Turns out we fit in well with crazy.

A few years ago I had it in my mind that people who used midwives instead of doctors were a little odd.  And people who had their babies at home were all crazy.

Right now I’m waiting at my midwife’s office for my 36 week appointment. We’ll be having this 8th baby at home here in the next month or so.

I figured I’d give you a little bit of info on what we’re doing and why. You know, just in case you’re curious.
I actually don’t get all that much inquiry about it.  Probably because everybody we know has just assumed we’re crazy and that answers all questions.

They’re right, I’m sure.

But still.  I’m going to lay it all out for you anyway since some of you have asked about it in recent days.

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Um… I’m no longer at my appointment.  I’m home, but barely.  Traffic is freakish and I’m sure half the drivers on the road today were out for blood.  My blood.

[here is where i kiss the ground and thank God for safe passage home]

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We didn’t start off this pregnancy planning a home birth. Like I said, home birthers are were all nuts.

So, how did we find ourselves on the crazy train, you ask? Or maybe you didn’t ask.  Whatever.

When we moved to where we live now and were searching for an OB  for this current pregnancy, we could find not one OB doctor who would agree to give me a little leeway with the so called ”rules”.  I wasn’t asking for anything illegal or insane, but none of the OBs would see me without me agreeing to all the so-called optionals. This has never been a problem before so I was really wowed that nobody would work with me.

One doctor, after me not allowing her to do a complete physical on me so she could know me well enough to deliver my baby safely (which were her exact words), had had it UPTOHERE with me and said, You may just want to think about having an unassisted home birth.  That’s the only way you’re going to get what you’re asking for without paying thousands of dollars.

She informed me that, really, my only option in this area was to follow the rules. Her rules. 

Oh. Really.

I thanked her kindly for her advice and promptly left her office.

When I got home I lamented to my dear husband that I was 21 weeks pregnant and without a doctor.  Thus started our search for a midwife.

Still not planning a home birth.
Still not sure a midwife would be the right way to go.
Still not sure about anything…

I met with Sharon.  We talked.  I asked questions. Turned out Tricare did cover the majority of her midwifery services (though that didn’t last long).  I told her we were interested in having our baby at her birthing center.  She gave me her personal information so my husband could call her with questions about a possible home birth - we’d be excellent candidates.

Suddenly I found myself really wanting to have this baby here at home. Though I doubted Ryan would be cool with it.

I talked with him about it, shared my new information and thoughts with a subdued attitude, and was surprised when a few days later he said, Okay.  Let’s just do this thing here.

Here meaning in our home.

And now you know how easily crazy can happen.

There comes a time in every pregnant lady’s life when she just wants to have the baby already.

I’m there.
I’m so totally there.

I’m not sure I’ve blogged about this with my other babies. I know in my head that patience is key and the baby will arrive precisely when he (or she) intends. I like to portray myself as having this kind of euphoric peaceful patience.

But…

As it turns out, I’m just like every other tired and achy pregnant woman who just wants to remember what wearing normal clothes feels like again.

I’m 8 months pregnant now and in less than a week will be considered full term. That means that I can have this baby at any time, right?

Um, no. It doesn’t quite work that way, as we all know.

What 37 weeks means is I’ll start this ridiculous thought process in which I will easily convince myself that every little ache and pain is labor.
It’ll be time at least 18 times before it really is time.
And it doesn’t matter what anybody says. I’ll be sure that just believing it’s real labor will make it so.

Oh my goodness, please say I’m not the only pregant lady with these end of pregnancy insanity issues.

It’s annoying that I know this impatient, half crazy me is on her (my?) way and I’ve found no way to stop her (or me?).

Is there an herb I can take or tea I can drink for this sort of impatient madness?

Anybody?
Anybody?

My record for the number of comments on a single post is 33. Not including giveaways, of course.

I have a post I wrote yesterday that has 32 comments as of right now.  And I’ll be honest and say I’m getting all excited.

I admit to having a bit of a comment obsession. I don’t know why.  I just do.
On another blog I read the author mentioned closing her comments for a little while.

My first thought was, why blog then?

Then my second thought was, Wait, that first thought makes me kinda seem a little self absorbed.

Then my third thought was, But still, why blog?

Yes.  I’m a total mess.

Anyway…
Maybe nothing will happen. 
Maybe it’s all over. 
Maybe there is nothing more to say on that particular post subject.

But, maybe, just maybe there will be two more comments.  Maybe that post will make We Are Culbertsons history.

Just maybe.

