9 days.

So here we are...9 days until my due date...3 days into maternity leave from work...and who knows how many days until we actually meet this baby...

Yes, we've entered that frustrating time of just WAITING and hoping that the baby comes soon. I'm not overly impatient yet, but I keep thinking how nice it would be just to be able to meet him and spend as much time with him as possible before I have to go back to work next school year. Truthfully, it's kind of nice to be able to stay home by myself and have some "me" time before this little guy makes his arrival...because that's been pretty rare in my life ever since Adelle was born and especially since I started teaching full time...yet at the same time I feel guilty about it. I have been feeling "guilty" that I stopped working even though I could still probably be working with no issues except being exhausted and feeling large. But the thing is that the baby could hypothetically come at any time so I didn't want to risk trying to work too late into the pregnancy. I hit 38 weeks last Friday, and so here I am on leave.

At 38 weeks, 5 days...I'm still feeling reasonably good. My biggest complaint is the lack of sleep, which I remember all too clearly from my pregnancy with Adelle and so...not too surprising. I'm definitely looking bigger in the past couple of weeks, and my fingers and feet have started to look swollen. And while I'm listing pregnancy gripes, my back aches a lot of the time. I feel like I'm almost there though!

I'm wondering if I'll have to be induced with this baby as I was with Adelle...a huge part of me was hoping that this time my body would go into labor naturally sometime conveniently just before my due date, but I guess at this point I'm pretty much resigned to feeling like that's looking less and less likely. We can still hope, but I'm choosing to be realistic so I don't get too disappointed if I'm sitting here pregnant a week from now writing another blog entry about how I'm still pregnant. ;) I guess only time will tell.

156 days.

According to a countdown on Jesse's phone, that's how many days until our baby will be born. I still have moments where it's easy to forget that this is really happening...it's still a bit surreal, and my guess is that probably always feels this way until the baby is actually here because I remember feeling the same way when I was pregnant with Adelle. Not to mention life is very full, what with both of us working full-time, somehow keeping the fridge stocked and making dinner, entertaining Delle at night, getting her wrangled into bed each night, and trying not to make the weekends so jampacked that we never get to relax on our days off. It's easy to go about my busyness. And at the same time, it's on my mind all the time...I get swept up in daydreams about the baby, about how we'll all interact and grow together as a family, about how it will feel to see Jesse holding the baby and to watch him be a daddy from the very beginning, about how I'll cope being a mommy of two, about what next school year will be like...