Mornings? Yeah, they suck.

I got probably five and a half hours of sleep last night. Between the Hall session that ran until midnight and the many joys of late-pregnancy sleeping and having to be up at 6... Yeah. Five and a half sounds about right.

Yesterday, for whatever reason, turned out to be astonishingly busy at work - I don't think I stopped moving for more than maybe twenty minutes, and that was at lunch.

Plus I had another hormonal meltdown last night, which is always tiring. (Never mind what about. I've felt it sort of coming for the last few days anyway. It's embarrassing enough admitting to breaking down into tears without telling you what actually set it off.)

And today promises to be, if not as busy as yesterday, then still fairly busy.

I need to take more naps.

Matt is planning on taking some time off from work (unpaid) when the baby is born. He wants to take a whole month off, so he can help me get back on my feet and have some time to bond with the baby.

Except we never reckoned on the FMLA paperwork being so stupid. Matt has to turn in his request for leave one month before the leave is supposed to begin - now, I ask you, if you have to take time off for a family emergency, how are you supposed to know about it a month in advance?

Anyway, he guesstimated the time he'd be taking off based on our expected due date, and turned the paperwork in to my doctor's office to be filled out.

And then it occurred to him that the baby might be late - in which case he'd be sitting around the house with me for two weeks, jumping at my every twinge and wondering if This Is It, and only get a couple of weeks after the actual birth to get to know the baby and really help me.

Which isn't what either of us had in mind. If we're going to live on my reduced maternity-leave salary and by draining our savings account, then we don't want to waste the time on just sitting around waiting for something to happen.

But I'm not sure what we can do about it. The paperwork came back from the doctor's office yesterday, with my expected due date and the original date Matt had planned to return to work. We thought about shifting the whole thing forward about a week - if the baby comes on time, he can just use his personal vacation time - but I don't think we can change the paperwork now that it's been filled out, and I don't know if Matt has time to get it filled out again.

On the other hand, August is a long month. If the baby comes a full two weeks late (and it won't be later than that, because at two weeks late, they'll induce labor) then Matt will still get about three weeks at home before he said he was going back to work - and there's not a lot of difference between taking vacation time at the beginning or at the end of the FMLA leave. So I guess it'll work out.

I just wish the whole thing wasn't so stupid and complicated.

And I haven't even got all the information I need yet to apply for my maternity leave. Normally, I'd have it by now, but since my company just noodled with our insurance - effective July 1 - all the paperwork people up at corporate are running around in circles. I know they've supposedly streamlined the process, so I phone in the leave request instead of filling out reams of paperwork, but I don't have the phone number yet. Or the form that the doctor will have to fill out to allow me to return to work. Or anything else.

I keep having this nightmare vision that I'm in the hospital, holding our new baby in my arms, and work calls to tell me I have to come in because they never got my paperwork.

--Liz