3 weeks into the new year

A couple of months ago, I paid $5 to enter a WritersWeekly.com contest to write a short story in 24 hours this month. They would send out a topic and word count when the contest began, and entrants would have to send in a story that fit the topic and word count within 24 hours of the original e-mail. Then I forgot about the contest. Until today, when I got the second e-mail from them. That is, the one announcing that the contest was over & no more entries would be accepted. I had never seen the first e-mail yesterday with the topic or word count! After a bit of digging, I found it in my deleted mail folder. :-( I get soooooo much spam, I'm obviously going through my mail too quickly. I guess I deleted it because I didn't recognize the sender (the editor's name), but I don't know why I didn't see the clear subject line. And I was sooooooo bored yesterday. As bored as I've been in months or a year. I complained about it several times. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be busily writing a story! (And the topic was vaguely about cooking, which would have been more timely for me than usual since I've been watching Top Chef lately.) Argh. That's at least the second message I've missed lately, so I've got to get less delete-happy. Sigh.

Meanwhile...this is shaping up to be my longest pregnancy yet. I'm 12 days from the baby's due date. My first son was born 12 days from his due date, at 3:20 pm CST. I have just passed that time in this pregnancy. And my second son was 11 days old by this point. While I'm happy to have this baby a week or more past his brother's birthday, the waiting is still getting frustrating. I'm as huge and uncomfortable as I've ever been in my life, and because I keep thinking it could be any minute, I feel compelled to take everything I might need at the hospital with me every time I leave the house! We have bags for me, the older kids (who will stay with some of our friends while I'm giving birth), and the baby in the trunk of our car, but there are last-minute items I still need at home, so I've been dragging things back & forth to the car all the time. Ugh. Both of the other kids came before I expected them, so I'm not used to waiting & wondering, and I also didn't have all these annoying pre-labor symptoms with them. I've been having contractions on & off for more than 2 weeks now! So I'm getting antsy. It's weird to find myself wishing for painful labor to start. Though I still don't have a name for the baby, and the house really isn't ready, either, so I shouldn't be in a hurry. I was at least very glad not to go into labor when we were iced in a few days back!

So the ice is gone, & we have sun again today for the first time in more than a week. It's lovely! We were really going stir crazy being stuck at home for several days, especially with the kids being out of school for 3 days this past week (one for MLK Jr. Day, two for icy weather). Friday night, we went to see Night at the Museum. It was okay, but I don't think the kids were crazy about it. And the happiest news in days is...Girl Scout cookies are here!! We got 3 boxes so far: Thin Mints, my favorite Caramel deLites (known as Samoas in some other states), and the new Lemonades. I was a little wary of the Lemonades, since I loved the lemon creme sandwich cookies they had in years past, and these didn't look as good (big round shortbread cookies with lemon icing), but the lemon icing tastes the same as in the sandwich cookies, and they're really pretty good. My 8-year-old likes them better, because "the lemon is closer to your tongue." But the boxes have fewer, large cookies instead of many small ones, and I'd really prefer more cookies to larger ones! (I'm trying to eat half a cookie at a time...we'll see how long that lasts!)