On January 19, 2011, after [what turned out to be] my last night of semi-uninterrupted sleep, I went to my 37 week appointment.  Everything looked good & normal.  No dilation or anything.  Since I hit the 37 week mark, I got the ‘all clear’ as far as having the baby & set my next appointment for the following week.

I had a whole list of what I needed to get accomplished that day:  the usual cleaning & laundry, along with de-Christmas-ing the house & getting some baby stuff done.  I was already out, so I grabbed a bagel & an amaretto Italian soda from Dunn Bros. & armed with my list of what sizes I needed to stock up on, made my way to Babies R Us to hit up the baby clothing clearance sale.  I found some cute 3 & 9 month outfits to get us a start on those sizes & got an extra 40% off [w00t!] & then headed to Target to update the registry, post-showers, since we would be getting an extra 10-or-whatever-% off everything left on the list.  After a disastrous attempt to update it [for some reason, my password that worked perfectly fine online did not work in the store.  Fantastic.], the girl at the guest services desk talked to the helpful people on the phone & got it reset so it worked in the store.  [FYI, she still remembers me when I go in…that’s how much of a fiasco that whole event was.]  I finally got the registry updated & some grocery shopping done, then went home to tackle some laundry.  I wanted to add some more online-only things to the Target registry too, &, lo & behold, neither my new nor my old password worked.  Super fantastic.  So I got to spend another half hour on the phone arguing with target.com about my password.  At least I could still get clothes washed at the same time…??!?

While the laundry was wrapping up, I started some more baby stuff:  sorting her new clothes, blankets, & towels to be washed; sorting & organizing the rest of her gifts; & sorting cards & gift receipts & finding the duplicate gifts [impressively, only 2 or 3 items!].

I was making decent progress around 6pm, with laundry running & a good chunk of baby stuff taken care of, when…um, what was that?!

Aaaand, my water broke.

Weirdest.thing.ever.

After I determined that this was indeed what had happened, I came downstairs and told David, “Um, I think my water just broke.” We called Maternity Care and they told us to come in right away—they thought they’d be able to find a room for us. How reassuring. We packed our bags kind of in a daze, while David referred back to my book on what to bring to the hospital.

from Welcome, Abigail Grace, in which you can relive the rest of our exciting experience!

**Spoiler Alert::we had a baby.**