sum, sum, summertime!

breakfast beignets!

That’s almost always the first question anyone asks when they find out a woman is pregnant, right? I waver back and forth between whether it’s “no big deal” to wait until delivery day to find out the baby’s sex and being on the edge of my seat. I personally have gone from being certain one way or the other at least four times. I’ve had two random women tell me it’s clearly a boy by the way I’m carrying – whatever that means. My supervisor is sure it’s a girl, and my nanny has gone from confident it’s a girl, to a boy, to pure despair that she has no idea. But I’m not anxious about it, or worried about having what we need for a specific sex; instead, I am just super, duper excited to see who joins the fam. And I get more excited about it the closer I get to my due date. We have a nice long list of names picked out for both sexes at this point; there’s gotta be a winner in there somewhere.

We’ve got a couple birthdays coming up in the family – Kraemer’s and Calder’s are within days of one another once we hit the end of June. I’ve been thinking of it for months but have never really felt the energy to plan and was also never sure whether I might have a newborn by then. I’m feeling more confident in a term baby at this point, but that could still mean delivery the first week of July. Even if I get up the energy to plan a party, the question is finding the time. There are still things on my to-do list from 1.5 years ago (no joke.) I’m assuring myself that as long as I provide a cake, regardless of whether there are guests (DC folks? Cake, anyone?), I’ll have met my duty. Calder won’t complain, right? 

kickin' it

Calder is still communicating primarily through some sign language and a lot of “ee-ing.” He regularly signs things like, “sorry,” “please,” “more” and has a few others up his sleeve, like “ball” and other things he may encounter throughout the day. He says “Cr-cr” for cracker and says “ga-ga” for, well, just about everything. He’s 23 months – I guess something like 19 adjusted. I’m not worried, and I don’t really plan to start worrying (can you *plan* your worrying?) until he’s 3ish. Even so, we are switching the speech therapist currently seeing Calder through the Strong Start program; this was precipitated more because our new nap schedule does not coincide well with the current therapist’s availability than anything else, yet I’m interested to see what a different therapist’s approach looks like and whether it engenders more progress than the last.

intro to swinging (as baby swing intro did not go so well)

patio surgery

beach boys tribute on the water

I have officially made it further in my pregnancy than before; passing the 24-week mark felt rather surreal! At the time, it felt a little bit as though I was embarking on an entirely new journey because, well, in some respects, I was. I’ve said before that though it surely sounds funny, there was a sadness that came with Calder’s early delivery that was separate from the anxiety and despair and …. well, all that stuff… that came from the scariness of being in the NICU. There was also this mourning I was doing for my pregnancy. I was sad I was no longer providing the safe, warm womb where my child could continue to be properly nurtured and sad that I did not have that little companion for as long as I had expected to – I always say, expectations are everything! So this time, despite all the “fun” side effects that come with the third trimester, where at times I will admit that, like any “typical” expectant mom, one who has not birthed a micropreemie, YES! Yes, I do sometimes feel eager for delivery day so that I can just be done with this pregnant body of mine! On the other hand, my (somewhat) atypical perspective serves to keep me in check, and I will endure as happily as possible whatever my body decides to throw at me.

Last pregnancy we did not have time to do a lot of things, one of which being a childbirth class. I’m quite sure it’s not necessary, that plenty of women deliver plenty of babies without doing any research prior to pushing, but as I’ve tried to explain to Kraemer when justifying the pending bill, there is more to it than pushing and Dad playing catch. We make decisions on most big purchases together, but I told him he didn’t get to fight me on this one. I expect that it will give me some peace of mind, along with information on things I don’t even know I don’t know, not to mention on a few questions I have related to epidurals, things specific to delivery at our hospital, etc. Or at least let’s hope so, or I’ll never hear the end of it from my husband. J