As I mentioned earlier, my mom is coming out to visit next Monday and is staying for a week. We’ve had this on the calendar for a few months now, and the anticipation is totally killing me. I always look forward to visits from my parents, but this visit is different for a few reasons.

See, I’ve been pregnant for nine out of the past twelve months. Matt and I moved to Nashville just 15 days shy of a year ago, unpacked boxes in our temporary apartment, hung our pajamas together, and took that life changing pregnancy test. Two months of my first pregnancy went by, and then my mom flew out to be with me during the hardest week of my life. Her visit last July changed everything about our relationship. Up until then, she was my mom, and I loved her. But when she came out to Tennessee to help me through my miscarriage, suddenly her MOMHOOD struck me like never before. All those years of hearing her tell me to “drive safely!” while I rolled my eyes came flooding back, and suddenly I realized A) what it feels like to be a mother, B) how the last thing a mother ever wants is for her child to hurt, and C) what it’s like for a mother to lose a child you loved more than life itself. My mom now totally made sense.

I’m not sure she realizes it, but since then I’ve opened up to her in ways I never had before. I’ve told her things I haven’t told anyone else (other than Matt – sorry, Mom, but you would want me to be honest with my husband, I’m sure). I’ve gone to her to cry instead of the people I might have otherwise gone to. In the past year, I have finally taken advantage of her motherhood the way she had offered it to me for years.

People often ask me if it’s hard living far from family, and the biggest thing I miss is that I would have loved to share the past seven months of this pregnancy with my mom… in person. Because I’ve realized just how much I need her to mother me… at age 27. I’ve realized how much I want to be a mom just like her. And a mother-in-law just like her. And a grandmother just like her. I want to be like my mom.

So she’s coming out next Monday, and for a full week we’ll be able to live out pregnancy together the way that I’ve wanted to for the nine months of this past year that I was pregnant. We’ll shop and clean and daydream about Penny together. She’ll give me tips and advice, and bemoan raising daughters, and I’ll likely cry a lot when I voice my fears and concerns to her. And I will so enjoy just soaking up her motherhood. It will be such a great time of bonding, but it will also be a time of closure and healing. Last time she came alone to visit us, she was here to mother me in a dark place. And this time, she’s here to celebrate with me.

All of this to say, I love my mom. And yet again in my life, God has shown me that I will face tough stuff ahead, but there is so much to celebrate. New life, green grass, faithful friends, a man I admire, creme brulee, a puppy romping in her backyard, and fresh beginnings. And the best daggone mom in the world.

I’ve broken many of the rules of pregnancy in that I’ve indulged in the occasional salami sandwich, regularly forgotten to take my prenatal vitamins and have sipped on four glasses of wine with a few glurbs of Matt’s beer to boot. All in all, I’ve tried to be pretty good, but the fact of the matter is that by nature I’m a rule breaker. There are few rules that I believe really matter in life, and the rest I feel can be bent a little bit.

Despite my penchant for living on the other side of the law, I have held firm against my biggest desire – Wellfleet oysters on the half shell. Luckily I live in TENNESSEE and am not faced with this temptation on a daily basis. But this past weekend while in DC we went out to a yummy seafood place in Old Town Alexandria with my lovely cousin and her husband. And what should Matt order? Oysters on the half shell. Because deep inside his puritanical spirit enjoys snickering while I am forced to OBEY.

I have never wanted to dive into something face first more than I wanted to dive into his plate. Thank the good Lord in heaven that the conversation was so interesting I was distracted from his plate long enough for them to be slurped up swiftly behind my back.

While I have vigilantly given up raw seafood while pregnant, you better believe I won’t let breastfeeding stop me. And as soon as that baby girl pops out of me you know I’m going to be demanding that Matt provide me with a dozen Welfleet oysters on the half shell. In Tennessee. In June. Which doesn’t have an R.

I consider that ample payback for the twinkle I saw in his eye the ONE night he ate oysters while I was pregnant. What goes around comes around, boy!

Over the past… eh… week and a half, life has been spinning at an absurdly fast rate of speed. Suddenly all of these carseats started arriving at the front door, which made it absolutely necessary for me to remove them from their boxes, inspect all of their moving pieces, read all of the installation instructions (holy cow!) and proceed to vacuum, detail and wash both of our cars.