Actually, she thought that last one was pretty good except the color is weird and it’s blurry.

I took a bunch more and she actually found a few she did like. So, I got to play hero for a few minutes.

Or maybe hero is too strong a word to use here.  More like, super nice mom who at least tried.

Around here the title hero is reserved for things like buying a pack of bendy straws at the grocery store.

Ryan took Kait out to a movie the other night and on his way home bought me these.

And some Tylenol.

I heart yellow flowers.

Isn’t my man just awesome?!?!

Yes.  You should be jealous.

But that’s not Christian so don’t.

Photo credits go to Kait

My husband took me out to dinner tonight because he’s awesome like that. I had chips and spinach dip for an appetizer and couldn’t even take one bite of my cheeseburger.

Then, as we were leaving Ryan was carrying my drink for me. I joked, be careful not to drop that.
Turns out Ryan is just like some all of our kids.
He dropped my drink.
I laughed really good. Stopped laughing, then started laughing again. It was awesome.

But there was also this: This is a picture of what was on the car parked in front of us.

I believe in the right for that person to have that stupid magnetic ribbon on the back of their car, and even the right to pursue such a career.
However, I also believe I have the right to hate it.

And I do.
Hate it.
Support Strippers? Really?

Give me one good reason why.

As if there isn’t enough of that already. We’re in a recession already, people. Don’t too many family’s much needed dollars already go down the drain for stuff like this?
Wouldn’t, support your families be better than support some addiction that robs otherwise strong families of peace, money, and healthy, trusting marriages?

I could go into detail about how much I hate this stuff but this is a mostly G rated blog.

So I’ll stop my little rant here and move on…

Kait.

Kait, Kait, Kait.

[shaking head slowly]

My daughter has these books she has to read so I suggested that she could just read them outloud to me while I’m in labor. 

Her response was, You mean while all that screaming is going on?

It would seem that I’ve have done wrong by my only daughter.  I have had seven kids and my oldest child hasn’t the foggiest idea about the truth of labor and delivery.  I explained to her that I have never screamed during labor. That her idea about what’s going to happen just isn’t realistic.

Then she said, Well, you have to remember that my only experience with this kind of stuff is what I’ve seen in movies where the women don’t even get any pain medicine.

[And I'm shaking my head again]

This homebirth experience my husband and I have chosen is going to be very, very good for her I think.

The baby is due 4 weeks from today.  And, um, excuse me Houston?  There is a problem over here.

My husband and I cannot agree on what to name her if she is, in fact, a her. Which we don’t know.

I’ve always said that since I have pretty much had final say on our boys’ names (I’d like to note – with Ryan’s approval) that he gets to name the girls.

Way wrong thing to say. 

It would appear that although my husband and I both believe in the same things, feel the same way about having and raising children, church, faith, life, etc…  we just do. not. agree. on baby girl names.

Boys names? Sure. We’ve got a giant bag of them. If this baby is a boy his name will probably be Henry James.  We both liked Huck, too, but for some reason it just doesn’t seem to fit.

However, for a girl he would like to name her Helen Lucille Aileen.  Helen after a couple grandmothers, which is a mighty sweet gesture.  But I don’t like the name Helen for my little girl.  I really like Lucy and I love Aileen.  But not Helen.

I’ve tried to like the name Helen.  Really tried.  I’ve imagined a little girl with bouncy pigtales who answers when I call Helen, but I just can’t make myself like that name.

I’ve tried convincing him to use it as a middle name.  Or, trying a variation like Helaina.

But no.

[sigh]

I have to keep in mind that we’re most likely having a boy. The last 6 kids have all been boys. And we have pretty much both agreed on what our boys’ names should be.  In fact, the only boys name we’ve used that  we didn’t immediately agree on was Gabriel.  And that was just at first. He liked Gabe’s name just fine well before he was born.

But if we do have a girl and her name ends up being Helen?

I just don’t know…

My husband and I decided a few months ago to begin the search for a new laptop. And from that moment on my current HP laptop started the agonizing process of dying off in small pieces.

How does it know?

We’ve had issues with this laptop since about exactly a year to the day after we purchased it to replace the perfectly working 2 year old Dell the TSA destroyed cause they thought my laptop was maybe a stowaway suicide bomber or something. I don’t really know. To me it just looked like a regular old laptop. But to the TSA, with their way hightech x-ray eyes…
Who knows, maybe my Dell really was planning something. I guess I can’t really know for sure. I’m just sayin’. 
Anyway, we didn’t have to pay for this one so that was nice.  But that was all that was nice about it.

