Halloween is a touchy time for me lately.

It is – hands down – my favorite holiday. I love and embrace everything about Halloween. 

I dress up every year and even go trick-or-treating with several children.

My front porch is a testament of my devotion to Halloween, were corn stalks, spider webs, pumpkins and skeletons abound.

But, alas, Halloween has changed for me as of late. Over Halloween 2007, I got pregnant. So, come Halloween 2008, I had a 3-month-old baby to take care of instead of partying like a rock star. We did go trick-or-treating though.

This year, I have a 15-month-old baby, and again there will be no partying, just trick-or-treating.

Don’t get me wrong, it is immeasurably cool to see the holiday I love come to life all over again in the eyes of my child, but I am still sad whenever I hear about super scary hay ride trips and dance your costumed butt off parties.

The thing that gets me through is the knowledge that in about 5 years, my son is going to have the best Halloween parties on this side of the Mississippi!

It appears as though I may have a C-section in my near future.

At my last regular OB/GYN appointment my doctor expressed some concern over the size of my baby. We already knew that he would be above average sized from a previous ultrasound, but the doctor wanted to get a better handle on exactly where his weight is right now.

As it turns out, at 39 weeks, Alexander is measuring at 8 pounds 1 ounce…but here is the kicker…according to the ultrasound tech, that measurement is give or take 15 ounces!

CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT!

What kind of science is that? We are talking about an almost 2 pound swing. This is a baby, not a sack of grain. Two pounds in a baby can mean the difference between life and death for God's sake.

Luckily for me, since Alex is so big, even if he fell on the low end of the scale, he would still be over 7 pounds, which is a more than respectable weight.

Not so luck for me is the fact that he could fall on the heavier side of the scale, making him a 9-pound baby already.

At any rate, because of his size there is a good chance that he cannot fit through my pelvis.

I have to talk with my doctor next week about the results of the ultrasound and, hopefully, we will schedule a C-section and get this kid born.

I am willing to bribe the doctor if I have to – I just want this giant baby out!

So, here it is…what just might amount to the incoherent ramblings of a woman driven completely mad.

The obvious first question is, "what could have driven an otherwise healthy 27-year-old woman completely mad in just a matter of weeks?" Well, the answer is very simple, pregnancy!

I am currently in the very, very end of my pregnancy, the 39^th week to be exact. Instead of being full of excitement and running all about my home trying to prepare for baby's arrival, I have been in early labor for one solid week.

Essentially, this amounts to doing a very slow sit-up every couple of minutes for the last week. Needless to say, I am not very comfortable.

After a couple of trips back and forth from the hospital and a visit to the OB/GYN's office, we have been assured that everything is fine and that the baby is doing very well. My doctor has even gone so far as to try to console me by telling me that women who experience this intense level of early labor generally have a much easier time in active labor and delivery.

Well, there's a lot of comfort.

While most women get to have all of their pain and discomfort in just a few intense hours, I get to spread mine out over an as yet indeterminate amount of time.

One of the major problems that I am having with my early labor is the sheer exhaustion.

I can only sleep for an hour or so at a time before I have to readjust myself to a new position. For a normal sized person, this would mean rolling over. But to someone my sized, this means sitting up, unwrapping myself from my pregnancy pillow, turning over and then rewrapping myself in the pillow.

On top of the almost constant need to flip flop around in bed, I have to pee every two hours or so. Again, for a normal sized person this is not such a big deal, but for me it has become a whole process.

I am sure many of you have seen a very pregnant woman try to get up off a couch, well image that she is in the middle of a queen sized pillow top bed, wrapped up in a pillow and blanket and she is in the dark.

I am sure that my husband could win some sort of funniest video prize if he had a night vision camera on me.

Another of my favorite side effects of the early labor, which is exasperated by my immense size, are hot flashes.

If you, your mother, sister or anyone else that you may know is suffering from hot flashes, please pass on my sincerest sympathies.

When one of these dastardly little episodes is upon me there is just no hope for cooling me down. I am inconsolably hot and sweating from every pore. My poor husband has taken to wearing a sweatshirt around the house during the day and sleeps with a heavy comforter at night because I have the air conditioning on full blast.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that, pre-pregnancy, I was always cold. I would almost never sweat and rarely had a need to wear deodorant or perfume. Man oh man, how things have changed.

I thought that things were bad in the early stages of pregnancy when I couldn't stand the mere smell of food and was a bit more tired than usual. Little did I know that the last weeks would be so much worse.

Now I can't eat because I have an eight to nine pound baby kicking my stomach and my fatigue is such that I can hardly do anything at all without a two-hour nap.

My random aches and pains can be so uncomfortable that I just want to jump off the top of a very tall building. It is inconceivable to me that many women do this to themselves on purpose, and they do it more than once.

The only thing that has kept me going over the last couple of weeks is the knowledge that it is almost over. I am only a week from my due date and therefore, worse case scenario, I only need to hold on for three more weeks.

Medically, it is ill advised to allow a pregnancy to go beyond 42 weeks, so no matter what, this misery will end soon.

Yes, I said misery…you don't even want to get me started on how other parents, many of whom are complete strangers, feel completely at ease barraging you with personal questions while expressing their unsolicited advice and well wishes.

Perhaps my next rant will deal with the way pregnancy has led me to a true understanding of the old adage, "misery loves company."

BOY

We had our 18 week ultrasound and found out that we are having a BOY!

Lately, I have found my world to be lacking inspiration. I have been fighting so hard to keep the dream alive, that I have almost forgotten what the dream is.

