After living the past several days in an “Are you effing kidding me?” fog, today I have been treated to a handful of digital dispatches from Nashville (with love) and a box sitting at my front door containing OH MY GOD, ARE THERE COOKIES IN THERE? And yes, yes there are. Were. Okay, there are still some left, technically, and I’m sorry, but I just cannot remember what I did with them so I guess I can’t share. Yep. Sure am sorry about that. Where is my mind?
Having a group of gals halfway across the state coordinate an onslaught of sweetness aimed directly at me to help me over this hump is one of those things I can’t think about without getting choked up about, even when I’m not brimming with hormones. My friends keep proving to be the best of the best and I am so grateful for them.
Everything is going to be okay. At times lately all that is wrong has loomed so large that I have felt a welling regret I had to choke back like bile. I really hate the welling regret feeling, and it has no business in my life right now. It’s just a stand-in for my insecurity about how we will manage. But we will manage. It’s how we do.
So I sit here munching a cookie, drinking milk, and getting punched from the inside and here is where we are this week:
We’ve got a 13.5-incher in there flailing around sometimes, stronger and stronger, and weighing in at more than likely a pound and a half (more when I get done with these cookies). My uterus is the size of a soccer ball and the baby is the size of a rutabaga this week. I had to look this one up because honestly I didn’t know what a rutabaga looked like. Um, holy crap. Remember when I was all, “he’s the size of a shrimp!” Cute. Now he’s the size of several handfuls of shrimp.
The crib was delivered Monday and assembled by the fine folks of Babytime in Cordova. Check out this slickness…
That’s a crib you could hitch a horse to and ride around town, tipping your hat at people and listening as they whisper behind your back about how they didn’t realize you had such means. A fine, sophisticated crib for a fine, sophisticated baby. The baby who ends up sleeping in this crib is going to judge my postpartum unshowered dissheveledness with unrelenting fury, I’m sure of it.
A fine crib! And there’s an equally fine changing table in the hall. Some day I will photograph them both properly when the room is in better shape. It’s a wreck right now.
Ray’s taking the essay portion of the bar right now. I have been a ball of nerves over his test and I know he has too. So much pressure. It will be nice for him to be done with that process (hopefully for good) because it will be neat having my boyfriend back. Maybe we will be able to go out and do things, maybe even socialize a bit. For months and months we’ve been super hermity because his head has been shoved into a book and my ass has been shoved horizontally on the couch, dozing off. Now that he will have time and brain space, I’ll be able to pull him into the baby planning stuff a bit more, which will be interesting, considering I’ve been reading all the books and doing all the research and pestering all the mommies I can pester about what we need and what we don’t, and he’s just coming into this completely blindly.
I can’t believe I’m within a few weeks of the third trimester. That to-do list is blinking in neon now. Childbirth classes start in August, and we’ve got to get on the ball about picking a pediatrician. I have read with despair on Twitter how difficult it will be lining up childcare for when I go back to work, and we haven’t really even begun to think practically about that. Getting the nursery/office switcheroo finished is paramount (after we get the walls/electricity repaired).
Here’s the belly, accompanied by sleepface, messy desk, and mussed hair:
My skin is starting to reach the point where there’s no extra give, so here comes the for-real stretching. That should be interesting. I can see from the two stretchmarks I already have that I am not the kinda gal who gets those sweet little white whispering stretchmarks. I get the very loud, angry, dark ones that I’m surprised don’t come with sound effects.
I’m getting my head to a better place today. It’s been decided. Thank you, friends, for the kickstart.
That’s a crib you could hitch a horse to and ride around town, tipping your hat at people and listening as they whisper behind your back about how they didn’t realize you had such means.
Out of all the magnificent things you have written, this may be the most magnificent sentence I’ve ever seen. SO EVOCATIVE. Also, hilarious.
So so happy that life is positively, rather than negatively, crazy again. You deserve it. (The positive, not Teh Crazy.) BTW, you’re going to get lots of hits on that hot-momma shot there; you know that, right? Eeek.
That crib is super-sweet. Convertible, too, right?
We all just want to make sure you know that we’re here and we care!