Baby #3 Update: Week 35

I am desperately hoping that this is my last update, since I do them every five weeks and the next one will be written on my due date.


Hopefully, I will be sending pictures and labor stories and great news of a healthy baby boy before long.


Hopefully soon.
Hopefully.


The last five weeks have been pretty dull physically: I am growing; the baby is really lower now and kicking alot; I have no real new symptoms or complaints. I can't lie down comfortably at all so I've started sleeping on the couch. My feet and hands have started swelling by the end of the day. I have very mild heartburn (so I'm guessing the baby will have hair when he is born... the old wives' tale about hair on the baby causing heartburn proved true for the girls). I am tired of hearing myself talk about being pregnant.


Emotionally, I have had an interesting few weeks. When I hit 33 weeks, I got pretty down about the discomfort I was feeling physically and was just feeling like the pregnancy was never going to end. I was thrown a curveball having to change doctors and couldn't reconcile feeling sorry for myself versus the worry I had for my OB and his health issues. I felt like such a crybaby about the whole thing. Now that I've met all the OBs, like the new practice and feel more settled, it is basically a non-issue.


And then this week all that miserable-ness lifted.

Every day is a day closer to seeing my boy and holding him and kissing him. I am grateful, so grateful, for the lack of drama or issues or problems with the pregnancy. I am finishing up projects, organizing the room, and seeing the results of my summer's worth of work. (Quick side note about the difference between getting ready for your first and getting ready for your third: my due dates are the same day, but Michaela's room was done by Memorial Day. This baby's room will hopefully be done by Labor Day.)


And a little part of me is holding on to these last few weeks, knowing it is the last time I will feel a kicking baby inside of me, the last time I will be waddling around, the last time I will feel this level of anticipation, worry, excitement and eagerness about a new baby of ours coming into the world.


I am a little sad that this is my last time. The pregnancy years will be over for me. It's hard to believe, especially when you've drawn it out over an eight year period.


But it's okay. I am ready to move on. I can be sad about this, mourn that part of my life and go about raising my family the best I can.


So that's my story. I am hoping it all goes well. I am hoping I do not have back labor. I am hoping that he is as healthy and beautiful and precious as I imagine he is. I am hoping that I don't miss either girls' first days of school. I am hoping that God is protecting me from harm and wrapping His arms around us in this whole process.

I read an article once about giving birth, and the woman described it as the closest you get to the sometimes thin divide between life and death.


I'm not anticipating any kind of problems ... who does? But I understand the heady-ness of it; the hugeness of the moment; the crashing together of pain and joy and hope and fear and anxiety and love; how things can go terribly wrong or amazingly right; the way your body does what it is meant to do and has done for hundreds of generations before you and you are just along for the ride at that moment in time. There is a thrilling out-of-controlness to the whole thing, where you are bringing this life into the world where there was none and suddenly there he is: defenseless, full of potential, just starting this wonderful journey of life and eager to be loved and cared for. And suddenly there you are: a parent for the first or second or third time, just crushed by new love and infatuation and a sense of responsibility and abject wonder at how you and your husband, who met completely by accident at a weekend party in a college apartment hallway 14 years ago, could come together and make something as completely perfect as the baby you are now holding in your arms.

Hopefully soon.
Hopefully.