Doing what I have to today, in order to get where I want to be tomorrow. That is how it started.

However, what I have to do today has turned in to an all-consuming monster. Instead of bringing the dream closer, it pushes the dream further away. The dream has run screaming from it and now it is so far ahead of me that I can barely make out the outline of what it used to be.

For those of you who know me, you know that Steven and I are heading to the Starwood Festival for our honeymoon!!!!

Well it is coming up soon, July 24-29.....yay!

Anyway, for those who don't know......

Starwood is the "largest Pagan/Magickal/Consciousness gathering in North America (possibly the world)," according to the RosenComet.com website.

Check it out people....expand your horizons for "god's" sake!

Article Two: Keeping a close-knit community, Bucks Section p.5C Feb. 12, 2006

Did you vote for Bush? Are you happy with what you got? Can you look at the people of New Orleans and tell them that Bush was the best man for the job? Does it mean so much now, to be a republican that you must vote that way? What about those of you who didn't vote, could you have caused a different outcome?

I am not normally one to look back, I prefer to keep my mind in the present and my eyes on the future, but in this case we must look to the root of the issue.

Our President created the Department of Homeland Security. In my opinion, it seems as though Homeland Security spends more time worrying about other countries than their actual homeland. That, however, is only part of the issue. The point I want to make is more about the absorption of FEMA by the Department of Homeland Security and the impact that is made on FEMA ability to respond to national emergencies.

When FEMA was incorporated in to Homeland Security their budget was severely slashed. Along with FEMA's ability to act on its own. The focus of FEMA was changed from "all-hazards disaster preparedness" to one of terrorism preparedness. The Bush administration put the act of preparing for and handling natural disasters on the state, with a promise that a new federal agency would be established.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina it has been brought to the attention of the nation that, in fact, no such agency was ever created. Is it any wonder that FEMA was inadequate, to say the least, in their response to this disaster? FMEA was no longer supposed to be responsible for this type of incident.

In the days of the Clinton administration FEMA had a program entitled "Project Impact". Project Impact's basic goal was to prepare cities for a possible disaster. They did this by retrofitting structures with new technologies built to help them withstand hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornados. Bush ended this program on Feb. 28, 2001, the same day as the Nisqually earthquake in Washington state.

So tell me, who is really responsible for the non-preparedness and slow response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath?

Is it FEMA, or is it Bush?

It was Tony Blair's statement to the media this morning that got me to thinking about our own President and his, rather entertaining, past speeches and media statements. As I listened to the Prime Minister deliver a very clear, concise, and well spoken statement this morning I couldn't help but feel a little embarrassed at the blatant gap in public speaking ability between Tony Blair and that of our own George W. Bush.

Now, this is not a debate about who is the smarter of the two. This is merely my observations of their differences in regard to addressing their constituents. I do not feel the need to slander our President’s intelligence; I believe that his words and actions take care of that strictly on their own. To spend too much time discussing the idiocies of George W. Bush would be like beating the preverbal dead horse. I am sure that not even the die hard Bush supporters could find the spirit to defend the President, or even have the capabilities, as Bush has not given them nearly enough examples of brilliance to rally around in their arguments.

Getting back to the subject at hand, I listened closely this morning as the Prime Minister spoke to his nation and the world. Though he had very little information to offer his statement was still somehow reassuring. At no point during his statement did I feel the impending doom that comes with a George Bush speech. There were not threats, no gun totin’ Texan debauchery, just facts. Blair told us this morning that these near simultaneous explosions are being handled as terrorist attacks, that he will be leaving the Group of Eight summit today to go to London, he assured us that the Group of Eight summit would continue on today in his absence, and that he will be returning to Scotland later today so that he may rejoin the summit tomorrow.

You could hear, almost feel, the restrained fury in Blair’s statement this morning, but he did not waiver. Blair maintained the composure that one would expect from an elected leader, the professionalism that I see a complete lack of in our own President. I couldn’t help but let my mind’s eye do a little creative editing and imagine this same speech if given by George W. Bush (in this vision Bush looks a lot like Yosemite Sam, but that of course is a product of  my own opinions of the President).

I imagined a speech full of fist waving and tough sounding buzz words like, vigilance, resolve, dedication, and lets not forget…evil. I could see that side ways lean on his podium as he gave the press his dopey smirk. It was all very vivid in my mind.  

Walking through life we tend to forget that this journey's purpose is a quest for knowledge. Taking so much consideration for our next step, too often we have already forgotten our last step. While I do not condone living in the past or looking back in regret, I am in awe at the way we continue to let history repeat itself.

Observing some of the less enlightened, shall we say, people in my world I can not help but wince. I watch them time after time tripping over the same curb without ever learning how to step up. Like their life is nothing more than a bad looped movie.

When I think that these same people are out there in the world everyday running companies, operating heavy machinery, teaching our children, and god knows what else, it makes me wonder how the earth continues to spin. I pray that this blindness is not contagious, lest it spread to us all.

How did these otherwise intelligent people fall in to this loop? The question runs through my head begging me to find the answer; maybe in the answer I can find the cure. Some way of mentally slapping these people, breaking them away from their well worn path, and showing them that they need not repeat the mistakes of the past.

How can I show these people that by looking at their past mistakes they can learn how to avoid the same mistakes in the future? How do I convey a concept, which to me seems like so much common sense, without offending a large population by screaming at the top of my lungs, calling them idiots?

To be continued…