Surprise, surprise!

I tried writing the birth story yesterday but my thoughts were too disjointed so instead I decided to compile a list of ironies surrounding Benjamin's birth:

• On Wednesday I wasn't feeling well at all and was having some pretty bad contractions. This worried my father-in-law but I assured him that I always have killer Braxton Hicks contractions—so bad that I have to focus on breathing through them—for months before my children are born and everything's always been fine. So when he came in on Sunday morning to give me a blessing with Andrew I said, "Yeah, don't worry about these contractions. They're totally fine..."
• A couple of days ago I told Andrew that we needed to pack a hospital bag. He said I was stressing about nothing and that we still had like a month before we needed to worry about that. 2:00 on Sunday morning wasn't exactly an ideal time to be running around the house thinking about what we needed to bring to the hospital. I grabbed a Sunday dress to wear for some reason, thinking we'd be discharged and on our way before church started.
• Before we went to bed on Saturday Andrew scheduled a family trip to the salt flats for this coming Saturday. We've been wanting to go for a while...since before we moved back from Egypt...but things always kept coming up. He said, "There, see? I put not one but two exclamation points at the end of SALT FLATS!! This appointment is officially immutable." Hardy-har-har.
• I told my mom that I would finish editing her dissertation well before the baby was born and actually stayed up until midnight on Saturday working on it. I am not finished. The baby is here.
• My mom was in New York for the International Viola Conference and didn't fly in until yesterday evening so she missed all the drama. It was kind of a sad day. But I had the baby before she boarded her plane and she was able to hear the news, which meant she didn't have to worry about it for the whole flight.
• I signed the girls up for swimming lessons a couple of weeks ago. Rachel's been wanting to do another session of swimming lessons since last year. Once she found out Rachel would be doing swimming lessons, Miriam started begging to do swimming lessons, too. She's too young for the preschool so I signed us up for a parent-tot class thinking it would be a fun thing to do together, you know, before the baby was born. So now I'm scrambling to find people to take her to do the parent-tot class with her since I won't be swimming for, oh, six weeks or so.
• I bought a new pair of swim shorts specifically for the class. Ones that fit over my baby belly. Fortunately they were only $3.
• I picked up some baby clothes at the BYU clothing exchange a few months ago and after I washed them I noticed that one outfit was a little smaller than everything else. I checked the label and it was size "premie" instead of size "newborn." I just about got rid of it—because why would I need it, right?—but in the end I put it in the box of clothes for Benjamin, anyway. So now the boy has one outfit...you know, for when he's wearing clothes.
• Last night Andrew said he was going to wait until midnight, when Sunday would be over, and then he'd grade a bunch of stuff for the Stats class he is the TA for. But he fell asleep by 11:30 and just woke up. I don't think he woke up for anything else in the night except to hand me a pen (and he doesn't remember doing that). So much for work... (I thought it was a dumb idea, anyway. I mean, we'd been up basically since Saturday morning so by Sunday evening I think we deserved to just go to bed).
• I only had gestational diabetes for like three weeks! I felt so guilty eating popsicles and jello all day yesterday because I haven't had sugar in such a long time but that's all they'd let me eat and I was starving. As the doctor pointed out, we weren't worried about the baby getting too big at this point and I needed some energy. My blood sugar was a little high this morning but considering all I ate for most of yesterday was popsicles and jello...
• A couple of weeks ago we told our doctor that we'd be staying in Utah for the delivery of the baby so he told us there was a series of questions he wanted to ask us. #1 Did I want an epidural? No. #2 Was I planning on breastfeeding? Yes. #3 Who was going to take care of the baby after it was born? I looked at him for a minute and blinked before saying, "Uh...me?" He looked at me for a minute and blinked before saying, "Poorly worded question. Who is your children's pediatrician?" As it turns out I'm kind of not taking care of Benjamin and neither is our pediatrician...all the nurses and doctors in the NICU are doing that, aren't they?
• I was gearing up to write a blog post about weighing the most I've ever weighed in my whole life. Not because I was gaining any more weight this pregnancy but because I started out a few pounds heavier than I did with either of the girls (I started the same weight and gained the same weight with the girls; I started three whole pounds heavier with Benjamin and was right on track for weight gain, according to how I've gained before). Suddenly that post is irrelevant since I ended up not tipping the scales. I certainly didn't gain 25 lbs. with this pregnancy...so didn't end up exceeding what I weighed with the girls. 
• On Thursday we went to pick out some yarn so that I could make a baby blanket for Benjamin. We ended up choosing a white, yellow, and blue variegated yarn because I said I was feeling too lazy to bother about stripes or anything like that. I thought I would have plenty of time to finish the blanket before the baby arrived. I am no where near finished.
• I ordered a few books on Amazon to help us get ready for a natural childbirth. The Bradley Method, Husband-Coached Childbirth, and Ina May's Guide to Natural Childbirth. They came in the mail on Friday and Saturday. Andrew's plan was to begin reading Husband-Coached Childbirth on Monday while he sat around waiting for us to get out of swimming lessons. They are now all sitting on a shelf, unread.