Waiting For Baby

Given that my first daughter arrived a day before her due date, and the second a week before, I didn’t necessarily expect to go past my due date with the third. But stuff happens. We’re still waiting for baby. I’m not all that bothered by it. I know lots of people go weeks past. I’m still pretty comfortable and unstressed, especially compared to first-delivery jitters and second-delivery known complications that freaked me out and made me nervous that my husband wouldn’t reach us from across the ocean in time. He did, just barely. Now I’m paying close attention to every little sensation. And at this point there are a lot of curious sensations.

We’ve reached the finish line… of the countdown maternity tee, anyway. See more of Miranda’s tee on Instagram at #maternitycountdowntee

For example, she seems to like to suck her thumb. We saw her doing it on the ultrasound. At first I thought “Hooray! She’s already figuring out self-soothing!” but later I realized that in order for her to get her thumb into her mouth the way she’s positioned, she’s basically punching me in the bladder. Which really, really hurts. The other day I realized that I could actually push her hands away with mine. Doing that too closely resembles the… umm… adjustments… a lot of baseball players make on the field. Not something *I’d* do in public, but anyway, how freaky and weird. Amazing to clearly identify her individual hands and feet at times. Just funner when they’re not punching me in the bladder.

My to-do list is done. Anything that I’d thought of doing and haven’t done at this point is just not all that important. I can’t say I’m looking forward to delivery, having done it enough to know that this one shouldn’t be as difficult to recover from as the first but is still a festival of soreness and please-can-I-get-that-image-out-of-my-mind. How Dads get some of those images out of their minds is beyond my understanding.

On my due date I realized I hadn’t gotten any good photos with the big girls + belly, so we did this:

And now I’m glad I didn’t deliver before I had a chance to get that photo. They’re both excited to meet this kid, even though they don’t have much of a concept of how things’ll change. And I probably don’t have much more of one. I’m realizing that four years in between kids is enough to forget a lot of the realities of newborns.

So… bags are packed. We’re as ready as we can be. Will be back with some sort of update when there is one. Instagram and Facebook pages will probably have the first peeks, since blogging takes more energy than I’m expecting to have for a bit. You know, just a guess.