your readers and on Twitter. Go ahead and mark all as read, or come and join me in my time machine. Your choice.

And if you think this is bad, you should see all the crap I have in my basement. Boxes upon boxes of letters, photographs and memories I can’t bear to part with. What can I say? It’s my history.

At least here, I don’t have to dust.

***

PS - I am working on a list of ideas for future columns over at my legit gig. If you have any suggestions about topics regarding family travel that you would like to read about, please email me and let me know.

Cheers!

I am, in a word, wasted.

And not in that good way, like when you’ve had one too many Mike’s Hard Lemonades on the Fourth of July and when you giggle, you pee a little.

In the bad way, like you haven’t slept a full night in 15 weeks and you are so hungry you could eat the face off a monkey.

Can I just say that Week 32 is kicking my ass?

Tuesday night we went to bed at our customary hour of 11 p.m. and read for about 30 minutes. I was exhausted and looked forward to closing my eyes.

Sadly, that never did happen.

All of a sudden I was short of breath, and decided to sleep propped up with two bed pillows plus my giant Boppy pregnancy pillow (which, by the way, I love). Every 10 minutes from that time on I needed to pee, change positions or breathe my way through a painful Braxton-Hicks contraction.

Oh, and don’t forget my new friend, heartburn. We’re like this, heartburn and I.

Wednesday morning found me struggling to breathe, dizzy and with my blood sugar spiking even though the only food I’d ingested was one slice of Weight Watchers wheat bread (gag) and two tablespoons of peanut butter.

So yeah, I did it.

I called my doctor.

They got me in right away and hooked me up to the fetal monitor. Baby moves as he should. Heartbeat as it should be. Blood pressure is good.

The doc came in and told me my sugar readings were terrific overall, and that there was nothing to worry about. She said the shortness of breath is normal when your organs are being squashed by a small human and that I needed to eat more.

“You can’t feel like you are starving yourself,” she said. “Are you hungry a lot?”

I nodded, and the scant two pounds I’ve gained over the last six weeks sealed the deal for her.

If I couldn’t control my sugar with diet, she said, she could give me an oral medication before we even considered insulin.

I heard “you’re fine” and “eat more.”

Then I spontaneously combusted from mortification.

I panicked. I caved into The Pregnant Crazy that threatens to take over the remaining seven weeks of my gestation.

I couldn’t help it.

Feeling ridiculous hooked up to the monitor under the doc’s amused gaze, I bushed and apologized.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I should have known better. But I just didn’t feel right, you know? I was never like this with my first, I -”

She interrupted me.

“The first time, you don’t know what you don’t know,” she said, gently patting my knee. “Call us and come in any time. Really.”

She and the nurse left me to pull my shirt down, gather my things and exit as gracefully as possibly under the circumstances.

I am under strict instructions to eat more (yay!) and come back Saturday to re-evaluate my blood sugar.

So there you have it. I cashed in my “Hysterical Pregnant Woman” token. From here on out, I have to act like a normal person.

It is going to be a very long seven weeks.

Thirty-two weeks and counting