False Labor or How I've been in labor for two weeks

Nowadays, whenever I call anyone on the phone the first thing out of their mouth is not hello. It's "so, did you have your baby?" Not that I don't appreciate the concern, but the answer is no.

First, some housekeeping. In nursing school, we learned to negotiate with families to set up chains of command so that if anything happened, we didn't have to call a million people, just one or two. So, if and when I go to the hospital I will call Mom and Amy. Mom gets the nod because she's mom, and Amy because she has been voted "Most Likely to Answer her Phone." From there, they are in charge of disseminating information to the rest of the family.

I'm really starting to be irritated that I'm still pregnant. Every night for the past week or so, I've woken up with contractions. Real ones. That hurt. It goes something like this: I go to sleep around 10:30 or so, wake up around 3 or 4 with contractions painful enough that I can't sleep through them but nothing near painful enough to signal the eminent arrival of a baby. (As a side note, I was trying to remember exactly how painful real active labor contractions were. I couldn't quite remember the quantity of pain but I have a mental image of sitting in the hospital with my vision totally whited out with pain and crying and yelling at mom, "I can't do it anymore!! I can't do it" and her yelling right back, "Yes you can! Come on!" And since the contractions I've had so far have not inspired me to yell anything besides, "I wish I could go back to sleep," I don't think they're what we're looking for.) These contractions come every 5-7 minutes, but after I get up and start moving around, they peter out after about an hour. By this time, it's almost 6 and my family will be waking up in 30 to 45 minutes. Do I try to go back to sleep? Just stay awake and hope that Lillian will take a good nap that day?

Needless to say, this whole process is making me very crabby. For example, I just yelled at Lillian for putting too many goldfish crackers in her mouth. The only upside I can see is that all these false alarms help me keep my house in order and keep up on the dishes and laundry because I don't want to leave my house a mess or come back to a pile of dirty clothes.