Looking forward

At my baby shower yesterday (with some very cool women... I'm so grateful to my friends!) someone asked me, "What--besides, well, a baby--are you most looking forward to?"

And admittedly it wasn't hard to come up with a few things. Walking without pain? That. Yeah. Wearing shoes that don't slip on? And maybe burning the three pairs of shoes I've been wearing since Christmas? That. Definitely. Wearing my wedding rings again? That too.

But I started thinking about it another way. What am I going to miss?

"You said that when you got pregnant, you wouldn't complain," my sister pointed out last month. And yeah, when I wasn't pregnant, or was trying to get pregnant, I can't even tell you how very very much it pissed me off to hear how hard it was to be pregnant, and how much it sucked. How much a parasite that unborn baby was (oh, that one was tough to hear). I was definitely going to be a better pregnant woman and approach it with the gratitude appropriate for the situation. Right?

Ahem.

Now, clearly, I'm going to have to eat my words because I have clearly done a lot of complaining. So I will totally cop to the first part--being pregnant is hard. My body has not adjusted well to its altered center of balance, to the extra weight, to the stretching ligaments.

But you know what? As hard as it has been, as hard as it still is, pregnancy still doesn't suck.

I get to feel that baby rolling around. I get to rub my belly and feel like I could be petting my baby. I get to anticipate and share that anticipation with Andrew. I also? get to lie on the couch and ask my husband to bring me a soda. And he does. A friend on his darts team told me that she's never known a man to be as excited about his child as Andrew is. So I get to see that transformation, too. I get to see Andrew become the father he was meant to be.

That said? I can't wait to give all of that up, be mobile, and hold my baby. And see Andrew actually be the father he's become.


-----------------
Nine days of work left until my maternity leave starts. Wooo hooo!