Now

I spent a lot of the last year living in the future. I was always thinking nine months ahead: "If I get pregnant this month the baby will be due in..." It actually got me confused about the dates, and I would catch myself thinking fall was right around the corner, when we had just celebrated Christmas. Several times I tried to shake myself out of that way of thinking, tried to make myself focus on right now. On living my life, pregnant or not. Of not putting things on hold for something so uncertain.

For a few weeks I was able to concentrate very much on the present. All I could think of was the fact that at last I was pregnant and hope that the pregnancy would last just another day; of what I could eat that wouldn't make me sick; of when I could get in another nap.

Now that we're a little more confident, more convinced that ClearBlue Easy wasn't lying when it flashed the word "pregnant" on the screen, I'm back to living in the future, forgetting to concentrate on now. I am so excited to meet this baby that I forget to appreciate this time right now. This last time of just Brian and me, just ourselves together. This time with my body going through amazing changes.

A few weeks ago I woke up in the night to a spectacular thunderstorm, with one roll of thunder beginning before the previous had ended and bolts of lightning flashing across the sky. At first I lay there thinking about the baby and what our lives would be like during next summer's thunderstorms. And then I sat up in bed, watching the trees thrash outside, throwing rain against the window, and I thought about how just a few hours before I had heard the baby's heartbeat at my prenatal appointment for the very first time. I realized that I didn't have to wait until this winter for him to be real. He already is.

The details

Judging by some of the emails I'm getting, my last post lacked certain details that some of you deem essential information. So:

• I am about four months along.
• Sticky is due on New Year's Eve (although family history says that means that this is a mid-January baby).
• I'm feeling fine. I had morning sickness (which really ought to be called "all fucking day sickness") for about a month, but it was relatively non-pukey. Now I've got a bit of a backache and some sciatica that comes and goes. The pregnancy books all indicate that these are problems that arise later in pregnancy. I have come to the conclusion that I am therefore some sort of pregnancy prodigy. And that whoever invented the Snoogle should be nominated for sainthood.
• I am not really showing yet. I just look like I've been eating too many donuts. And for awhile there I was (vegetables made me sick, but donuts never betrayed me), so maybe that really is the problem.
• We don't know if we're having a boy or a girl yet, but we will definitely find out, so we can all start gender stereotyping to our hearts' content. We don't have much preference either way (although my intuition is boy), but if Sticky's a girl, she is totally going to have ruffles on the butt of her first Giants fanwear.

Does that about cover it?

A little bit of news

One night at dinner, probably over a year ago, I mentioned to Brian that I thought one of our friends was dating someone new.

"What makes you think that?" he asked.

"I read it on the internet."

And we laughed at the funny world we live in where you read your friends' blogs or journals or whatever you want to call them and find out what's going on in their lives. It's funny and kind of weird, but it also just makes things so easy.

Sure is a convenient way to let folks know that we're having a baby, don't you think?