The Readiness Is All

The lovely women of my ward threw me a baby shower last weekend, and I just got the pictures of the awesomeness, so I'm posting them. The week before my awesome aunts also threw me a shower, so between the two showers, we have an insane pile o' baby supplies now. People are amazing.

Anyway, here are the pictures of the cuteness.

Me with my cute mom!

The lovely ladies who planned the shower, my mom's counselors from Relief Society.

So many decorations and delicious foods! That diaper cake also had some awesome baby headbands.

Some lovely shower guests and gifts.

More shower guests

And still more! (Most of these ladies are from the neighborhood where I grew up.)

So many awesome people!

My friend Becky, who painted that awesome painting for the nursery, and yesterday took some pre-baby family pictures for us just for fun. I'm excited to see how those turned out.

Yep. This one.

Fruit baby! Thanks, Pinterest, and my mom.

My good friend Cate, who was first my favorite babysitter and later a good friend. She also gave us a hand-me-down bouncer the following Monday, which was awesome. She's expecting her 4th baby in August!

So hooray for the amazingness! Thanks to these people and the family/couple of friends who came to the shower the week before, our baby will be extremely well-dressed, swaddled, teethed, etc.

Okay, "reveal" is a bit dramatic, since I've posted various pictures of our mural efforts in the nursery at various times. But the time has come to post nursery pictures. I kept waiting until I finished various projects, and I still have two more I'm working on, but I'm going to post this and then I'll add the mobile and the hedgehog clock when I finish them. (The mobile just needs to be rigged up on hoops, hopefully today or tomorrow, but I'm really proud of the animals I made for it. The hedgehog clock was my request, but Eric drew the pattern and my dad is going to cut it out, so I can't make any guarantees about when it will appear. But it will be awesome.)

Anyway, here goes.

I've been feeling really stressed/sore/ready to be done being pregnant for the last few days, and the combination of these things has been sometimes making me overwhelmed/snippy/unhelpful. But I was thinking today about just how ridiculously blessed we have been, and I'm going to make a list of the things that have made me feel so very, very lucky lately. Please indulge.

• I am incredibly grateful for this new baby that's about to enter our lives. I am grateful that my pregnancy has been relatively easy (despite some major nausea early on - I still never missed a day of work or was seriously incapacitated) and has gone well. I'm grateful that my baby has been healthy and that so far my body seems to be doing what it needs to do to get ready for labor. I'm grateful that it was so easy for us to get pregnant, since I know so many people who have really struggled and really ached for a baby. I don't know why we were so lucky. 
• I am grateful that we've been able to live with my parents for the last few months as they've been preparing to serve a mission for our church. It has been so wonderful to be able to make things with my mom and go shopping with her when the nesting urges hit - plus, she feeds us, especially when I've been feeling tired/sick/excessively pregnant. I feel a little guilty about how much I let my parents take care of us, but they've been kind of amazing. 
• I am so grateful for all of the gifts and hand-me-downs that now fill our nursery. I got an incredible haul from family, friends, and neighbors at baby showers (I'm still trying to figure out where it should all go - but once I do I am taking pictures and posting all about the nursery - later this week, I promise).  I've also been absurdly lucky in the "Hey, do you have one of these? Want my old one?" department. I have a niece who is two years older than our baby, and I have bins of amazing hand-me-downs from her now organized by size in my closet, along with some other awesome supplies. My sister-in-law offered me maternity clothes hand-me-downs, which saved me TONS of money and days of hating the few maternity clothes I invested in. A friend just offered me her bouncer because someone passed one down to her, and it is beautiful and yellow and just needs a new battery. Another friend offered me a sling and a boppy, and if I can ever get down to see her, that will be amazing. I need to remember all of this when I'm getting rid of my baby stuff someday. 
• I'm grateful that Eric has been so busy with his work. Sometimes it's frustrating because he's working long hours, but most of the time he is here if I need him, even if he's working, and the fact that the business has been so busy is a huge blessing for a little start-up family business. 
• I'm grateful that I have had so many great friends who empathize with me about pregnancy and pre-parenting stress and talk to me about it ALL THE TIME so I can give the people I live with a break from my constant chatter about sleep methods and breastfeeding and round ligament pain. 
• I am grateful that I finally found some awesome, distracting books so I can stop feeling like a lump watching TV all the time when I'm feeling tired. 
• I am grateful that the doctor thinks this baby might come a little early, although I will be less grateful if he is wrong. 

