the home stretch.

So I recently met up with a friend from the past- Good ol' 39 weeks of pregnancy. I remember rolling into the last week of pregnancy with Gabriel a little under 2 years ago, but at the time, my excitement at being a first-time mom far outweighed the prospect of possibly being overdue. I took ridiculously long naps, baked a table full of desserts to drown my boredom in, obsessively cleaned, and fielded daily phone calls from the inevitable throng of relatives and friends wanting to know if I'd "popped" yet.

Pregnancy has its beautiful, miraculous aspects, but let's be honest- After the first lap on this track, it just isn't as glamorous. Instead of easing out of bed at 10ish, I wince around 7-something when my son begins his morning routine, which is banging on his bedroom door as loudly as possible, just in case I couldn't hear him screaming "DADA!" from across the hall. And remember, we're at week 39 here, so I'm in the company of gigantic Arctic glaciers right now- together, those glaciers and I are huge, slowly moving masses (although I'm an impressively tanned one... ha ha).

Anyhoo, in my current state of limited mobility, I've been doing a lot of Gabriel observation. I park somewhere near enough to prevent horrific accidents and/or death, and he does his thing. Here's our track record for the last few days:

• Me saving the dog, who is being chased by Gabriel with a mock golf club.
• Gabriel shutting himself in the dining room and transforming the dog's food into his personal buffet (gross!)
• Us watching a DVD montage of his 1st-year pictures and video clips over and over and over. He's obsessed with it. He laughs hysterically. His favorite movie is the movie about himself.
• Being bathed 3 times in one day because of a "creative" incident involving the removal of clothes and a FULL diaper of stuff (use your imagination) instead of napping.
  
• Finding the speakers on the computer and cranking the bass up so loudly that the neighbors probably thought we were hosting a rave at our house.

That's all my poor brain can recollect at the moment (I've probably subconsciously removed the rest of the memories on purpose). In all seriousness, as busy as he's been keeping me, this final stretch with him being my only baby has been precious. I tuck him in at night and lay there with him in his dark, big-boy room while we practice all his words and remember every second of the day he was born. Any parent knows what I'm talking about when I say that he's made our lives full in a unique way that couldn't be duplicated by anything else; He's the most rewarding thing I've experienced to date -even when I'm digging small pieces of dog food out of his mouth while he bites me in resistance. Pretty soon, I'll have a double dose of the best madness a person can go through.