30 weeks

Wow. Thirty weeks down. This baby is coming. Soon. My nesting instinct kicked into high gear sometime over the last week or two, but seeing that Babycenter email ("Congratulations...you are 30 weeks pregnant!") really sent me over the top. I'm a lot more excited and eager to meet this little girl than I've felt up to this point, especially since the baby's chances of survival and thriving beyond this point are very good. So to that end, I feel I can breathe a sigh of relief and finally just enjoy what's left of the good weeks...the ones where I am still fully functional and sleeping relatively well every night. But on the other hand, I'm freaking out a little too. There is so much to do and so little time left. And such stressful timing with her birth being hot on the heels of Halloween (costume-making), Ava's birthday party, Britt's birthday, company two weekends in a row followed by one weekend away (for early Thanksgiving with my folks) and a mid-week Thanksgiving trip, Christmas decorating and wrapping (because I am determined it will be done very soon after Thanksgiving this year so I can just sit and enjoy the last weeks of this pregnancy and not overdo it), and then before you know it...Christmas. I have so much to do! I have gifts yet to buy, and I'm behind schedule! That was scheduled to be done by the end of October! People are not cooperative in giving gift suggestions in September and October. That makes it rough. Plus, I commited to making my daughter a native American costume for Halloween to save us from spending fifty bucks plus tax and shipping for ordering one online. She's supposed to wear it to school on Tuesday. Guess what I'll be up late doing tomorrow night. Our boxes are still not 100% unpacked, nor have I yet invented homes for everything in this house (hence the boxes). I need to revamp my blog situation before baby comes. I need to make mailing labels for Christmas cards and birth announcements. I need to choose birth announcements! You are supposed to up your bra size twice during a pregnancy, and I'm still bustin' out of the ones I have always worn. Bra shopping is annoyingly time consuming! I really need to find time to inventory all of Ava's baby things so that I will know what needs to be replaced for the baby and remind myself what we already have. So many things. There's just so much more regular life to take care of this time in addition to all the nesting desires. I can't do it all at one time, and I realize it's probably fair to say I can't do it all...period. So I just go from one day to the next doing what must be done that day and hoping it all comes out close to even in the end. (And that the baby doesn't decide to join us way early!)

All of that having been said, something magical happened to me today too. At thirty weeks, I finally felt gleeful that I'm having a baby. Really excited. I've always been happy about this pregnancy, but I started out feeling so guarded and tentative and it's only moved into stages of relief and reduce anxiety in small increments as the weeks have progressed without incident. Understandably so. A friend of mine who had a miscarriage fairly recently mentioned to me that she's afraid her experience will take away some of the joy from her next pregnancy, even if it's successful and easy. I admitted that that was the case for me, certainly. But it gets better a little at a time. And though I may only have ten weeks to feel really excited instead of thirty-four this time, I will live it up as much as possible, savoring every flop and kick and hiccup in my belly, even at 3AM when I'm up (again!) to pee or drink a glass of ice water because I'm so hot (thus ensuring that I'll be up again to pee before daybreak). She finally started feeling like a real person to me within the last few weeks. Not just this little being inside me that I know intellectually is my child, but a real person with a name and a personality and a self. A person who is aware, at least to some degree, of my presence, my voice, my demeanor, my love for her. My daughter. My child. My "longed-for child." Miriam.

I celebrated my newfound excitement by buying her some very cute newborn clothes today. And I finally enjoyed every minute of it. She's coming!

Reality check

I'm having a baby. I'm twenty-six weeks and three days pregnant, and strangely enough, there are moments when I sort of forget that I'm pregnant. Then she moves and snaps me back into reality, or I try to move and immediately remember how unwieldy The Belly is getting. I have two daughters now, and sometime within the next three months, I will know both of them. And sometimes that's just hard to wrap my brain around.

I'm finally having a baby. Really.