operation baby

Do you know what today is? Today is September 25th. The 25th. As in, 3 months from December 25th. Also known as 3 months from my due date, the date on which I have forbidden this baby from appearing any earlier. I hear most women hoping their baby appears a couple of weeks early, or at the very least right on their due date, and instead I find myself lecturing my uterus on the fine art of patience and remaining inside until I am ready for baby to emerge.

My mom bought us a tiny little countdown clock that we keep on the mantle, and I noticed a few days ago with no small measure of alarm that the clock has bypassed 100 and dropped into double digit numbers. Double digits! On the one hand, Christmas seems forever away, and I have more than enough time to finish the registry, and get Josh to paint the room, and purchase the crib, and order the dresser and the rocker, and get diapers, and do all of those things that everyone tells me don't actually need to be done before the baby is born but I feel a pressing need to complete. Yesterday, though, when I saw the Christmas display already set up and twinkling at Target, I felt a little sick to my stomach. Excited sick, but sick nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Josh skips around the house singing and alternately cupping my belly in his hands and telling baby to come "faster, faster!" because he can't wait for December to arrive. Every night he presses his hands against my abdomen as we wait for the nightly internal kickboxing show to begin, and every night he ends up sighing and telling me how jealous he is that I get to feel our baby every single day. I am so lucky, on so many levels, there is not doubt about that.

So that is what we're doing these days. I try to get my head around the idea that a baby might come home at the end of all this, and it seems impossible. Instead, I focus on cleaning out the closet, finding spaces for the junk accumulated in that room. I've discovered that the color yellow is an evil bastard, and I have 6 different 2*2 foot swatches painted on the wall to prove it, none of which match the yellow of the crib bumper exactly right. Did you know that yellow can be too green and too orange and too icy and too pale and too just plain wrong? Because I didn't. But when I asked at the paint store for a common yellow used in a nursery, the clerk just laughed and laughed. I should have known then.

Yesterday I attended a prenatal yoga class, and I'm in all kinds of pain right now. Pain in places where I didn't know I had muscles, like my ribs and my back and my shoulders. Ouch. I'll try to believe the teacher, though, when she tells me that I'm making space for my baby by stretching out my chest and doing squats. Seriously, though, OUCH.

Besides all of this, I herald the arrival of my favorite season, of course. My favorite holiday is coming up soon, and then I suspect that the days will fly by from there. I'm just trying to hold onto these last couple months before they slip through my fingers.