Bare Naked Exhaustion

Today my friend Alex and I took our boys to see BareNaked Ladies at the Barnes and Noble...no, that's not a typo...Bare Naked Ladies put on a free concert at Barnes and Noble in a neighboring town today, and all we had to do was buy their new children's cd, Snacktime, which is really good, and arrive at 9am to secure a wristband for the afternoon performance.

I decided about 45 minutes before I was supposed to be out the door (of course, I hadn't showered or begun getting ready yet) that today would be a great day to test out the new double stroller, as I knew that Alex's OS would most likely tire of walking at some point, and H always does better when contained. The double-stroller was still sitting in the hall closet...in the box. After about 10 minutes of struggle, I had it out of the box, with all parts on the floor. It really was easy to assemble, so it wasn't long before I was in the shower, forgoing shampoo for my hair, as the salon blow-style from yesterday still look way better than when I do it myself...okay, out the door and almost right on time.

The only hitch to our grand plan to treat our kids to their first concert was that we then had to arrange activities to occupy ourselves from about 9:30 am until we could go back and be admitted at 2. The first no-brainer was to get a coffee the size of my head at Starbucks, then take it with us to the playspace at the mall. The kids ran themselves silly for over an hour until it was time for lunch.

After lunch, we did a little shopping for really exciting things like nursing tanks from GapMaternity. Yes, say good-bye to the days of flipping through the racks at Victoria's Secret. I have to say that it was worth the time and effort to get the stroller to the car because it was great! I'm very happy with my purchase.

We made it to Barnes and Noble just in time to stand in line, then to be ushered to our seats. We quickly realized that our plan to put our coats at our chairs and have the kids play at the train table until it was time to start was just not going to work. Even worse, Alex and I met each other with a look of horror when we realized that the concert started at 3 THIRTY, not 3 o'clock as originally thought.

Awesome, H is so easy to contain, I'm sure he'll do great with an entire 90 minutes to kill. I ingeniously unclipped the tail from his 'back-pack' wrapped it around his seat and re-clipped it into place. He still had plenty of range of motion, he just couldn't run off...well, at least he couldn't without giving me ample warning.

Although I was getting tired and annoyed by the time the band came on, it was well worth the wait. After about 30 minutes of music, we got our CD signed and left the store...EIGHT HOURS after leaving the house that morning. Yes, EIGHT HOURS.

It was on the drive home I realized that at some point over the last couple of days, the corner has been turned. No more am I upbeat and silly SallyHP who responds to the daily, and unceasing inquiry of how are you feeling? with "Great!" Nope. No more. I am DONE being pregnant. I am so ready to squeeze Baby C out that I can hardly stand myself.

It's like when Carrie saw Natasha whack her face in the stairwell, which made her finally tell Big that they were 'so over, we need a new word for over.'

I decided that in order to speed things along, it couldn't hurt to write the adult version of a Santa letter, but instead of the big one, I'm hitting up the big three.

Dear V, Uterus and Cervix:

While I know that we've had a pretty good run so far, and I've been a little nervous about the whole parenting two kids thing; please finish. Please start contracting with ferocity. Please dilate. Please expel this child from my body in the usual fashion, so that I can regain my waist (and ankle) circumference. Please. Please. Please. I'll never ask this of you again (for at least two more years when the next baby comes). I know that you may be snickering at me, because you know that I'll be even more exhausted in the coming months. But I don't care.

Please. Just go.

I'll even go so far as to quote Pee Wee Herman to convince you how much I deserve to be done; "Believe me Santa, Please, I've practically been an angel."

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

Sincerely (and with naked exhaustion),
SallyHP