Home Stretch

I took my meditation final yesterday, and my yoga final is next week. Yoga has been such a disaster-- the class feels incredibly disorganized. Our final consists of us each demonstrating a sun salutation of our own creation, which at this point, I sometimes feel like I'm lucky just to be standing in mountain pose. Luckily I just found out my teacher will walk around the room observing us while we all do our sun salutations simultaneously. I was having nightmares about performing a solo sun salutation in front of my class. I still have so much to do for my education class, but at least I will only be on campus once a week from here on out. I feel like I can finally turn my focus to preparing for this baby to be born.

It's been interesting since this is my second baby, I should feel more prepared than I do. Because it's been five and a half years, in many ways I feel like I'm starting over. I mean, just from the practical side, we had to get all new baby gear since we'd slowly weeded out basically everything. But there are other details I just don't remember about last time. Our doula asked me this week if I felt like this baby was heavier (as a mother's sense of size is often most accurate), and I honestly have no idea. I do not remember what it felt like to be eight months pregnant. There is one huge change this time, however, which is that I am not filled with terror at the prospect of having a baby. The entire first year of Bria's life I was living on the edge wondering if we were both going to survive. And we did! I'm glad I have that piece of evidence under my belt so on tough days in the future I can remind myself, "hey, you've kept another human alive for five and a half years. you can totally do it again!" It also helps that I wanted this baby for a long time. Sam and I were flying by the seat of our pants in so many ways when Bria was born, but now we feel so ready for this little boy to join our family. It's a good feeling. It's good to know that really tough transition to motherhood will count for something.

Over the last week I've started to really assume a sense of ownership over my plans for labor, and I'm actually feeling excited about it. Everywhere I go strangers want to know when I'm due, and it's starting to freak me out that the answer is now "about a month." And I really don't love strangers inserting themselves into my business, but when the jock from my yoga class asked me how much longer I have today, he followed up with "and is everything going ok? how are you feeling?" I told him I'm feeling pretty good, and he said "yeah, well you're totally killing it."
Now that is the kind of commentary I will accept.