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I vacillate between feeling unusually calm about the imminent birth of this baby, and wracked with desperation to finish the 1200 things that I'd like to wrap up before she arrives.

To that end, my last pre-baby Health.com post is now ready for your enjoyment. It's the one about skin and pregnancy.

Anyway, I confess that my patience level is at an all-time low. I'm still able to muster patience with my hilariously beautiful children, who are obedient, clever, and getting along wonderfully. But everyone else? Screw off!

I'm slightly sad about not giving birth spontaneously this time around. It doesn't seem fair, evicting Leaf two weeks earlier than Chebbles and Gigi were born. But would it be more "fair" to risk uterine rupture with a 41-week VBAC instead? And my head will certainly rupture well before that point anyway.

AND we might have a name for this child. For a long time, we were going to name her "Margaret" (with "Gretchen" as a nickname) but it just didn't stick. It felt somehow not exactly right for her. It could still happen, the Margaret option, but it's a dark horse candidate at this point. We've been erasing names from our list on the refrigerator, and one name (not Margaret) has outlasted the rest -- it keeps resonating. Even Chebbles has conceded that it's the least "plain" name on the list.

I got our oil changed today, and our wheel covers installed, so Leafy isn't driven home in a smoke-spewing hoopdee. But I still haven't managed to set up the bassinette, or the swings and bouncy chair, and I haven't chosen a location for the stack of pink Bumgenius 3.0's I bought for The Leaf. It's still a mystery as to where this child will sleep.

I do wonder if there is any sort of ritual I could perform to ensure that the new baby's a better sleeper than Gigi was. The first six months of Jeege-sleep was H-E-L-L, because she would nap for just 20 minute spells during the day, then stay up all night hollering and making our lives hellish.

In retrospect, I wonder if it was all something digestive with Gigi. Now that I know how much goat milk calms her down, and how dairy makes her intestines do the lambada... perhaps I could have done something different with her that would have made her a calmer baby?

What am I talking about? No way. The kid was just hyper-alert from the moment she was born, and it took her longer to have the "long sleep" neurological mechanism kick in.

Let's just say a prayer together that we have more of a Chebbles model brewing here, and less of a Gigi Parade of Sleeplessness ahead.