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girls in the men's section when I am nine months pregnant. Not just nine months pregnant, but six-feet-tall-and-weighing-45- pounds-more-than-normal pregnant. Not when I weigh-more-than-my-husband's-b est-friend pregnant. It was here that my psychological discomfort morphed into physical discomfort when I felt that perhaps there was a little more wetness than normal down under and I high tailed it to the women's lounge.

My water didn't break in the I wish I'd had a jar of pickles to dash on the floor' kind of profundity. It was more than the normal little trickle that might escape an otherwise healthy woman who hasn't been doing her kiegels.. It also looked like maybe someone left a small piece of toilet paper in the bowl for a while and it started to dissolve into little flakes in the water. It wasn't yellow. Looking down into the bowl, I knew I had a situation on my hands. The doctors say that the baby's head acts like a plug in some situations to keep the fluid from leaking everywhere in a big gush. Jared must have had a big head, because I made it back to my husband without incident.

Now, in anticipation of the blessed event, we had traded up from the two door Toyota 4 Runner to something a little roomier to accommodate our next generation. We were proud owners of a spanking new Chevrolet Suburban, with enough crisp leather seats to seat eight. We're Catholic; we were looking ahead. After I told my husband that my water broke and we should go get my overnight bag for the hospital, he looked at me with incredulity and asked, "Can you wait here while I run home and get some towels for the seat?" I won't repeat what I responded, because I can assure you it wasn't nice. Well, he allowed me to enter the vehicle and we made it home. I think I was even allowed to sit on the seat, instead of crouching on the floor, which I'm sure was an option running through his head at the time.

My contractions still weren't coming at a very regular or painful pace, so we stayed at home trying to decide what to do. We looked in the toilet a lot to see if perhaps we could discern amniotic fluid like the last dregs of tea in a cup. I wasn't too thrilled to go to the hospital that evening anyway. My normal doctor wasn't on rotation that weekend. Instead, of course, was the one doctor I didn't like out of the six doctors in the practice. We finally called and were asked to come in to get checked out. The first thing they inflicted upon me when we got there and claimed water breakage

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