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Still nothing. Now we’re just pissed.

My parents leave in two days.

In our Bradley class, which seems like a distant memory now, Denyse encouraged us to write up a “birth plan.” I didn’t get the concept at the time, figuring the plan was: Give birth; go home. How could we possibly develop a plan for the most complex, unpredictable moment of our lives, when the experts should be calling the shots? It seemed ridiculous…

Just got off the phone with Sarah. Very excited. Still no baby, but here’s a transcript of the call—which I pray no one overheard:

Me: Hello?
Sarah: You sitting down?
Me: Yeah. What’s up?
Sarah: I passed my mucus plug.
Me: (excited) Really? Your mucus plug? What did it feel like?
Sarah: I didn’t notice. I went to sit on the pot, and…

My parents have been living in the basement for a week now, and Sarah’s womb has been painfully quiet the whole time. Every time I go downstairs, Tom and Lois are sitting on the couch, eating peanuts and watching Law & Order. And every time Sarah goes down there, they jump up with excited anticipation, and when they realize she has come to simply put in a load of laundry, they sigh. Audibly. They don’t mean any harm—they just want to meet the baby, too—but their presence seems to have spooked Sarah’s cervix. The pressure is overwhelming. “I feel like every day I don’t produce a child, I’m letting everyone down,” Sarah said…

Every time my phone rings at work, I think, Here we go. I look at the calendar: This is the day. I look at my clothes: This is what I’m going to be wearing in all the pictures. Usually, it’s someone calling to ask my least favorite question: “Has the baby come yet?”

No, it hasn’t. Thanks for reminding me.

It’s easy to forget that Sarah’s due date was an estimate—not an appointment. In most cases, post-term pregnancies aren’t really “late”; they stem from miscalculations of the time of conception…