How to tell if you're an A-Type

So this all starts yesterday morning, I'm not even kidding, at 6 in the morning. This is when I get the first text from my best friend Stacey, who's pregnant with her first child, a little girl. The first text says:

"Had contractions all night, on Oxygen and hands and knees to get baby moving...doc will be here at 8 am. Cervadil dilated me 2cm"

And I pick up the phone, blurry eyed and not sure what month it is, let alone what day, read the text, and think, Are you there, God? It's me, Tracy. Please protect my Stace and let her give birth to the most beautiful girl in the world without too much pain or jerk-wad doctors or crappy jello, make it quick and not like they show it in the movies to scare the crap out of you, and please, if you could find the time to send her an angel message that she DOESN'T HAVE TO TEXT WHILE IN LABOR that would be swell.

Thanks, God!

Alas, sometimes our prayers are answered, sometimes not, because my beloved best friend, whom I have known since seventh grade and I have seen on more than one occasion use ONE black olive as a vehicle for which to deliver an ENTIRE TUPPERWARE CONTAINER of ranch dressing into her mouth, the girl who rolled her eyes at our German teacher even more than I did, my partner in crime for debating existentialism, Catholicism, and Smashing Pumpkins lyrics, my best friend who has lead archaeological digs in 105 degree heat in Southern California while carrying 60 pounds of gear and once got yanked into the government of Ireland's office for daring to write that Dublin's cultural centers were trying to re-write history to make it more politically correct, the self-confident woman who got a PHD from Stanford University and then got hired to teach at a university in Idaho before she even finished her degree, the bad-ass who wrote her thesis while pregnant, this Stacey, girl that I adore above many of the girls that I adore...

Is surely an A-Type. So the texts continue.

And I am getting hourly updates now of how dilated she is, what they're giving her, one text message that actually says "Breaking water now" and all I can think is that if someone gave ME a cell phone while I was in labor there would actually be a new episode of "True Stories of the ER" on Lifetime that could reenact someone getting a cell phone removed from their right eye ball, where I JAMMED IT IN after someone said, "Hey, Tracy, while you're in labor, do you want to send mass text messages to everyone to keep them updated?"

So there you have it. Stacey is, um, one of a kind. And Lana Joyce, at 8 lbs and 11 ounces, is beautiful.

As I was texting Stacey this morning and I mentioned that I'd, uh, never heard of anyone else texting while giving birth, she replied, "Trust me, it was the only thing keeping me sane." And when I asked her if I could blog about this she said sure. So just so you know, we're still best friends.

Until she reads the paragraph about the ranch dressing.