The home stretch

So my due date is this Sunday. For those of you thinking “well, that came quickly” all I can say is join the freaking club. This pregnancy has absolutely flown by. It’s like one minute I was seeing two lines on the pregnancy test and the next I’ve turned into this:

I was reading this post today and it actually made me feel pretty good to realize that since I wrote it Mike and I have gotten our act together and actually feel more or less prepared to bring this little one home. He has somewhere to sleep (even though I’m still not done decorating it):

And, thanks to the generosity of so many people, we now have pretty much anything we could need or want in the way of baby stuff. I know I shouldn’t be shocked by all the ways that people have reached out to us during this time since our friends and family are truly the cream of the crop, but it has still come as a most pleasant surprise every time someone has thrown me a shower, turned up with a gift, or simply checked in to see how I’m feeling and if I need anything. Just yesterday my pilates teacher came to class with a bag full of gifts for our baby and the sight of it nearly brought my hormonal self to tears. People are rad.

(I'm a Young Women's leader in my ward and the girls threw me a surprise shower a few weeks ago. I was so impressed by the diaper cake they made that I took a picture.) 

But as the number of items on our “to do” list has shrunk significantly, the time that I’ve been able to spend mulling over how this change is going to impact our lives has increased. And for someone as prone to sentimentality as myself, the best word I can use to sum up the emotions I’ve been feeling lately is bittersweet.

On one hand, I’m so excited for this new phase of our lives to begin and to have our own little family. I realize that we have been extraordinarily lucky in the timing of this event—it didn’t happen before Mike and I were ready and we didn’t have to wait long once we decided it was time to add a baby to the mix. We’ve had four and a half years of marriage in which we were able to finish school, find jobs, remodel our home, do a bit of traveling, and just enjoy all the different aspects of newly married life.

But now that this time as just the two of us is coming to an end, I feel myself clinging to each little moment like it’s the end of a carefree era. This past week has been filled with ordinary happenings like running errands together, meeting up with Josh and Heather for snow cones, watching crappy TV shows with our sister wife Megan, going to book club, having dinner and testing out a homemade gelato recipe with Masha and Matt, etc., but suddenly all those things seem so precious and final—like I will do them again but never in the same way.     

 (Butch did not want to cooperate. He thinks taking pictures of food is the epitome of hipster nonsense).

I know this all sounds a bit dramatic, but I’m hoping that we can be the kind of parents that find a way to merge these two halves of our lives; that even though our days of last-minute camping trips or midnight movies might be over for a little while, that doesn’t mean we can’t still go on hikes, spend summer weekends at Bear Lake, or hang out with all the great friends we have made over the years. We might show up at Cup O Sno with a diaper bag in hand, and a stroller and pack-n-play will now be part of the baggage we check in at the airport, but that also means that there will be a little person around to keep things interesting.  And even though a part of me is panicking about our lives never being the same as they are right now, I'm beginning to think that maybe having a little sidekick to share our adventures with might just make them even better. 
Unless our kid ends up being really annoying. Then we're just screwed.