Raise your hand if you're pregnant!

Well, Little Tummy Baby, Tumi, and I have officially made it to 39 weeks and 6 days of pregnancy, which makes tomorrow, March 27th, our due date! It has been a fantastic pregnancy, and an amazing adventure to watch my body change over the past nine months as LTB grew from just a couple of little cells into the watermelon-sized baby in there today.

I first learned I was pregnant in late July, and started preparing for the journey ahead...I spent the first week of pregnancy online learning everything I could about about pregnancy and the development of the little creature growing inside me. I was blessed enough to miss out on all that morning sickness badness I've heard so much about. I felt a little more tired than normal, but since it was summer and I didn't have any classes, I could just nap when I felt like it (wonderful to be a pregnant grad student!).

We decided not to tell anyone until 12 weeks along. It was fun to keep it a secret for the first trimester, but I remember feeling very excited when it was finally time to tell our loved ones we were expectant parents. Some of our friends had their suspicions, especially given my strange behavioral changes, like skipping on beer and wine at dinner parties. We had our first ultrasound on a Friday morning right around 12 weeks. It was so wonderful to see that beautiful wiggly baby on the screen! Seeing the heartbeat, nose, fingers, and toes for the first time made the whole thing feel so real; parenthood here we come!

At the 20 week ultrasound, the baby made the nurse laugh out loud because it was opening and closing it's mouth like a little guppy in addition to the normal kicking and wiggling around. I'd like to think that Tumi and I have bred a person with a quality sense of humor, so I take it as a good sign that LTB can make strangers laugh from the womb. We asked the nurse if she could tell us the gender, and she said that while it was impossible to tell for certain until the baby was born, she said it looked to her like a GIRL! I have absolutely no idea how she came to this conclusion, since the baby's legs were crossed and folded up during the whole exam, effectively blocking out the whole area-of-interest on the ultrasound. Guess we'll know if she was right any day now!

Over Christmas break, Tumi and I were married in a simple civil ceremony in Reykjavik. We decided not to try and get all of our loved ones in the same country to celebrate with us. While it would have been spectacular to have everyone together, the logistics and expense were just too much to make such a wedding a realistic option. Instead, we went to the Pacific Northwest for the holiday and had a wonderful celebration in Olalla with the State-side family and friends, and then had a beautiful party in Reykjavik when we came back for the New Year. All of this amounted to a month-long celebration, and many happy memories.

I promised myself that I would have a Master's degree before I became a parent, and I just barely made it. Knowing that I had to be finished with my graduate program before late March, I planned my research and writing for my thesis accordingly, and am proud to say that I defended on March 15th. There are a few more revisions I have to make to the final final thesis paper, which is officially due in May, but it's now safe to say that I have MSc degree in Environment and Natural Resources. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed doing the research, data analysis, and writing for the project...I am even starting to think that my next professional move might be in the PhD direction, but that is still months away, so I am focusing on motherhood at the moment.

Since defending my thesis, I have been focusing on relaxing and preparing for LTB's arrival. There has been much napping, movie-watching, fiction-reading, long walks, coffee breaks with friends, and trips to the pool filling my days. I am focusing on appreciating every second of calm, quite, alone time, since I know that these precious moments are limited to the very near future.

We decided that if all goes well, we are going to try and have the baby at home. We have two midwifes who will come and help us with the delivery, and if anything isn't going the way it is supposed to, it is comforting to know that the hospital is a five minute drive away from where we live. We've rented a birth pool, and I was pleased to learn that it is more sophisticated than the kiddie-pool I was envisioning (no pictures of colorful fish or summer beach themed images on the sides or anything!). I have nothing at all against hospitals, but don't see the reason to go to one if you don't really need too.

I am struck by the amazing power my body has to grow a new human being. Have you ever seen how complicated the circulatory system is? It's impossible to not be captivated by the magic of reproduction as you see your own body making a new life. What a blessing that all the millions of things that could go wrong and ruin the whole process don't happen. With this new amazement I have with my body's abilities, I am very excited to see what it is capable of during birth and motherhood. I am also more excited than I can possibly describe to meet the little person I've been carrying around for the past several months. LTB will come out whenever it decides it's time to come (babies are always born on exactly the right day...they always come out on their birthdays) and when it does, we are bursting with love to shower all over our new addition, and welcome it into this beautiful world of ours!