Week 33: Behind!

32 weeks, 4 days.

No, the title does not refer to my behind, which, as always, is enormous. E-nor-mous. As Bridget Jones would put it, it is a bottom the size of Brazil (but, I should add, not as festive).

But I am not here to discuss my nethermost quarters.

No, no, it’s that I am behind – behind in comment responses, behind in e-mails, behind in organizing the house, behind in laundry, behind in reading news and blogs… behind behind behind.

With laundry I’m close to caught up after washing a buttload of baby clothes to put away. Laundry here at Haus Grothoff takes longer than it does for most of you, mostly because we do not, by design, have a dryer. This is not because we’re in abject poverty, but rather because we live in Denver, where especially in winter, your clothes dry in hours if left on the line/rack, so why spend the money for the dryer and energy and help ruin the environment in the process? Also, it’s free humidification of the house, which is lovely. But this also means that given that we only have so much rack/line space, I can only do a load or two in a day, so getting behind can be a bad thing.

Outside of the laundry, I’m starting to get a bunch of stuff put away and get the house under control, but there’s still so much to do.

This becomes harder and harder as Small Monster gets bigger – he’s apparently holding raves in my belly early in the mornings, and in the mid-afternoons, and just before bed, and if I eat vegetable pot pies, and if there’s music on TV or my computer, and when I stroke my belly and sing, and and… I’ve been looking for the flyers advertising these raves around campus, but no such luck:

In Utero Productions Presents:

HiccupFest 2007, Featuring DJ Small Monster!
Location: Mama Monster’s Belly!
One (cramped) room of Techno Action with special appearance by The Cheat!
Friday, October 19th: $10 before the 4 am bathroom break, $15 after.

Clearly Small Monster already has a handle on his mama (as if the cute ultrasound pic hadn’t made that clear already *gush gush gush*). And he’s growing lots, so his mama is tired. Add to that the FFD™ (the new way I’ll refer to the Frickin’ Family Drama™ from here on out, although it should be noted that I use a different word than “Frickin”, thankyouverymuch) and my week of painful intestinal chaos which caused me to get a little behind in my coursework (caught up now!) and a little behind in being a normal human being, and you have a very frazzled and worn-out Soon-to-be-Mama Monster.

I suppose I should get used to it – all of the mamas I know have let me know this frazzled worn-out behind on everything state is par for the mama course, and I suppose it’s probably a bit like grad school: you walk in knowing you’re already behind the first day. But I’d still like to get some things in order here, because God knows I won’t have time in a few weeks. Oh, and did I mention that I’m only 4 ½ weeks from full term??? Now, given my luck, he’ll go to his latest possible birth date – 9 ½ weeks from now (no, Mickey Rourke is not involved) – but still… we could have a Small Monster here in one short month. I so need to finish those curtains for our room, or the kid will never sleep (stoopid bright Colorado sun… ).

Oh, yeah, and then there’s NaNoWriMo in November… which is my current excuse for trying to hustle and get things done before November 1^st. The real reason, of course, is that I’m getting too big to do most of this stuff (although amazingly, I can still run across the street and have the energy to yell at the evil woman in the SUV who almost backed over me in the crosswalk…) and I really want some time to rest up before the little one comes. (Plus, my sister-in-law is coming out for Christmas, and the last thing I want to be doing is trying to clean house with a newborn!!!)

So anyhow, I’m behind. I probably owe half the people reading this some sort of correspondence, so I’m sorry – I’m trying to get to it!