It was bittersweet cleaning out our Volvo wagon, because I knew I was ultimately cleaning it out to be replaced. The little guy has been everything we could have wanted for carting around drywall and a muddy dog over the past few years, but has now gotten to a place where it needs major repairs – repairs that are significantly more expensive than the car is worth. As of December it won’t pass inspection without those repairs, so we’re planning on replacing it, perhaps with an Outback, perhaps with something else.

We’ve put 85,000 miles on our already well-loved wagon in almost five years, which is crazy considering it was my car and I took public transportation to work for 2 of those years and was at home for another year. Matt’s jobs have always required an outrageous amount of driving, so we’ve had to face the fact that we will inevitably replace cars sooner than the average American family. It’s a bummer on the wallet, but has gotten us pretty adept at car shopping over the past few years.

This Saturday we had an appointment to test drive an Outback and a Forester; the former we decided was the car for us. We’re wagon people. We like having a five-seater with lots of storage capacity and good gas mileage. We like a car that drives well in the snow, not that that matters so much anymore. We like a car that you can put a muddy dog in and not think twice about.

But I didn’t like how the smug salesman was unwilling to negotiate down to the price I wanted. So today I called down to a competing dealership to see what the Polish salesguy could do for me. After I played a Chris Matthews-worthy version of hardball, he made me some good promises that the car we’d be special ordering would come in right at the price we are willing to pay.

I like the Polish people. They make great sausages. And sweet sugary baked goods.

I’ll hear back from my friend later this week, and I hope he has good news for me. Yeah, I want a new Outback, but more than anything I’m just gnawing at the bit with an insatiable desire to install this adorable new carseat!

Until then, I can bide my time re-reading the owner’s manual.

I really didn’t sleep last night. I may have been laying in bed for five hours, but I remember most of it, which leads me to believe that no sleep was had.

It was a late night – Matt accidentally downloaded a bad file that sent trojan viruses through the computer, which I stayed up late trying to repair. I think all is well now, but I will not be surprised if a window pops up with an African-American basketball player rapping about my credit score – I’ve already seen him once today.

When I did finally lie down for the night, Pendragon wouldn’t stop squirming around. Overall she’s a pretty mellow chica, but last night she was wide awake. There really must be something to the “sleep when the baby is sleeping” since she really, honestly kept me awake. Downside is I’m fairly certain “the baby” hasn’t slept in 24 hours.

I was up early to go to a friends house for a women’s prayer group and got absolutely lost on my way over there. So much for going into it “totally knowing how to get there.” I was calling her every five minutes for directions which seriously inhibited my driving as I’m not good at multi-tasking while driving a manual yet. I kissed the sky that I was in Tennessee as Mass drivers would have slaughtered me with my erratic behavior.

Overall it feels like a day that is challenging me to stay posicore. Just as I was about to kick the cat out of frustration, Matt texted me saying  ”Extra fun surprise coming!!” When I inquired further he responded, “Special treat.”

Instantly, out of nowhere, my mind ran to “I hope he’s won $250,000.” I’m not sure why that figure came to mind, or how exactly Matt would have won that sum of money, but that’s what I thought.

I’d also settle for a bouquet of flowers.

OR A WHOLE BOTTLE OF PINO GRIGIO ALL TO MYSELF.

Whaddya think it is? Bets and/or affirmations of the wine/$250,000 theories are welcome in the comments.

Do you know how warm it was here yesterday? LOW SEVENTIES. The type of day where you go outside and sit in the sun and will come in with a little pink on your white-as-a-fish’s-butt arms. Moving to the South might have been the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. Marrying Matt coming in second, of course.

The downside to the heat is that our house is full of original rope and pulley windows that we are attempting to restore, but only half of which actually open. The other half are stuck shut. Which means we could turn on the AC in the house, but c’mon! I’m not only a cheap Yankee, but I’m a cheap Yankee who thinks it would be ridiculous to turn on the AC when the thermostat is registering 73. Unfortunately I’m also a pregnant woman in her third trimester who frequently has hot flashes and is constantly accompanied by a pitcher full of ice water wherever she goes. So a compromise had to be made.

