All Shades of Irony, Especially Green: Delivering Charlie, Part I

As most of you know, I'm writing this post from a hospital room.  But two weeks has passed since Charlie was delivered, and so it will take some telling to get to this point. Here goes, the story of delivering Charlie: it begins on the night of December 26th.

7:00 pm: Michael returns from Cub with my requested cottage cheese, protein for my late-night pre-C-section snack.  He holds up a tin of peppermint Altoids. "You can have some in the morning so you're not totally deprived," he says cheerfully.  I remind Michael that eating nothing 8 hours before surgery includes Altoids.  After 2:30am, I was to have nothing by mouth, not even gum.  "Seriously?" he says.  "They're AL-TOIDS. They're like, nothing.  They're medicinal.  Take them if you have nausea tomorrow."  "I'm just saying-" I begin, then decide to just thank him and tuck them in my backpack.

9:00 pm: In the kitchen, Michael and I both gravitate towards a foil-covered plate from yesterday's Christmas celebration: brownies.  We were, um, foiled.  No more brownies left.  "Dang-it," we mourn over the plate of crumbs.  I find a runaway crumb on the counter and pop it in my mouth.  "Oh, sick," I say.  "That was not a brownie crumb.  That was a leftover morsel of sloppy joe meat from yesterday."  Still pregnant, I found myself swallowing it anyway, as Michael covers his mouth and shakes his head.

1:00 am: Still running around the house in a panic to prepare for the next day, I finally sit down for my Last Meal.  I choose enchiladas along with my cottage cheese.  Michael gives me a disapproving look.  "What?" I ask sharply, tired and hungry.  "I'm just worried you're going to get indigestion," Michael mentions gently.  "Well, you know what? This is what I want," I say, and heat up a plate. 

1:20 am: Facebook status: "sitting down for my last meal pre-C-section.  I'm eating like there's no tomorrow, or at least as if there's no food tomorrow."

1:45 am: I include a mildly self-deprecating comment in my blog entry about having no business eating my own weight in ice cream sandwiches this pregnancy, but that I did it anyway and I'm glad I did.

2:15 am: Try to go to bed four hours before wake-up time.  Toss, turn, toss, turn, toss, turn...man I'm anxious.  Toss, turn, toss, turn., gotta pee.

3:00 am - 3:15 am: I get up to pee and have a nanosecond to get myself to standing so I can hover over the toilet bowl and puke up every last bite of that enchilada and cottage cheese.  And most definitely that lil' morsel of sloppy joe meat, the suspectedly guilty party.  I'm quite sure that had I turned on the light and had an out of body experience- which I was very near doing, by the way- I would see that my mouth would have looked somewhat like a fire hose aimed vaguely at the toilet.  A fire hose turned on and off about nine times. 

3:15 am:  Rustled around in the dark bedroom for my backpack.  And had an Altoid.