Thoughts, feelings, details

***So, so sorry about the disgraceful lack of editing and proof-reading, and for the run-on sentences and paragraphs.  I'm just afraid if I don't hurry and post this thing, it will never happen!

I hardly know how to begin documenting this pregnancy. I want to document it for me and for her, but having journaled almost nothing about it at 33 weeks along is overwhelming. I don't even have any pictures! I'll get Marty to take some tonight, I guess. Well, here are some details (and I am fully expecting this to turn into a novel).
 

Thoughts and feelings on the pregnancy:
I don't necessarily feel the need to broadcast our personal reasons behind this baby, but so many people have been bold enough to ask if this was "on purpose" that I guess I may as well set the record strait. :) So...back before I was even pregnant with Gabe I had the feeling that babies number three and four should be close together. Then the awful pregnancy came on and the feeling still never went away. Finally by the very end of the pregnancy (I was so crippled!) and with the rough post-partum stuff I tried to shove that feeling away, but I wasn't really fooling myself. By the time Gabe was about six months old Marty and I were talking timelines and decided we wanted a summer baby. That meant Gabe and baby number four would be about 17 months apart at the very closest, and if a summer baby didn't work out we'd just go from there. Well, it worked out! Baby #4 is due May 5th, and we couldn't be more thrilled! We certainly feel blessed (like...overly so!) that everything worked out the way it did.

 

 I’ve been hearing a lot of “you’re crazy!” and “you’ll be BUSY!”  But the truth is, I want to be busy doing this!  I want my hands full with this mommy lifestyle.  I’ve never felt so invested in something or never felt like what I was doing was so important.  And I just plain love it.  Most of me never wants my little ones to grow up (holidays are going to be so boring without them!) although part of me looks forward to those phases, too.  It’s funny.  I was never the little girl who loved playing with baby dolls, and I was never that teenager to swoon over the new babies at church.  And through a lot of college I had my mind drifted more often towards a career than a mom.  Who knew Emily was the type?  I never suspected the lifestyle would agree with me so much!  Ok, this is not to say I don’t get to the end of some days and cry my eyes out and say it’s too hard, and wonder what on earth I was thinking having any kids at all.  To be honest, I probably feel overwhelmed more often than not and am overcome with the stupid “mommy guilt” of I’m not cutting it as their mom.  They are special kids and deserve “the best”, and I rarely feel I can give them “the best.”  I’m too busy picking my worst attributes as a mom and comparing them with whoever has a handle on those attributes “the best.”  I’m trying to quit, though. J  But I have never ever had the thought that my kids could be any more loved in any other house.  That should count for something, right?

 

Details on the pregnancy:
33 weeks, due May 5^th, feeling pretty ok.  I’m trying really hard not to complain about the small things in this pregnancy, because, miraculously, the big issues I’ve faced before aren’t there!  This is the first pregnancy where I’ve never thrown up.  In the first trimester, I felt nauseas pretty much all the time and had to really stick to my silly routines and diets in order function.  But I {somewhat} managed to keep my act together and wait until the end of the first trimester to announce anything.  Although the nausea lessened somewhat, it didn’t go away until about 18 or 19 weeks, which has been typical of my last two pregnancies.  I really thought this baby was a boy at first.  Having hyperemisis throughout my entire pregnancy with my girl and not with my boys, I had somehow convinced myself that I was done having girls and that Heavenly Father wouldn’t have the heart to put me through that experience again. J  I always said if I had another pregnancy like Brynn’s, it would be my last, whether that meant two kids or 12 (I’m not having 12 kids, btw).  Anyway, with my two boys, pretty much immediately following the end of the morning sickness, the SPD would begin and would get so severe that the pain would make me cry pretty much every day and every night and I’d ask Marty to carry me upstairs in the evening.  Well, at 20 weeks I wasn’t feeling the SPD and thinking that was kind of strange since my dr. told me that it would just get worse and come on earlier with each subsequent pregnancy.  I was feeling some of the pain, but it sort of just felt like the leftovers from the last pregnancies.  So that’s when I started thinking this one could be a girl, because I didn’t have the SPD with my girl.  So really…I had no idea what to think and just asked Brynn.  She tends to be right about these things.  She said it was a girl, so that’s what I went with even though I had irrationally decided I wasn’t having anymore girls.  And for the third strait time, she was right.  Poor little Bryce cried at the ultra-sound, he wanted it to be a boy.  Although Marty is convinced he was just crying because he was wrong and Brynn was right so she got to pick where we went to go get ice cream. J  I had a really amazing second trimester, and the third has certainly come in with a bang!  I’ve had TONS of contractions, which I am not at all accustomed to.  This is my first pregnancy with regular back pain.  I’m sore lots of places, but the miracle is that it is all manageable.  The anxiety I felt with Gabe hasn’t been as bad, the heartburn hasn’t been as bad as usual.  As I said, there are just the normal pregnancy discomforts that we all just gotta feel.  I can walk, I can eat, and therefore, I cannot complain.  (Ok…actually I keep complaining about being up EVERY HOUR at night – literally – to use the bathroom, but that’s probably way TMI.) She is a pretty calm baby and plays nice in there.  No hard kicks to the rib cage yet, just gentle reminders that she is there and she is coming!  I am so busy with my other little ones running around, I can’t wait until I go to bed and I can just lay down enjoy feeling her moving around.  Never. Gets. Old.  