I was awfully warm at bedtime and decided the fleece pj pants were a bit much, but there ain’t a heck of a lot of other things I can fit into these days. So I stripped down to that which I could feel morally upright with wearing to bed while carrying my daughter in my belly, and turned on the overhead fan for a nice breeze to sleep under.

And that’s when Berlin’s world came to a screeching halt.

Because didn’t you know that overhead fans ARE THE DEVIL!?! That they are the scariest machine man has ever made? And that they were created to kill and torture dogs with anxiety? Specifically HER?

She was petrified of her normally safe den, our bedroom. She wouldn’t walk in, and even when she was forced into the bedroom, she sat slumped over on her dog bed looking at the corner. She wouldn’t jump on the bed, she couldn’t fathom looking at the ceiling, and there was no way in heck she was going to eat her dinner in that setting. After all, that overhead fan was there to kill her.

This is where I take a little rabbit trail and tell you how hard I laugh when people ask us if we’re ready to be parents. They chuckle and say things like, “Oh just you wait! Wait til YOU have to try potty training! Wait til YOU’RE fighting picky eaters at the dinner table! Wait til YOU just want to give in and let them win!”

They’re probably not aware that by day my husband potty trains 200 pound 17 year old boys with multiple developmental disabilities and tendencies towards self-injurious behavior. That seeing a child throw a large table across a room DOES NOT PHASE HIM. And that when he comes home at the end of the day, he patiently works masterful therapy on a schizophrenic dog who is afraid of ROTATING CEILING FANS, finally coaxing her onto the bed to wrestle and wag her tail.

Then we lay in bed after all of this and laugh about how funny it all is – our dog who requires daily sessions with the shrink. We roll our eyes and discuss how as miserable as she is with the ceiling fan on, and as hard as it is to watch her be so scared, we’ll keep it on all night because we’re going to win this battle. That it’s just not appropriate for her to be afraid of ceiling fans. Remember how she used to be afraid of the TV? And the back porch? And riding in the car?

Maybe I sound a little bitter, and I apologize for that. It must be because cleaning vomit off the carpet in the middle of the night, calming a frightened creature at the vet’s office, and leaving the party early to get back to someone’s bladder control schedule has not adequately prepared me for parenthood. Excuse me while I get up to leave, in the middle of my hour of internet peace, to run to the store and get cat food. Because we’re all out, and while I have a million things I need to do to pack up and go to Chicago for the weekend, his needs come before mine.

Oh boy, are we in for a surprise!

I’ve spent the afternoon calling and meeting with local handymen who are stopping by to give me quotes on drywalling our upstairs. Right now it exists as two rooms that are used to house the litter box and lots of half-opened, half-unpacked boxes of miscellany that I have been happy to live without for the past year. But soon!? Soon they will be our guest room and cozy den for watching Netflixed movies on Friday and Saturday nights when we’ve finally gotten Penny to fall asleep. Frankly, that sounds like the perfect weekend to me.

Originally we had planned to do the drywalling ourselves, and honestly Matt is still not too keen about hiring it out. But the pressure he is receiving from his wife is akin to the pressure that I will soon be feeling on my abdomen when it’s time to push this little girl out. And there’s only so much fighting off the nesting urges of a pregnant woman that a man can do.

Plus, I think even HE realizes that drywall dust plus spending every weekend away from his 4 week old baby to be upstairs spackling by himself isn’t all that appealing.

So it’s been a stream of phone calls and visits from handy Southern gents all afternoon while I pepper them with questions and try to find out how quickly they work. After all the people we’ve had into the house, electricians, plumbers, HVAC repair guys and general handymen, I’m getting pretty good at this. At first I was a little intimidated, what with my big belly and swollen ankles and them with their Ford F150s. But now I’ve grown accustomed to being called “Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’aaaaaaaaaam,” and I kinda like it. I like that nobody pressures me into anything and that they’re all kinda on island time. I like how they tell me to “talk it over with your husband and have him give me a call if he’s got any questions.”

So I’ve come to the conclusion that most of them are better people than the folks I know with college degrees. Plus they’re all a heck of a lot nicer to work with than business executives and women in designer suits.

I love my old house that’s constantly in a state of renovation in a neighborhood where not a single person has the interest or energy to be pretentious. And I love Tennessee.