I am still pregnant. Average gestation for pregnancies that go to term is 38 weeks, 5 days. Assuming it's a bell curve and that my due date is right (within a couple days' accuracy is what I was told, since we had the first ultrasound so early), I have a 50% chance of having this baby by Thursday.
Yesterday I set out to clean the kitchen, dining and bathroom floors. I started the kitchen floor, decided to just check and see how bad the radiators were, since weird, tiny little pebbles keep popping up every time I sweep. I mean, it's the kitchen. How bad could they have let them get? It's not like you let your cooking and eating space get that dirty, right?
Oh my gosh. I should have remembered the *refrigerator.
The kitchen radiators were worse than almost any of the others in the entire house. I spent hours degunking those incubators of filth. And without ripping out all our radiators and buying and installing new ones, there is no way to get absolutely everything. I'm not selling the baby to pay for that.
It looked like they'd had an aquarium set on that side of the kitchen, and one of the kids had dumped it out one day, all the little beads settling in the space between the floor and the radiators. There were also bits of what looked like very old animal feces. I am so glad all the food prep areas are way on the other side of the kitchen.
So, James comes home to find not sparkling clean floors, but a seriously grossed-out wife on the front lawn with a bucket of Pine Sol, a rag, a scrub brush and a couple of very nasty radiator covers. Inside, the kitchen is all in disarray. The refrigerator, table and microwave cart are all on the wrong end of the kitchen, and we have smaller radiator pieces soaking the sink. I usually like to let him relax a little when he comes home, but I set him to work doing the last bit of cleaning on those that I couldn't really do. Poor guy.
There's me, still in the front lawn, wearing white flip-flops, black gaucho pants, and my pumpkin shirt (must post a picture). It's late enough that teenagers are walking home from school all over the place.
Of course, that's when the bees started attacking. I don't know if it was the shirt, or the Pine Sol or what, but those little buzzards would just not leave me alone. I wasn't near a nest. At first I ignored them. I'm not allergic, and I'm not really scared of them, but then they started dive-bombing me. I found that a little unsettling. I'm pretty sure they didn't just want to play. I dropped an already very beat-up cover on the sidewalk and starting ducking and weaving all over the front yard.
Well, that was my plan. I forgot that I'm nine months pregnant. Nine months pregnant doesn't duck and weave. Nine months pregnant stoops and shuffles. In my enthusiasm, I managed to wrench a bunch of muscles I didn't even know I had in places I didn't even know could hurt unless you were actually in labor.
So I yelped and winced my way back into the house to a freaked-out James, who probably thought I was in labor. No, just neurotic. Thanks for asking. I sat for a bit and limped back outside, repeated the process two or three times, and finally had clean radiator covers. Oh, and a clean mailbox, too. And one section of clean-ish porch railing. I would have scrubbed the whole thing, but there are way too many spiders out there.
We finished the radiators, I finished the floor, washed the dishes, cleaned the bathroom, and would have kept going, except there was pizza, and I was hungry. And then I tried to stand up and found that I'd been stabbed repeatedly in the stomach. I'm still having great difficulty standing up straight and walking. This makes nighttime bathroom trips quite an ordeal. I feel like a very old woman with a giant tumor. A stomach goiter.
This baby cannot arrive soon enough.
*The refrigerator! I thought I told you all about that. Apparently I didn't. When we first bought the house, the first order of business for me was to clean the fridge. Our realtor, who did the trash-out, had cleared everything out and wiped it down, but she hadn't cleaned it. At first glance, it just looked like there were a couple food and juice spills. One juice spill was particularly bad, but it didn't seem too offensive.
Oh my gosh.
I sat down to clean that germ house and nearly passed out. It's a miracle these people didn't die of food poisoning before they had a chance to cut and run. It took me four hours to clean the fridge. Four.
The good thing is that I'd been lamenting the lack of other essential appliances, like an oven, but once I was done with the fridge I realized there was no way in heck I could have cleaned their stove, too. No. Way.
I'm not easily grossed out. I've had pets most of my life. I worked in a restaurant for nine years, cleaning both poop-stained bathroom stalls and vomit-covered tables. I've changed diapers. I even sat in goose poop once by accident.
It still took me a week after cleaning it to be able to trust that refrigerator with my food.
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