 

The pregnancy and our family:
This pregnancy is definitely a family affair.  Marty says at least once a day, “I’m home, use me!”  And I do.  A small part of the reason I wanted to have this baby as soon as I did was just to get the pregnancies out of the way.  I don’t at all want to get the babies “out of the way,” but the pregnancies, yes.  I’d love it if my kids could have little to no memory of Mommy being pregnant because I’m just not…the best version of myself when I am.  And sometimes it makes me feel bad for my kids that I can’t always do as much for them as I normally would.  But I’m realizing this is actually a wonderful opportunity for them to step it up.  They’re good kids, capable of so much, and I want them to be responsible.  This is my chance, I suppose.  Brynn is slowly learning how to cook very simple breakfasts and dinners.  She has perfected breakfast parfaits.  She feels so grown-up reading the recipe I made her and takes so much pride in them.  And last week there was a day we weren’t going to see Marty at all and I was on the phone with him saying I was putting off getting off the couch to make dinner.  Brynn overheard that I guess, and the next thing I know she is pulling chicken nuggets out of the freezer and putting them in the oven, setting the table, getting everyone drinks, and putting carrots on everyone’s plates.  When I got up to turn the oven on she said, “Oh Mommy, you have been working too hard.  You need to get back on the couch!”  Marty has that girl TRAINED.  Apparently he gave her a talking to about telling Mommy to sit down if she starts working too hard and that funny girl does not back down!  Then tonight I mentioned to Marty that I had forgotten to bring the groceries in from earlier that day (good thing it was only produce) and the next thing I know Bryce is hefting the grocery bags in from the van without me even knowing he had overheard the conversation.  It’s such a wonderful feeling (and a relief) to know that everyone in this family is invested in this pregnancy.  Every one of us is excited about this pregnancy and everyone wants to be a part of it.  And what is it like being pregnant and having my other baby to take care of as well?  In some ways it’s easier than I expected, in other ways it’s harder.  I didn’t expect Gabe to still be sleeping 12 hours at night and taking TWO naps during the day.  It’s great though, I REALLY rely on those two naps.  Especially because he refuses to walk!  He can do it, he’ll take 20 steps at a time sometimes, but then sits down and starts crawling again.  Our other two were walking at 12 months, so when we planned out this baby I was thinking, “Hey, it’ll be fine, Gabe will be walking by my third trimester.”   But no.  So Gabe has had to feel the effects of this pregnancy, too.  It’s just too hard on my body to carry him around all the time (as much as I honestly love to).  So I took a week, a traumatic week, and trained him hard on a few things.  But he’s actually a pretty adaptable baby and learned the new routines pretty fast.  I no longer carry him up the stairs at all.  I set him down at the bottom and motion for him to follow, which he usually does happily, but sometimes requires drama.  And I no longer hold him at all – ever – in the kitchen.  I normally didn’t mind preparing some of the meals with him on my hip, but it became impossible to do that anymore and he is understanding.  Usually when I cook he plays outside or goes through the plastic cups cupboard and sometimes he still hangs on to my legs and cries to be held.  But I don’t do it.  I thought I might feel bad about Gabe being “the baby” for such a short amount of time, but I really don’t.  I don’t think I could have enjoyed that sweet, calm, snuggly baby any more than I have.  He’s lived a pretty cushy life. J 

 

Probably one of the hardest parts of the pregnancy was facing the reality that I would have take a hiatus from teaching piano.  I so love it, and feel it’s such an important part of my identity, and I feel horrible leaving my students in a lurch like that.  But with all the crazy responsibilities Marty has had lately, plus all my own responsibilities to my three (well, four)  little ones, there was just too much.  I’d hardly see Marty at all during the week.  I’d teach until bedtime, put the kids down, run around trying to accomplish everything that should have been done that afternoon and evening, then Saturday came and it was a blur of projects and errands and scouts and whatever and then I had overdone it so much that week I was sick on Sunday.  I was literally sick four Sundays in a row and I just really felt like it was because I was overdoing it during the week.  So, we had to pick some things to go.  Since really none of Marty’s stuff could go, it had to come down to kids stuff (like sports teams) and piano lessons.  I cried for days just feeling sick about it all – knowing it had to happen but unable to force myself to break the news to my students.  But after a very calming blessing from my wonderful husband I knew it had to be done and it would be ok.  And it has been.  Although I have to say that after seeing a kid every week for years you become so attached, and I miss them already.  Sigh. 

 

I keep getting asked about baby names.  I have no idea what we are going to do.  We have a list a mile long of boy names that we both love and would be happy using, but we can’t seem to agree on a girl’s name.  I suspected this might be the case ever since we named Brynn (which is my middle name).  That is the only name we really loved and I think we just kind of knew from the very beginning that she should be a Brynn.  And here we are six years later still unable to find any other girl names we agree on.  We each have our very favorite which the other isn’t crazy about, so we finally went back to the drawing board and put together a list we can take to the hospital.  I’ve had so many people talk about refusing to settle on a name until they see the baby.  But we settled early on with Brynn and Bryce and waited until the hospital to name Gabe and it was REALLY STRESSFUL.  So usually when people ask what names we want I ask them to help me out and contribute a few nice names.

 

Well Baby Girl, I’m sorry I waited so long to write all my thoughts and feelings and details surrounding your presence.  I love you and I hope this NOVEL makes it better.