the time has come

It is time to have this baby, folks. I am dead certain.

Would you like to know how I am so certain?

It's not because I am 37 weeks along and therefore considered by obstetrical medical professionals to be "full term" and "ready to go at any time".

It's not because I'm the possessor of a cervix that is both ideally soft (thank you, evening primrose oil!) and already 2cm dilated AND feeling the pressure of the head of a full-term baby pressing on it via gravity.

It's not because Jason and I have all the material essentials (crib, car seat, diapers, food supply, clothes), as well as a stash of wanted "non-essentials" (like a "piddle pad"), in place and ready to go for this baby.

It's not because I've wanted to be a mom as long as I can possibly remember, and the anticipation of being so close is killing me.

It's not even because of the massive Belly That Cannot Be Contained, along with its best friends Marshmallow Feet, Cankle-licious, Eye Luggage, and the DoubleLeak Twins.

No, it's none of those things, really. Here's how I know - picture this:

If you've read this blog in the past month or so - or talked to me in person - you are probably well aware of my well-documented struggles with bugs in my house. Specifically, bugs of the roach kind. They came out in droves to welcome us when we first moved in. We fought back. They decided to get more personal and make physical body-to-body contact in some extremely memorable, horrifying ways. We fought back yet again, even roasting one alive at one point. They re-emerged. We fought back. Our pest control dude made a few repeat visits**, armed with sprays and traps and gooey bait stuff.

And then it seemed they were gone. They have been gone, for the most part. In the past 2-3 weeks, we've seen maybe one or two roaches, usually half-dead already, located near a doorway or some other obvious entry point, nowhere near any place we keep food, definitely nowhere near my head, and guarded over very suspiciously by our cat (whose pitiful howls alert us to the bug in the first place).

A bug-free house.

In the past few days, however, I've suddenly seen an inordinate amount of them... but in a much different way. First, they are ALL dead. No movement, not even a struggling tentacle or wiggle. Second, they aren't the roaches I'm used to seeing, the huge palmetto bugs that are as large as a retiree's Cadillac and fly like the devil's minions when provoked. No, these roaches are the ones we Floridians make fun of more northern folk for getting upset about, the bugs the size of your pinky fingertip that send them into histrionics but make us stay perfectly calm and instead break out into a story that starts with, "Let me tell you about the roaches WE have..." Third, they all appeared at once. It seems like I woke up one morning, and the whole lot of them were scattered about the house, still and quiet in their smallness.

It was like some sort of massive roach death wave, a huge group suicide, and really, the whole thing just smacked of David Koresh and white Nikes and drug-laced Kool-Aid. Like there was nothing left to live for in this world, that resistance to those humans was futile and pointless, and the only solution was to just end it all, all together, all at once.

And do you know, I actually felt BAD for them. I felt bad that I had possibly caused bugs any sort of despair, bad that I must have convinced creatures genetically programmed to survive and persist at all costs to just give up.

Yes, that's right. I felt bad for roaches.

And THAT, my friends, is how I know it's time to give birth and be done with this pregnancy, when I am shedding tears and wasting emotional energy on bugs I have fought so hard to get rid of.

That is all.


**Note: if you live in the Central Florida area and need to get rid of bugs, our pest control dude is the bomb (no pun intended), being friendly, courteous, highly professional, AND most effective. Even though he's a one-man deal, there were at least two occasions when he came out the same day or only a day or two thereafter when we called him, frantic and freaking out about the bugs we'd encountered. He did a couple of repeat sprays/baits at no extra charge, took tons of time to answer our questions, and really worked with our crazy schedules... AND showed up almost to the minute when he said he would, not sometime randomly in an 8-hour window. Roaches be gone. Ty Fischer of Magic Pest Control - my hero.