It was an odd day,…

It was an odd day, yesterday. Morning was fine -- did lots of e-mail and other work, picked up plants with puppy, all very nice. We were driving very slowly down some residential streets, so I actually put Ellie's window all the way down and let her hang her head out in the breeze, which she *loved*. Came home, did some more work. Sapna came over with baby Rowan, who is seven-and-a-half months, gorgeous, and a very smiley baby with no stranger fear at all; she was pretty much a perfect angel baby, and actually made me feel much more optimistic about the whole baby thing while she was around. So sweet and giggly and adorable! We ate chocolate rugelach and brownies and drank tea and Rowan played cheerfully in the activity gym that Nilofer had loaned us and Sapna passed on parenting advice, and it was all lovely.

And then they left, and we tried to put up that shelf in the nursery, and somehow I just started falling apart. It wouldn't go up and it wouldn't go up, and we managed to melt one of the plastic anchors and totally contort the other, and we were making bigger and bigger holes in the wall, and I just got so frustrated that a simple task was taking so long, and in the end, we had to go to Home Depot where we picked up some EZ-Anchors which actually worked just fine to attach the shelf to the drywall, so all's well that ends well except that afterwards I ended up sitting in my glider in the nursery and just crying for half an hour, for no reason that I could name.

No good reason, anyway -- there was a vague sense of foreboding, a conviction that there was no way we were going to get a nice, healthy baby in a week. That something was absolutely going to go wrong, either with me or the baby or both. I know this is idiotic, I know that most babies come out just fine these days. But I've had one friend with a severely ill baby (now doing much better, thankfully), and another friend who had a baby die of SIDS, and two babies is not so many, but two out of the twenty or so that my friends have had is too much! Those aren't good odds at all.

I know, I'm being ridiculous. And eventually Kevin got me to go downstairs and curl up under a blanket and watch Heroes and then go to bed, and after a mostly-full-night's sleep, I'm feeling more sane this morning, but still. I don't think I'm going to really relax until she's actually safely out, and I'm holding her, and can count all her fingers and toes. Until then, I guess I just try to keep myself busy...

I got through about half my list yesterday. Here's the new, revised list for today:

• mulch and fertilize downstairs window boxes (9:10 - done)
• pick up paint to fix gouges in nursery walls (11:05 - done)
• spackle gouges (12:00 - done)
• clear stair railing of old electronics, etc. (12:30 - done)
• sell Kevin's car at CarMax (2:15 - done)
• stop at campus to see if any late papers are in my box/office (3:30 - done)
• pick up nursing nightgown, robe, fluffy books for hospital (5:30 - done)
• dinner with David and Beth (6:30 - done)
• pack bag for hospital
• move craft supplies from nursery closet to hall shelving unit
• winnow unread books (too many for shelf, and many are undesired freebies)
• hand in final grades
• paint over gouges