Just at a year of age, which is like 72 years in HP laptop years, it started overheating like crazy.  We had a cooling thingy under it, which it burned up, and have since bought an even better cooling thingy that we keep under it.  It still overheats.  Overheats to the point that if I want to put it in my lap, because, you know, it’s a laptop, I have to feel the bottom of it first to make sure it’s cool enough so it doesn’t give me good burn.

HP pretends like this is not a problem, outa sight outa mind, but if you do a little Googlin’ you’ll find that almost all HP laptops have this exact same issue.  Especially the Pavilion models.
One lady’s laptop even caught on fire.

Why hasn’t there been a class action lawsuit about this yet? Or maybe there is one in the works.  I don’t know.  I’m not a sue-happy sort of person. But if there was a lawsuit going on somewhere…

Anyway, if you have a computer that likes to turn up the heat, you probably already know the overheating eventually burns up everything inside your computer.  First, my cool little buttons across the top stopped working.  Bummer, I used them a lot, but it was nothing I cried about.  Then it was my DVD drive.  In the fall that stopped working. Annoying, but nothing I can’t live without.  Plus, we figured it’s replaceable for fairly cheap if we ever wanted to get a new one for this laptop to burn up.

And now, since we mentioned it being time to start searching for a new one, everything else has started making it’s way to computer heaven. No, computer hell.  Or maybe it’s purgatory wherever computer parts go when they die.  My wifi, my USB ports, my scroll bar, my up and down keys, my left side shift key, etc…  Everything is temperamental. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they stick.
And sometimes my computer screen just goes black and I have to shut the thing down in order to get everything back up again.

I’ve learned to save, and save often.

Ugh.

So, what I’m telling you is that if you ever decide to replace your computer keep it on the down low until the day you bring your new baby home.  Because as soon as your current computer realizes he’s being replaced sometime in the future, he will no longer have any reason to live.

So he will die.

And it will be an extremely annoying process to watch.

Oh, and don’t, under any circumstances, no matter how good the deal is, buy an HP.  You’ll spend more money replacing burnt up parts and buying cooling thingies than you would have if you  just bought a more expensive, less heat-happy computer from the beginning.

You know that old saying that goes something like but maybe not exactly, whenever you point your finger at somebody you’ll often find 2 fingers pointing right back at you?

Yeah that one.

[sigh]

Last night I wrote a particularly whiny little post about the ridiculous noises that come from the back half of my neighborhood that I didn’t publish because after I reread it I realized that, man, lady, you are being ridiculously whiny tonight.

In that post I thoroughly complained about the late night suped up Honda Civic car revving. The late night working on dirt bikes. The speed drivers who take our tight corners at 50 mph when children are playing outside (can I say again that I love living in a cul-de-sac?). The teenagers who walk down the middle of the street because they own it and are quite slow to get out of your way when you’re driving by to prove to you that they own it.

The people who leave their barkety dogs outside when they’re not home or just don’t care to bring the noisy mutts in when they chain-bark.

Yes. I complained about loud dogs left outside.

We went to church today as we do every Sunday.
And when we got home from church about 4 hours later I realized that we…
yes, we
us
our family
had left our dogs outside the entire morning.
This wouldn’t be bad if it were just big dog.  But little dog was left out too, which meant they had each other to play off of. It’s kinda like a game of doggy see, doggy do.

I know that’s supposed to be monkeys.  But it works for our dogs so just go with it.

So, they were accidentally left out.  And when our dogs get left outside alone they will bark at the back door to be let in.

Then, if they get really bored, which they always do when left outside together for more than 7 1/2 minutes, they will bark at the back fence to see if any other dogs have been left out and want to talk. Or coordinate an escape.  Or something similar.

Then, when they are done with that they will bark just to hear themselves barking because that’s fun too.

Even though nobody has complained, I can assume with a large degree of certainty that while we were gone our dogs did, in fact, become the barkety little dogs I was complaining about in last night’s post that I didn’t publish.

And even though I didn’t publish that post, I’m still feeling those two fingers pointing back at me.  And they have laser beams on their tips.  And the laser beams burn.

There is a moral to this story that we can all take away from this. 

Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

No really, that’s not it.  Although I’m sure that’s an excellent moral, I don’t even know what it means. Though now I guess I’ll need to go do some one-on-one with my personal Google consultant.

However, there is a moral here and if you aren’t getting it just remember this:
Never leave any barking dogs outside when you’re gone from your home because in the end you might get blasted by burning laser beams.

At least that’s been my experience.