Confinement

In olden days as a woman approached the terminal stages of her pregnancy she would go in to what was then known as "confinement". This meant that out of safety concerns she would stay at home for the last month or so of her pregnancy and wait for the arrival of her little one. These safety concerns were not so much for the mother or the baby but more for anyone else who just happened to cross paths with a woman in the last few weeks of her pregnancy. We still practice this tradition of confinement, only now it is called maternity leave. I knew it was time to start my maternity leave

• when I was spending more time going to and from the bathroom than I was at my own desk.
• when the only shoes that fit were my fuzzy blue slippers, casual but not exactly business casual.
• when I started to drop things and just leave them because I figured someone else would pick it up. I hope no one slipped on that ice.
• when I would make up reasons to call co-workers up to my desk and then have them do an inter-office delivery for me.  "Thanks for showing me how to load my stapler. Oh are you going by M's desk on your way back? Could you give this letter to her for me?"
• when I grew so tired of strangers on the elevator asking me questions like "When are you due? Is it a boy or girl? Is it your first? Have you picked out a name?" that one day I just gave a nosy stranger a blank stare and said that I wasn't pregnant.
• when I started to threaten violence more than once or twice in an hour.

Anyway, I knew if I didn't start my maternity leave soon that I would probably be fired. So I started last week at 36 weeks. Now I envisioned passing these last few weeks something like this: sleeping, swimming, laying out in the sun, reading, taking showers, fixing my hair, going for long walks and stopping to smell the roses and pet the unicorns on the way, you know, doing all the things that everyone tells me I wont EVER have time for again once the baby is born.

But reality smacked me upside the head when I saw this.

Yeah, that is Baby Faye's corner of the room. Over the past few months I've just been tossing all the gifts and baby stuff that I've been given into the crib or under it. I had been waiting for the fabled nesting instinct to kick in and motivate me to get all this stuff set up. Either that or I was in denial about this whole baby thing. But at this point in my pregnancy, I don't really have the luxury of denial or the time to wait for the nesting instinct. So I made a plan to get all this stuff unpacked, washed, set up, etc. and I figured it would only take me a day and then I could get back to my original maternity leave plans. But of course, the one day project ended up lasting the whole week as I got sidetracked with my birthday festivities and a torn/strained stomach muscle that left me immobile for two days. But I did make some progress.

No, the keyboard is not part of the baby decor.

Now that that is taken care of I can get back to doing all the stuff that I will NEVER do again once the baby is born. First, I need to buy a swimsuit roughly the size of a tent. Do they even come that large?