Coming Soon: June 3, 2009

I think you call all agree that this is the cutest picture ever taken.

When we were talking about getting pregnant, ZPJ would ask, "What if we need to move? What about your job? Will you be able to do everything that needs to be done?" And I would tell him, "Women have been having babies for millions of years. Women have had babies while working in the fields. Women had babies on the Oregon Trail. It will be fine."

Now that I'm so tired and sickly that even sitting at my desk for a day is a small, no HUGE, triumph, I'm even more in awe of the women who came before me and daunted by the task ahead of me.

But I am excited to report that I just travelled down my own personal Oregon Trail this week in the form of the annual conference that I coordinate. There are 100 presenters and over 500 attendees and dozens of volunteers and a mountain of LCD projectors, and I made it all happen! This is a trial every year, but this year I am even more proud of myself than usual because I did it all with extreme fatigue and morning sickness. Yay me!

Now I'm tucking myself in bed, because I have to get up at 7:00am. Nothing in this world could induce me to get up that early after such a long week other than one thing - our first sonogram! I am half-terrified, half-thrilled - I have been feeling for a long time like this whole experiment won't really be real until I see that little heart beating on the monitor and know that everything is going exactly how it should be. Wish me luck. I'll post pictures when I have them.

8 Weeks

This picture has been kind of blowing my mind this week. There are FINGERS. Last week there were fins. This week there are FINGERS.

Whole

With each passing week I feel more and more confident about the surety of this new journey I'm on. In the beginning I felt like I was holding on by a thin string that could snap at any moment, but now the rope is thickening and I am really grasping on tightly.

The days are passing deadly slow. I'm impatient to reach the milestones ahead and I'm struggling to appreciate the moments I'm in. I'm sure I'll look back fondly on these last weeks before my body balloons and clothes stop fitting, but right now I am desperate to fast forward into the months ahead.

Pacing

The nausea hit last week and I have been doing very little other than staring at the computer screen and wishing I were in bed. I can't think very well, and I don't move very fast, and even on the days that the nausea subsides, the fatigue kicks back in.

I keep catching myself saying, "I don't have time to be sick. I'm a busy woman. I have a lot of commitments. I need my body to keep up with my life."

But it hit me this week that its not just my body that's changing. My life is going to have to change, too. I'm not ever going to be able to work as hard as I have been the last several years. Well, I'll be working, for sure, and working hard. But it won't just be my job. I'm going to have to get ready to be working around the clock, and this month is just the first step of that.

I still have another 7 months of working on my own schedule, and I can't afford to pull back on things I've already committed to, but pretty soon I'm going to start having to say 'no'. That isn't something I've ever been very good at. Wish me luck.

The only words I ever use to describe myself these days are "hungry" and "tired". It is getting monotonous.

Hard Work

My breasts are swelling.

My heart is pumping faster.

My blood is flowing.

The small button of life inside me has tripled in size in the last week.

I'm exhausted.