On being 37 weeks pregnant

Technically speaking I'm not 37 weeks pregnant until tomorrow. But interestingly (so I think) today was filled with questions and comments that led to my unilateral decision that basically I'm 37 weeks pregnant now. For those of you that have been paying attention, you'll remember the significance of hitting 37 weeks. For those of you (like me) that need a reminder it is at this point that the potential birth of the child is no longer considered premature.

Of course, the past week has been filled with reassurances that most first pregnancies hit the 41-42 week mark no problem. In fact, until today, almost every birth story I had heard involving a first pregnancy had also involved threats of induction (ie. pregnancy gone long). Even the doctor calmly smiled and confirmed that yes, first pregnancies tend to go past 40 weeks, she saw no reason why ours wouldn't, and so we should settle in for the long haul.

Today, oh today, all that changed. With no prodding whatsoever I got no less than three stories of women delivering their first child before 40 weeks and two of them at (gasp!) 37 weeks. Um. Yeah. That's this week. This has also been accompanied by an interesting shift in belly comments - suddenly I'm "huge", "ready to pop", "bigger every day!", etc. One person even decided that I'd "dropped", which I would argue against, but there it is.

But, the reality is I'm more likely to deliver later, rather than sooner. Which basically means that I have up to 5 long weeks ahead of me, with each day a new wave of anticipation, fear, excitement, and the realization that more than half our house is in complete disarray at this point.*

* disarray - On Saturday evening, with dinner plans canceled, Zach and I debated going to a movie, but instead decided to... paint our living room. Now, to our credit (or not), we had decided to do this months ago. In fact, we had already bought the paint and the gear but had never gotten around to the actual painting. So, we figured, why not just do it now? Except now the living room is torn apart, the "dining" room is a combination of living room furniture and baby gear that we started to sort through, and the 2nd bed room (aka kid's room?) is full of unsorted baby gear. Now would be an excellent time to deliver.