1. Remember how I keep not telling people what we're probably naming our baby? (I've told some people, but most of the time when people ask I tell them we're not sure, we'll see when we meet her. But there's definitely one that is MUCH higher on the list than others.) Well, Eric makes fun of me for keeping it a big secret, but I remembered why this week. For some reason, I decided to tell an older neighbor what we were considering, and I led with "Her middle name will probably be Elizabeth or Beth after my grandma, which is also my middle name (that part isn't really a secret) and then her first name will probably be_______." And she was all, "Oh, but Elizabeth Long is a beautiful name. The syllables and everything, it's just so nice. Yes. Elizabeth Long." And I just stood there blinking at her, because yes, that's a perfectly lovely name, but that's not what we're naming her. And after months of agonizing over what we liked, a conversation on the corner is not the thing that's going to change my mind. So yeah. We'll let you all know when it's on the birth certificate.
2. Getting a haircut toward the end of your pregnancy is a great idea. Just when I was starting to feel super icky and huge, I got rid of my split ends and got some new layers, and I feel kind of awesome again. 
3. It's okay to leave slightly passive-aggressive notes on the customer comment section when you're ordering things online after waiting for weeks for the thing you ACTUALLY wanted to come in and no one every answered your email about when it might. Sometimes it means you get an apologetic phone call telling you the thing you actually wanted just came in and they will send it right away.
4. Working back-to-back 16 hours days when you are 8 months pregnant isn't as terrible as you'd think (when most of it is sitting down behind a video camera) but it will make your ankles swell so much that look like they are both sprained for a couple of days. Whoops. Luckily putting them up for a couple of days made them go back to being ankle-shaped, at least temporarily.
5. If you get to meet Sexy Sax Man when you are pregnant (which I did while I was working said 16 hour days for Mustache Power) he might offer to play for your baby. Video to come as soon as Eric has a minute to pull off some of the footage. I'm pretty sure my baby is going to have super powers now. 
6. Normally, pinterest talks me into spending more time and money on things I wouldn't normally make/think I need. This week, pinterest saved me a ton of money on nursing tank tops, because I made my own for $2.80 apiece. Thanks, pinterest. 
7. No matter how many times you explain to your husband that this time you are crying because you are pregnant and full of hormones and fatigue, not sadness, he will still try to fix the problem that is plaguing you. (E: Don't be sad! Everything is okay! Me: I'm not sad! I'm gestating!) 
8. There is no way not to feel hopeful when you go to the doctor at 35 weeks and he says you're dilated 1 cm and 50% effaced, and then you go back at 36 weeks and he says you're at 3 cm. Especially when you would really love it if your baby came a little early so that your husband can go on a business trip to Chicago 3-5 days after your due date without stressing you out that she might not have come by then or making you bitter that you just got out of the hospital and now he's leaving. No matter how hard you tell yourself that you could stay at 3 cm for weeks now, you can't help but hope this means she wants to come a little early while still being totally healthy, solving all of your problems, real or imagined. 
9. The closer you get to delivering a baby, the less you think about anything else. Sorry, blog readers.

So I was skimming through a book about a childbirth method last night, and I think the most useful things I got out of it were 1) the most comfortable way to sit when you're pregnant is "indian style" on the floor (with a pillow behind your hips especially), and 2) It's easier to squat down to pick something up than to lean over when you have a baby in there. (Not sure why I didn't figure this out on my own, but GOODNESS I've been groaning to myself every time I dropped something during the last few weeks of enormity.) I don't think those things were their main objectives, but working on the computer and getting my laundry out of the dryer were much easier today than they have been heretofore. Plus, I've been practicing abdominal breathing, so I feel like I'm in choir again.

Also, apparently I should have started practicing relaxation techniques more than 4 weeks before my due date. But I suppose the baby will get out of there regardless, so we'll get to that when it comes.