When a spaceship doesn't land in your alley and also the difficulty of finding somewhere to talk about your vagina in an office environment

Hiya! It's early to wonder, but in case you were, I'm still around and still pregnant.

I got a very sweet email from my friend Sophie yesterday all, "I assume no news is good news?"

Basically we've been getting organized and I've been so very tired and sleeping a lot, except in the middle of the night which seems to be my girl's preferred window of time for aqua-aerobics. And being all, "Settle down in there!" gets you nowhere.

Also, the rat issue keeps me up.

And I don't mean I'm up fretting. I mean that I'm currently sleeping nestled in a little pillow cocoon on a day bed in the elevator room/nursery, which is just off our bedroom. And the on-off-on-off of the motion sensor light outside the window downstairs comes up through the plexiglass shaft and wakes me up.

Or rather, I wake up for one of myriad reasons (Must pee! Or: hip aches! Or: stuck, can't turn over, am I going to have to call for Nick? Or: awake! Let's see if I can remember all the words to The Gambler...), and then I start fixating on the on-offness.

I was kind of disoriented the first time, so naturally I assumed it was beams of light from a spaceship landing in our alley. I didn't see Close Encounters 78 million times as a kid for nothing.

Then I decided it was a signal from one sketchy alley person to another, like, "Coast is clear to break in!"

But no. It's the rats. There are so many scurrying around next door that the light is on-offing for a significant portion of the night.

Because, you see, the next door neighbors have approximately a million rats. This was verified by the DC Rat Eradication Department (or name to that effect), which, at the behest of one of our neighbors, came out and inspected our alley and back yards/areas.

The neighbor who spearheaded the project has an actual back yard sort of space, and rats have dug up their flagstone patio. Because it turns out there are 16 rat burrows! Each with a WHOLE FAMILY OF RATS! Evidently their yard is popular because they have a little fish pond. So the rats have somewhere to quench their ratty little thirst.

Vomit, I know.

Now, we are not a source of rats because we have no yard. Only concrete. But they still come over to visit and eat our basil and such.

Rat bastards.

However. The could-be-nice-but-is-not-slumlord-run-apartment building next door has a lot of garbage, a lot of piled up junk, and is a rat haven. But being a private apartment building, the DC Rat Department couldn't go in.

We're supposed to take photos and email them to a different DC department, which I guess deals with apartment buildings and health hazards or something. So far, Nick has emailed them several times with photos and they've passed the buck.

Aaaaand now I realize there's no actual graceful segue from neighborhood rats to my vagina, is there?

So my doula called this morning to check on me. How's everything going? And also, all of her April clients have delivered! Her schedule is wide open for me.

Now, while I like my Quad-mates very much, and talk about all sorts of inappropriate things with them, it seemed like sitting in my cube discussing my vagina would be sort of...disrespectful. Plus, anyone could walk by and overhear.

But my vagina was precisely what I needed to discuss.

So I headed to the hallway and was just saying, "I'm having a lot of stabby pains in my va...!" when two men rounded the corner.

So I cut my pronouncement short, went into the stairwell, told her about my vagina, and then heard voices on the stairs. Seriously. It's impossible to find a quiet moment to say the word vagina out loud during the work day.

I returned to our office and found an open conference room in which to discuss the state of my business.

My doula, she was delighted. This is a good sign! The head is down and the girl is turning and mashing down on my cervix! My body is doing what it should! Great!

I'm pretty sure I heard her right when she referred to it as the "grapefruit juicer" - yikes.

Then I caught her up on the dread sex assignment, to which she said that self-pleasure would work fine (I seriously love this woman), but I explained the explicit mandate for the magical cervical-softening penile prostaglandin serum.

I also wanted to tell her that Nick has to go out of town Thursday night. This judge scheduled a hearing on our due date, to which Nick said, no, not possible, potential baby birth and all. So the judge rescheduled for this Friday.

Nick was concerned, but I think it's better to just have it out of the way. My doula agrees - odds of the kid arriving in the 18 hours he's gone are slim, even with all the super-positive cervical mashing that seems to be going on.

So not Friday. Saturday, though not expected, would be kind of awesome though, don't you think?