healthy baby

A huge wave of relief has settled into me tonight. This pregnancy has had this unsettled feeling thus far. There was the ridiculously fast, almost unbelievable conception. Then the possibility of a "blighted ovum." The blood tests. Waiting for the hormone levels to elevate. Then fact that I'm "AMA" as the doctor put it today. Advanced Maternal Age. The chance of complications seems to skyrocket.

And even though the statistics state that everything is probably absolutely fine, I still hadn't totally settled into it. I'm such a different pregnant person this time around. I'm harried and busy, the calendar boxes all marked in Sharpie in my brain. I'm on top of it, but it takes a lot out of me. I teach my yoga class the way I always have and hurl my body in and out of plank and crow then nurse my round ligament issues in the tub later that night. It's been an adrenaline filled second trimester. My energy flies and I feel unstoppable. Then I land - thud - in my bed and can barely roll my itchy, exhausted body from side to side.

Part of me is ready to erase all of the above too as I think about all the people I know and love who can't conceive or keep a baby. All the women who would love to get pregnant as easily as I do. I am blessed in so many ways. I know this.

The other recent anxiety producing cloud has come from my girlfriend's week old baby and her unexpected landing in the hospital with pneumonia and a respiratory infection. The out-of-nowhere-ness of it all reminds me of earthquakes and drive by's and all the things that have terrified me since I was a little girl. It brings up all the recent anxiety I've had with Baby Number Two. Not so much about it having all it's digits or a lovely, functioning brain but instead with all the unknowns of his/her lifetime. How insanely vulnerable we make ourselves when we become parents. The existence of accidents. The randomness and the evil.

But I think this began as a happy post. Because it is.

I'm ready to shed all that shit. I'm ready to be in the now with this baby. I've seen him. Yes, him! This girl's girl is having a boy. And I'm thrilled.

Eliana's known all along. She calls him Edgar. Don't think we'll keep that one, though stranger things have happened.

So I'm ready to settle in. Ready to journal and kegel and visualize my birth and make silly lists of boy's names. Ready to get more in the now with it all realizing, of course, that my now is just a whole heck of a lot fuller than it was two and half years ago. Fuller with a ridiculous, unbelievable amount of love.

We leave for Mexico on Saturday for ten days. That will be followed by a blissful Christmas and New Year's right here in our humble home. We will have three weeks together, both in the holy land of siestas and sunshine and in the sweetness of our chilly mountains. As I type that I literally feel my heart rate slow. I feel myself sink into the sofa, my jaw unclench just a bit.

So full it all is. So full it will continue to be. Stay with the now. Be present. Feel his perfect feet kick. Inhale her finally clean curls. Sing to them both, song after sweet song.