Sleep Deprivation and what passes for Adventure these days

I am so tired. Stella's been getting up earlier and earlier, Punky's returned which means constant waking up in the middle of the night to throw a cat across the room and off your head, and I got to have a fun emergency room visit Wednesday night. Wednesday night I kept having contractions, and if you have 6 or more in an hour you're supposed to call the on-call nurse. Unfortunately, I had 6 in about 50 minutes. So I called and she told me to take Tylenol, drink lots of water, and lay down for another hour and to call her back if they didn't get better. I continued to have them every 10 minutes for the next hour, so I called her back and she sent me to the hospital. It was really scary and I started to get freaked out. We waited for Tim's mom to come over to stay with Stella (thank GOD for having in-town relatives), tried to go on 35 only to find it was closed, made a detour to Mopac and finally arrived at Labor and Delivery. It was a slow night, there must have been 10 nurses just sitting around. I guess a very cold night in January is not as popular as March for having babies.
They got me in a room and in one of the horrible hospital gowns (these were even worse than normal, they were faded and gross. I am more convinced than ever that I need to buy one of the pretty ones that Tori Spelling wore on her show for when the baby's born.) They then spent forever quizzing me first on health and informational questions (I turned in my pre-certification for the hospital on Friday but it isn't in the system yet), and then of course the ER admissions person came in to make sure my insurance was in order. While hospitals can be scary, I personally found it really reassuring to be in a place where they could take care of me no matter what was going on. If something was wrong, even, as Tim pointed out, if I slipped in the bathroom, there were experts there to take care of me. That's SO comforting when you don't know what's going on with you and your baby! Eventually the doctor came in and checked me out. Everything was still closed and where it should be, which was excellent news, and they also did a test to see whether I had a protein that showed whether I would have preterm labor in the next two weeks. The doctor then wanted to start me on an IV to make sure I was hydrated and hopefully stop the contractions.
Ah, the IV. I wasn't really excited about it, but I think doctors know what they are doing and I follow their recommendations. I was REALLY not excited about it once two nurses tried 4 times total to get it started and failed. I tried to be stoic, especially since I couldn't help but think of poor Marsha and her many times of being stuck by nurses who couldn't get an IV started. But to be honest, it hurt really, really, bad. Like it brought tears to my eyes and felt like Chlorox was coursing through my veins. Finally they checked with the doctor and he said that he didn't want to be the one that made me go through more pain, so I could drink two giant glasses of water. Which I did. Then they said that the protein test for preterm labor came back negative, yay, and I was just having a lot of Braxton-Hicks contractions. So they sent me home, but told me I had totally done the right thing and in the future if I have 6 or more contractions an hour they still want to see me. I just hope that I don't visit the hospital multiple times over the next 10 or so weeks! I got to bed about 1:30, but had to get up every 30 minutes to pee and throw the cat off my head. Yay!
Tim and I both freaked out a little since we are the furthest possible from being ready for the baby. Okay, that's not true. We have a place for her to sleep, a carseat, and clothes in the attic. But I definitely feel inspired to get her room totally in order now!