The World As We Know It.
Mood:  quizzical
Topic: Rants
This is day number 227. You're 32 weeks pregnant . . . There are 53 days until your due date! (18.9% to go)

Why on earth do I keep looking at that pregnancy calendar thingy every day? I know only too well how long I've got left, how soon the changes are coming. Soon we will meet our new baby, but there's a part of me that wants to put on the brakes and slow things down. Are we really ready for this?

Every day, in every aspect of caring for the kids, the thought lurks around every corner: Soon there will be three. As in more of them than there are of us. Folding laundry, writing the day care check every Friday, trundling the boys out to the car in the morning: All those things, very soon now, are going to increase by one child.

I'm tired. So tired. A lot of this is due to the 5:42 a.m. alarm (I always set my alarm for an "odd" time; keeping things interesting, you know) and the sheer physics of dragging around this enormous belly, I know all that, but do I have energy enough for three little ones? Arms enough to hold them all? Heart enough to love them all? I do. I know I do. But some days I feel daunted, and unsure that I am up to the task.

Matt, in particular, tears at my heart. He is the baby; he has been the baby for two and a half years. At nights we cuddle to sleep and I feel his warm little hands grasping my neck and my hair as he drifts off, murmuring in my ear about warm sleepy Matt things. Soon there will be a new baby, needing a world of warmth and cuddles and comforts of her own. Is there enough Mommy to go around?

I felt these things late in my pregnancy with Matt, but this time it's stronger. Have you ever had that feeling of anticipatory nostalgia -- already missing days that aren't quite gone yet? Our lives are about to change forever, and Julia will make our days immeasurably richer, as babies do. Soon we won't be able to remember what life was like without her. But for now, I savor the present.