I blew my cork. Except less 'blew' and more 'slipped away like Wilson from the raft.'

So remember when I said I'd shortly be writing about a reoccurring dream I've had my whole life? Yeah, that was a lie. I didn't know it was when I told it, but woops! Pesky ol' LIFE got in the way and what do you know, I'm in the early stages of labor. Or, uh, the stages of Early Labor? Or whatever. I don't know. It depends on which book you read, but apparently the only thing keeping me from firing an infant out of my patunia like a cannon ball is that my water hasn't broken yet.

That seems like a flimsy barrier, yaknow? A bag of fluid is all that's standing between me and having a person coming out of my pelvis. I keep kind of looking down and going, "Really?" because, REALLY? There's a person that's going to come out of there? Whatever. That's got to be a joke or a dirty rumor that someone started when they were high on glue.

Without getting too personal and queasy, let me tell you what's already happening with my vagina. (How contradictory am I? Shut up, it's cute.)

- I'm dilated to 2 cm, and have been for about a week. My doc put me on 'modified bed rest' - which means that I can come to my sitting-on-my-ass-type job and SIT, and I can go home and lie down, but that's it. No walking around, no doing anything. No lifting anything heavier than a gallon of milk, wtf.
- The baby has most definitely moved down. I can breathe now, but the trade off is that I can hardly walk, because there's like this SKULL inside my PELVIS and holy shit OW. Well, not really ow. But more... owwww. Not really painful, but decidedly uncomfortable.
- I started losing my mucus plug yesterday. (I have to whisper 'mucus plug,' when I say it out loud, by the way, and follow it up with an ambivalent 'whatever,' as in, "I'm losing my mucus plug or whatever." Because there's something weird about saying 'mucus' when you're talking about your downstairs. So in an effort to make talking about it less awkward, I've taken to calling it my Cooter Cork, and that makes me laugh so hard I almost pee every time I say it. In addition to the peeing, it feels like my abdomen is going to rip open ala some terrible horror movie every time I laugh, because it's SO TIGHT and FULL OF BEBEH OMGZ.)
- I've started cramping low in my back and belly. It's a vague, menstrual period kind of cramping.
- I'm 36 weeks pregnant.


Now, all of these really vague, contradictory and mysterious books and Internet sites I've been scouring tell me that early labor can last like, twenty seconds, or it can go on for fucking WEEKS. Because who knows! The female body is a strange and mystical thing that no one could ever possibly understand!

So... Any advice? I have my hospital bag packed. I've got everything all ready to go. It's just... uh... Hm. I'm kind of worried that I'm going to be doing this crampy, achy, vaguely labory thing for A LONG TIME, and that makes me want to go up to the Walmarts and start doing bicep curls in the diary section to get things kicked off.