Time to open the betting pool

I can hardly believe it, but our baby is due in one month. One! Month! Excuse me while I hyperventilate for a moment.

I've officially reached the point in my pregnancy where people have started speculating on the date of the Big Day. MB's aunt and uncle are convinced the kid will be here between December 15th and Christmas. The other day my boss said I'd be having the baby in one lunar month, which would place his debut at December 28th. My work friend Julia is predicting a New Year's Eve baby.

Does anyone else want to make a prediction? I'm not sure there will actually be a prize for correctly guessing the date of arrival, but I guess "mad bragging rights" is a prize of a sort.


In other baby news, we're slowly but steadily chipping away at the list of things still left on our registries to buy for the brachiopod's care and feeding, trying to take advantage of sales and coupons as they come our way. I had the day off on Friday and spent the first half of the day running errands. While I was out, I went by Once Upon a Child and found the last piece of furniture we were looking for, a changing table, for only $45 including the pad (which would've cost about $20 to buy separately at Babies R Us). Win! And then last night, Mom and I went and bought a vintage wooden high chair that someone was selling in the paper for only $20. Once we finish restoring the high chair I got from freecycle last year, the child will be able to sleep and eat in two houses!


Because I'm not allowed to roll vacation time over from one calendar year to the next, I saved my remaining vacation days for the very end of the year. My reasoning was, why waste my vacation sitting at home by myself in October (because MB didn't have any time to take off and we couldn't afford for me to go anywhere) when there was some chance the baby would be born in December, allowing me to use some of my 2009 vacation to get paid for my otherwise-unpaid maternity leave. And so, with vacation days + personal days (which also don't roll over) + a little bit of comp time, I am going to be off work from December 17 - 31. I figure that'll give me plenty of time to wash all the baby's clothes and read some books and get some things done around the house.

I've been looking forward to my vacation since I set it up a few months ago, but now that I'm in the last 11-day stretch it's starting to sink in that this may be my last eleven days of work before I have a baby. If he's born before January 4th, I'll go straight into maternity leave and won't be back at work until March or April. I spend half my time feeling slightly freaked out that I only have eleven days left to finish all the work I need to have done before I go on leave and the other half trying not to spaz out about having an actual human baby to raise OMGHALP. I ran into an old acquaintance at the grocery the other night who has a son, and when I told her about how I'm excited but also freaked out, she said, "You feel like a pregnant teenager, don't you?" And she was exactly right. How is it possible that I'm even remotely grown-up enough for this?