9 Glorious Months

Today is Pirate Baby's due date.

Hard to believe that he's more than a month old now.

I just thought it would be good to put down some thoughts today about how I felt about my pregnancy.


I looked forward to being pregnant for 11 years. When I discovered I was pregnant back in May, I was thrilled, of course. Having lost my first pregnancy, the thought of losing another one was terrifying. But I felt cautiously optimistic this time. As the months passed after losing the first one, I'd had the strongest feeling that I would be pregnant in the spring. And sure enough, I was right!

The timing was awkward, at best. We had decided to move to North Dakota, without ever having visited the area. While that seemed crazy enough, we would now be making the move with a baby on the way. The baby would be coming during the peak of the arctic temperatures. It was certainly nerve-racking. Surfer Pirate was going to be moving a month before we were. We had never been apart for more than a day, and now I was going to have to deal with a month of first trimester sickness and exhaustion without him.

Before he left, we were able to get an ultrasound. It was very reassuring to both of us to know there was a tiny little heart beating inside of me. We hadn't gotten that far with the first pregnancy, so knowing things were going well made the time apart a little bit easier.

The nausea was no fun, of course. Neither was the exhaustion. Most frustrating of all were the hormonal surges that made me semi-psychotic during the entire pregnancy. But through it all, there was the amazing joy of knowing there was a child growing and progressing inside of me.

After all the years of trying, I had started to feel like pregnancy was a conspiracy - that it didn't really happen. No one really got pregnant. Babies came from somewhere else. Big pregnant bellies were fake, and everyone was in on it except me. So as I progressed through my pregnancy, everything felt like a dream. I have to admit even now that I have a hard time processing where this gorgeous little boy came from.

And then I started feeling the little kicks. They were so amazing! It really is an incredible experience to have movement inside your body that isn't coming from you. Someone else is having hiccups - you feel them, but you're not having them. I could go from feeling perfectly fine to feeling incredibly nauseous just because he was pushing on my stomach. I could tell where the little hands and feet were as he would stretch diagonally across my uterus. When Daddy came home and started telling me about his day, Pirate Baby would start kicking like crazy!

I felt so incredibly lucky to finally have been blessed with a child that was half me, and half my wonderful husband. Was I right in feeling like this was a boy? What would he look like? Would he be blond and blue-eyed like his Daddy? Would he have the platinum blond hair most of the boys on my dad's side of the family were born with, or would it be red like mine was when I was tiny? Or would he take on the Native American genes that don't show in his father - dark eyes and hair? I hoped for that the most. Pirate Munchkin, being adopted, has dark hair and eyes. I don't want her to look out of place in family pictures, so it would be nice if our baby had similar features to his sister. (It looks like he may have a nice mix of both. His hair is dark blond - although I suspect it may change eventually. His eyes mostly look like they will go brown, but it's too soon to know for sure.) Would I love him the same way I love his big sister? (While it feels different to how I love her now, I think I do love him pretty much the same as I did when she first came into my life.) Would she love him, or would we have a lot of sibling rivalry? (She adores him!) Would he share our love of music? Would he have his father's mind for math? Will he be a daring little monkey, always breaking bones like his father? Or would he be more like me - loving reading and history, preferring to use his imagination to play rather than the more physical things?

But most of all, I am overwhelmed by this amazing gift. Right now, he's sleeping on his tummy stretched out across my legs. His gorgeous little mouth (his father's) is slightly parted and his little cleft chin (also his father's) is twitching while he dreams. I can't believe I get to be his mother. I get the privilege of watching him learn and grow. The eight months of pregnancy were definitely a roller-coaster, and I got quite the prize at the end of it!