Week 18: Calm

This morning Andy and I shared our first date in a long while for a pre-term consult and the "20 week" anatomy scan. Baby is healthy and perfect, and it's official: we are having a little girl! I suppose we could have trusted the DNA fragments from the labs drawn at 10 weeks, but it was nice to get a visual confirmation the old fashioned way. We also got a quick glimpse of her face in 4D, which is always a bit wild (and sometimes concerning) but this time I melted a little as she does look a lot like her brothers, oh child of mine.

A first glimpse of baby w's profile. 

The last few months have been hard. Debilitating morning sickness and exhaustion that lasted well into the 16th week, mixed-in with Fall homeschool, and muddled by the Holidays; it has felt like a marathon to me. While this pregnancy challenges me on many levels the promise of a new year, and new beginnings, seems to have come at just the right time. 

My melancholic fog lifted around Christmas, in large part due to morning sickness finally (finally!!) leaving, but also the welcome intrusion of the Holiday into what has otherwise been experienced as a repetitive and unrelenting existence for far too many months. With Andy home and family around to share help with the boys I was able to unplug from my responsibilities for small amounts of time. Finding an extra hour or two more of sleep each night was almost transformative, and the opportunity to connect with real live people—after months spent sleeping it off in bed or hermitted away inside our house—was essential to feeling human again. It's hard to mother alone, and that fact has been underscored for me, yet again, in these Fall and early Winter months.

After feeling so low for so long, the positive energy shift was palpable and I wanted—and needed—to focus it on the good and fun parts of expecting a baby: picking her name, preparing the house, buying a thing or two for her to wear. I've put my feelers out for a birth photographer, I'm looking into placenta encapsulation, and I'm considering hiring a postpartum doula. (Did you eat your placenta?! I want to hear all about it if you did.)

We are in the very last stages of securing financing for construction of our house. Permits have been pulled and everything but the final appraisal is complete. The new house won't be move-in ready before the Summer, so our baby will be born and spend her first months in our current rental, making it easy for me to prep for her arrival because we don't have a lot of space to fret over. I'm going a simple route with plans to keep her clothes in my side dresser, and a bin for diaper-change necessities on top. I'll assemble a nursing station next to the big comfy chair in our living room and, other than gifting myself with a new sling, I think that's most of what we need.

In a nesting frenzy last week I pulled down from the attic the crates of newborn clothes I'd squirreled away for future babies, and sorted through everything marked 0-6 months. I threw away quite a bit, made a bag for goodwill, and sifted through all the boy stuff to find the gender-neutral pieces. I washed two loads of preemie (so tiny!) and newborn layette, folded them, and tucked them into the little spot I've cleared space for in our bedroom. I ordered a handsome ombre banner with her name on it to hang in celebration of her arrival, since she won't have much else that is hers in our house. I intend to have everything ready by 25 weeks, just to be on the safe side, but my consult today did give me new hope and peace of mind for a normal pregnancy and birth.

Based on the context of my past pregnancies and birth history, my perinatalogist is optimistic that I'll carry to term. I've declined progesterone prophylaxis in favor of watchful waiting of my cervix and bimonthly monitoring. If at any point it begins to shorten I'll get a cervical cerclage, but hopefully that won't be needed. This approach relieves much of the immediate stresses I associate with anticipating an early birth by reducing the dreaded element of surprise because we'll have information to go off of all along the way.

For now I'm relieved to know that our girl is healthy, and that she has a good chance at a peaceful entry into the world.