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There have been many past New Year’s Eve nights when I could look ahead and see no significant change for the coming year. This isn’t one of them. Even as I sit here, I feel the rolling of our baby’s arms and legs across my growing stomach and wish more than anything that I had a camera to peek in and see what she’s doing in there.  In 9 short weeks the mystery will be solved and she’ll be in our arms.  In that single digit number, our lives will be changed forever.  

On this side of the change, I feel the anxiousness of the unknown.  It’s easy to look at the life I have now, the day to day routine with my husband and three children and think “Why would I want to change this?”. Why would I want to give up the sleep-filled nights, the predictability of our homeschool days.  And not to rose-tint life at the moment.  It also includes lots of sibling fights and tedious chores that need repeating every day.  But it’s comfortable.  It’s containable. It’s known.  

But change is coming.  My body knows it and sends me the message-get ready.  Even as I drop my book in the bathtub and drift off to sleep after a day of putting the christmas decorations away, my mind still works on, picking out colors of paint and making lists of tasks to prepare the nest. I may worry over the lost “mommy time” with my 3 year old, but still I’m rearranging furniture(in my head) to fit our expanding family.

Experience is worth something though.  At the eve of each birth, I’ve felt these same fears.  And inevitably the moment arrives.  And matt and I marvel that our family ever existed without this warm, soft, beautiful, unique person that was always meant to be part of our family.

I know without a doubt that’s how I will be feeling in approximately 9 weeks.  I also know that these other thoughts will stick around til the day the miracle happens.

It’s the way this goes.

“A birth is not really the beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else’s story.”

excerpt from The Thirteenth Tale