Oh my gosh, I’m so excited to share next week’s belly pic.  I obviously can’t share it yet, because it hasn’t been taken yet, but please allow me to assure you that I’m huge.  This little baby’s hit a growth spurt and my belly is riding that wave like Patrick Swayze in Point Break.

A lot has happened this week.  Wes and I started putting the decorative touches on the nursery (he’s so busy with his job search, he initially told me he didn’t think he would get any painting done. Then he committed the cardinal sin of telling me the nursery didn’t have to be done before the baby arrived. I lovingly assured him this was a lie.) and we bought and installed our carseat.

I started feeling twinges of what may be that crazy nesting hormone surge that enables gigantic pregnant women to accomplish great feats of cleaning despite seeming exhaustion and great difficulty reaching the floor.  I’ve been spending my spare time in the evenings organizing the nursery, which for me is more stressful than blissful.

You see, I love living in a clean house.  A place for everything and everything in its place.  However, organizing and assimilating new things into my pre-existing matrix of order is very difficult.  Once the system is in place I am a happy little camper and can keep that system running with very little effort.  Establishing the system, however, is hard work.

For example, the diaper bag.  How to organize it?  This endeavor feels very similar to packing my backpack for the first day of school.  Trying things in different places until it feels right.  It’s not quite right yet, but it’s close.

As for Wes, he’s shared with me an adorable anxiety of his that I’m 99% sure is a completely common fear that dads-to-be to have.  Namely, that this will happen but in reverse:

I’m fairly certain that this is not because he thinks I’m a floozy, but rather just a subconscious fear of the unknown.  I feel like I know this baby really well.  Squishy’s likes, dislikes, his favorite time of day, and his favorite position of mine to sleep in.  We’re good buddies, partners in the road to running out of room in Erika’s torso.

For Wes, however, Squishy is a bit of a mystery.  He never knows what body part he feels moving around beneath my skin, and by virtue of not being pregnant misses out on most of what makes me feel like I know our child.  Now we’ve got this big, momentous moment in our lives coming up in just five weeks, and the mystery and fear of the unknown manifests itself as anxiety that I’m going to have a baby whose father is clearly not Wes.

It’s silliness, but no more so than the anxiety dreams I have wherein I don’t know how often to change the baby’s diaper or what temperature to make his baths.

The only thing I can do is assure Wes that the baby is very definitely his and wait patiently for the day Wes gets to meet and fall in love with our son.

As for Squishy, he’s perfected this new stretch guaranteed to make me cringe.  He stretches straight up and down, so that I feel it simultaneously in both my ribs and my cervix.  I pay him back for this by gently poking his little bottom every time he sticks it straight out of my stomach.  I can spend a few minutes just chasing him around my belly.  He doesn’t care for this at all and gets very thrashy to show me how he feels about my childish behavior.

He is also getting hiccups several times a day, and these, too, make him very thrashy.  I think he gets annoyed because he doesn’t know how to make them stop, so he just starts flailing until they go away.  In this way, we’re very similar in our approaches to problem solving.