Labor?

It appears I might have gone into labor beginning yesterday morning. That's right, for lack of a less gross way to say it, and to embrace all that is the human body, Friday morning I "passed the plug." That's right, I found the equivalent of a loogie in my underwear. We, of course, had to Google this, just to be sure we were seeing what we thought we were seeing. It got me wondering what people did before the era of the Internet ...?

Anyway, I went to work as planned, and basically told everyone that I didn't think I was gonna make it through the end of the month, save for gory details. Alex and I spent our Friday night at Home Depot. And you would have thought I'd be the emotional basket case, but quite the opposite. I was married to both Jekyll and Hyde last night. He zoomed back and forth between sweet, thoughtful, angry and inconsolable, and back to apologetic. I was a bit flabbergasted, to tell you the truth, and found myself giggling uncontrollably at his erratic behavior. Seems something in my own hormonal makeup was triggered, because I then began to laugh maniacally for a minute at a time, followed, without pause, by hysterical sobbing. The best part was that Alex and I were sitting in the Depot parking lot, with a giant piece of melamine separating us so we couldn't even see or touch each other. It's probably one of those "had to be there" moments that we will likely both remember well.

And this morning started out a bit strange again. I had awful dreams about bleeding out and not being able to get ahold of Alex or my doula. But I also had these subconscious inklings of contractions. Turns out, my water must have broken in the middle of the night. I had a little meltdown to follow.

"stuff keeps coming out of me and I'm not telling it to ... I don't want the baby to fall into the toilet ... I'm terrified ... What if this is the real thing ... What if it's not ..." I sobbed and sobbed, punum and all.

Alex, back to his sweet old self, stroked my hair and scratched my back while I listed all the things that could go wrong from here. To distract myself, I think I will manically clean the house, do laundry, and prepare for baby's impending (early arrival).