If another person calls me on the phone and says something along the lines, "Well, you must not have had the baby since you're still home!" I am going to scream and/or eviscerate the lucky caller. No shit, I haven't delivered. If I had, everyone would know! We have assured each of our family members and close friends that when I go into labor, they will be getting a phone call from my husband. If for some miraculous reason it is so quick a delivery that he hasn't got time to call, rest assured that yes, you WILL get a phone call as soon as everything has calmed down. Geez, people! My MIL (whom I love, really I do!) has called several times and made that comment, and my stepmother called me this afternoon and said something very similar. I guess they're trying to be funny, but after a while it's gotten REALLY old. Especially since I'm not handling it too well to have absolutely no idea when this baby is going to arrive, and it's driving me bonkers. I don't handle uncertainty well.
Last night Kurt and I were watching tv when the phone rang, and he didn't recognize the phone number but saw it was from my dad's area code. He handed me the phone, and I answered it even though I had a pretty good hunch it was a telemarketer. It was a guy trying to get us to purchase a subscription to the Navy Times at a severely discounted rate. When he identified himself, he said he was from my dad's town in Virginia, and so I told him that that's where I'm from. From there the phone call just turned into Old Home Week, I'm telling you. We just kept chatting about the area, and how much it's changed even in the last ten years or so. He went to a rival high school of my high school -- and since he graduated in 1968, he remembered when they split his school in two and sent half the students to my school which had just been completed. I told him my father lives near a certain intersection in the town, to which he replied that he'd worked at a club at that intersection for many, many years -- a club that I have never been to, and coincidentally never heard of or noticed until I went to college and met another girl from northern Virginia who wanted to go there because the band Ratt was playing. I also hadn't heard of Ratt before then either. I was a more mainstream hair band fan. I spent over ten minutes on the phone with this telemarketer chatting about the traffic, the noise, the crowds, and he mentioned these places he and his friends would go in high school that you can't go anymore because now there are half a million dollar homes there now. It was pretty amusing and pretty wacky to have a telemarketer call me from my own hometown!
My baby brother has a broken collarbone. He's on the football team at school, and he broke it during practice one day, I suppose. It freaked me out when my dad told me about it the day I called him rather randomly, but he and my stepmom were pretty nonchalant about the whole thing. I thought broken collarbones were pretty serious things! Anyhow, what's neat is when the doctor first saw it, she told him that it's the prettiest broken collarbone she's ever seen, which I guess is a good thing. It should heal pretty easily -- if my stepmom can get him to keep his brace on. Why are teenage boys so obstinate about doing stuff like that?! Why is it so uncool to wear a brace that's going to make sure your bone heals properly so it won't ache so badly when you're 40 or 50 years old?!?! It's so frustrating. I wish he would listen to me, but at nearly 16, he knows so much more than I do, so I know he would just ignore me. Oh well. What can you do?
Speaking of brothers, my brother-in-law is supposedly getting engaged. My MIL called a few days ago to tell us he was going to pop the question to his girlfriend this week, but no one's heard from him since. We're not really sure if he did it or not. I've got mixed feelings about it, really. I know my MIL is very much attached to this son, and she's not too keen on letting him cut the apron strings, so his wife-to-be may have a difficult road ahead of her. I know absolutely nothing about her, except her name and that she's "nice." I swear, that's my MIL's favorite adjective. I'm happy that he's found someone to share his life with, but I'm not sure he's grown enough to make that kind of commitment. He's sort of a party animal type of guy still, and I hope he's sown all the wild oats that he's going to and that he doesn't live to regret settling down. I hope that this girl is the right one for him, but they haven't been dating all that long (a few months at most), so I have some concerns. Kurt's family wants us to go to the wedding, but I don't think we'll be able to make it. Kurt may be in San Diego during the wedding, which means he can go, but there's no way I can go. First, I don't want to fly down to San Diego for a week or whatever, and stay in a hotel with a one-month-old baby. I doubt I'll feel up to traveling, and I'll probably be dead on my feet from figuring out how to take care of a newborn. Secondly, they don't have a set date for the wedding even now, and I know we won't be able to afford the plane ticket down there if the wedding is in four or five weeks. There's just no time to find a good deal. So I think they'll just have to have the wedding without us. We gave Kurt's family very little notice when we got married, so none of his family was able to come, but it all turned out all right. No one seems that upset about it. I think it'll be just fine.