I am very happy this week is over. First, despite all the hope we had for a positive outcome on Tuesday (my "Super Baby Power Lunch" day), the doctor continued to tell us that they wouldn't do anything other than prescribe sleeping pills so that Heidi could sleep through the contractions. This took most of the wind out of our sails right up front. We have been getting more sleep but it's still not great. Heidi is nearly up to two weeks of solid, regular contractions, and they're not letting up. In fact, they seem to punish her when she does actually get up and around by intensifying in strength and increasing in duration and frequency. This has given her more incentive to stay in bed and not get around as much and so I've been working as hard as I can with what time and personal resources I have left to keep the ol' homestead working smoothly.
Everyone continues to ask about the baby, and when he's coming, and that compounds our frustration because we don't really want to keep talking about it. Seeing as I'm saying the same thing over and over, I'm ready to pull out the proverbial tape recorder and just hand taped answers out when people ask. To make matters even worse, by week's end I had gotten past the "people asking about the baby's arrival" phase and moved into the "people giving advice on how to speed the baby's arrival" phase. (If I have to hear one more person tell me to take her off-road, or feed her hot wings, or try acupuncture, I think my head is going to explode.) We've been trying to stay positive and take all of this with good humor, but at this point, with the compounded issues we're already having outside of the pregnancy, we're having increasing difficulty finding the joy in what is supposed to be a joyous time.
Mid-week came along, and my good glasses broke. I don't really know how...I took them off and heard a strange pop, then noticed that one of the earpieces was loose. I was already out of contacts (I wear disposables), and now my good glasses are out of action, as well. I'm down to the third-string, three-year-old pair of glasses, and I've been dealing with mild headaches off and on since that day. Also, Heidi developed a new issue, aside from the size, the regular pregnancy discomfort, and the steady contractions: some sort of skin problem called PUPPP that is apparently common during pregnancies...FIRST pregnancies, though this is Heidi's SECOND pregnancy (just another indicator of what an incredible trial this has become). It has gotten so bad that she's back to the "I'm not sleeping well" stage. First the contractions were waking her up, so we drugged her; now the itching is waking her up. Our helpful doctors recommend Benadryl, but we don't like that much. We don't want to keep feeding more drugs into her (and the baby's) system, and especially another drug that would most likely amplify the effects of the sleeping pills.
By week's end, I had discovered that I had been so distracted with trying to keep everything running smoothly at home and trying to keep up with my regular duties, that I had missed two sizable payments coming out of our bank. It was three days before I was able to check our books and see what had happened, and by that time it was far too late to do anything about it. This leaves us completely broke (and continuing to rack up NSF charges for anything that we had paid out before we realized what was happening) until we get paid next Friday. We won't fully recover from the drain and get any financial cushion back until the beginning of May, barring some sort of unforeseen miracle windfall. We have a couple hundred dollars available on a credit card, and we'll be living off of that money until we can get some back...praise God for small favors. We also had to prepare for Donovan's birthday party, which was yesterday. This normally wouldn't be a big deal, but Heidi likes to do large, creative, custom parties for Donovan that always take a lot more time and effort in planning, preparation, and housecleaning than, say, going bowling (like last year) or just taking the crew to Chuck E. Cheese. This added stress sure didn't make us any happier. The one positive part of the week was that it was the beginning of a new term at school, so I only had class on Wednesday night...again, praise God for small favors.
Work continues to provide no respite, as my employers continue to ask me to do things far outside of my actual skillsets. For example, just Friday, I spent nearly two hours taking apart a full-sized datacenter server rack for shipping. While this wasn't very professionally fulfilling, it was at least a break with some mindless repetitive tasks to take my mind off of the other stuff going on. (For some reason, hands-on mechanical work always seems to take my mind off of other things.) The bummer of it is, considering what they pay me, they could've hired a monkey to take that rack apart and saved a lot of money, especially considering that I was working on preparing the company's new firewall for installation next Tuesday. Morale at the office is really low...at least, it is in engineering. My boss is stressed because he's swamped with proposals. We're installing a new internet connection on Tuesday (see the firewall above) and we're trying to figure out a lot of internal clean-up. I'm just on short time and waiting to get out for good. Emrah, the new guy, is running into the brick wall that is our ridiculous, product-focused sales staff that all too often leave the engineers out to dry in tough spots, and his spirit is being crushed as we speak.
It's so disappointing and tiring to have weeks like this. I know things will get better eventually, but I remember looking at this week nearly a month ago and expecting that we would finally have some financial cushion, we would be preparing for Owen's imminent arrival, and life would be generally pretty good. After seeing what this week has become, I think I'm probably going to start taking the opposite tack and just expecting the worst from every week. That way, I am ready and prepared to cope when things actually do go badly, and I am pleasantly surprised when things actually go well.
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