When my due date was pushed back to September 30, I was disappointed for the obvious reason of knowing that I might have to wait longer to meet Annika. And also…you know – I’d have to be pregnant longer.
Lee was disappointed for another reason.
“I want to be able to say I had all my kids before I turned 40,” he admitted. And who can blame the guy, right?
Today my husband hits a milestone birthday, and I have to say – he wears 40 well.
I am 40 shades of thankful for this man. Last night I approached my first new-baby meltdown moment. After only 5 hours sleep in almost three days, I was so tired I physically couldn’t keep my eyes open. He whisked the baby out of my arms and took her to the other room, and though I didn’t sleep much, I was able to rest enough to get through the night as I listened to him croon his love for his new daughter.
I love being married to Lee Stuart. After fourteen years together, he still makes me laugh every day. He and I could not be more perfectly suited, and yes, sometimes we drive each other crazy, but mostly we just have a lot of fun.
There are so many things I want to say, so many ways I want to honor this husband of mine, but new-baby-lack-of-sleep-recuperating-from-childbirth-birth syndrome has left my brain fried. So I will simply leave it at this:
I am beyond blessed, and it all starts here with this man. He’s funny, kind, wise, brilliant, kinda dorky and, according to Tia, REALLY COOL!
Happy Birthday to the love of my life, and the father of my four babies.
I kept on swimming, friends. Right into labor and delivery. Our daughter, Annika Rachel, was born yesterday at 4:32. The labor was a different one for me. But that’s another story for another time. Right now I’ll just share a few pictures. They aren’t great pictures, mind you. I haven’t had the wherewithal to try and create perfect photos just yet.
But that day’s coming because I have a closet full of RIDICULOUS hair bows waiting for this child.
Thanks for all the encouragement after my last post. I survived pregnancy! I’m not pregnant anymore.
I’ve never been what one might call “patient.” I was the kid who snooped for Christmas presents (maybe even unwrapping and rewrapping the gifts a time or two. Sorry, Mom…) While I enjoy surprises, I don’t like knowing a surprise is coming then having to wait for it. That’s just mean.
When a big event is coming, I feel nearly tortured with the wait. A holiday, a big trip, a life event, you name it, and I’m most likely bouncing up and down in anticipation.
This means that the end of a pregnancy is just short of torture.
What makes these last few weeks even more torturous is that there is no real set time. I could go in to labor tomorrow, or in two weeks. I don’t know. THIS MAKES ME INSANE!
And by insane, I mean angry. Imagine the Incredible Hulk in the final stages of pregnancy.
HULK SMASH!
Now, logically, I know that I should cherish this time. Right now life is still easy. The kids are in school all day, and I have free time to accomplish things. We can still easily get from here to there, and I don’t have to worry about juggling feeding and nap schedules as long as she remains nestled snug in my womb.
I am working on a new book, and still trying to pitch my novel, and I have time to focus on both those endeavors right now. This is good! I know the logical arguments for why I should be cherishing this time.
So why am I so frustrated?
First, I blame hormones. I can already feel those wily little chemical imbalances toying with me, pushing me into tearful escapades over silly little nonsense.
Incidentally, NERF guns should be banned from planet earth when one is at the end of her pregnancy, because NERF guns with all their clicky loudness and insanity inducing bullet shooting are enough to turn ANY hormonal pregnant woman into the Incredible Hulk.
HULK SMASH!
Second, I’m just uncomfortable. My hands and feet are swollen. I can’t sleep. I see a million things that need to be done (that I have the time to do), but they’re hard because I have a 20 pound bowling ball protruding from my gut.
Finally, I’m just impatient. I want to meet her. I’m ready to move to the next phase in our family. I’m ready for the nighttime feedings and the crazy, because clearly I operate better under crazy than I do under being stalled.
Some days, I approach full on HULK SMASH mode, overflowing with frustration at all of the world. And it’s so silly, really, because I know – I KNOW – I should be grateful. This is the last time I’m going to do this pregnancy thing. I want to cherish it. I’m trying to cherish it.
So I’m working on channeling my inner Dory, which is so much more pleasant for everyone around me than my inner Incredible Hulk.
There’s no point to this blog post. None. No lesson to be gleaned. No wisdom to be imparted. I tried to think of a really cool way I could turn it around and offer you something deeply profound about motherhood and life, maybe even relating it to creativity.
But I’ve got nothin’.
All I can say is that as you and I head into our weekends, let’s just keep swimming. Swim right on through this crazy life with all of it’s joys and frustrations. Let’s channel our inner Zen, avoid the dreaded HULK SMASH, and swim the heck out of this life.
Aren’t you glad you stopped by this place for a visit today?
Because I am so near the end of this pregnancy, I am what you might call…um…large. Great with child? My eleven year old says I’m HUGE. He’s learning tact.
Most nights are, to put it bluntly, completely miserable. I fall asleep quickly, and I sleep well until somewhere between 2:00 and 3:30, at which point I might as well just start getting out of bed and calling it day. Instead, I toss and turn, and mumble about the wicked heat, despite the air being turned as low as my husband will allow it, and a fan pointed directly at my face.
When morning finally rolls around, I try to pull myself out of bed with a good attitude, but generally my first thought is, “Well thank God that’s over.”
Then I suck it up, act like a big girl, drink a little coffee, and move on with my day.
Such is life. We don’t always get what we want, and sleep is overrated anyway, really. Who needs it?
(I do. I really do.)
I’ve also got a To-Do list that’s a half mile long, with two-thirds of it probably residing somewhere on the unrealistic side. Nesting is no joke, you guys. Last week, I took out the strongest cleaner I could find and washed my front door.
I WASHED my FRONT DOOR.
Add that to the list of ridiculous things I feel like I need to finish before baby arrives and you get a small picture of the crazy that is surrounding most of my days. Feel free to pray for my family as they deal with me.
The cherry on top of all of it is my desire to keep creating. I was in a creativity groove this summer, and I love it. I poured myself into my creative pursuits, writing and dreaming up ideas. I started new projects, and continued to push forward on completed projects. I published an ebook, sent out countless queries for my novel, started the proposal for a new book, and wrote blog posts for several different sites.
It was so much fun! My writer heart felt very fulfilled.
Now, however, the time to create has begun to taper, and I know that when the baby arrives there will be a period of time when it stops altogether. Fatigue plays a role in this lack of creativity, as do all those other tasks I want to accomplish. I’m still setting aside some time to write, but not as much as before.
And that is okay.
Living this life as a creative is a constant balance of knowing what I need to do and what I want to do. We creatives tend to be our own worst critics, never feeling like what we do is enough, but in the pursuing of our art, we can so quickly forget to live.
A couple of weeks ago, the kids and I watched the movie Hook and I was struck by the last line of the film. Granny Wendy looks gently at Peter after he returns from the grand adventure in Neverland.
“So,” she says. “Your adventures are over.”
“Oh no,” he replies. “To live – to live would be an awfully big adventure.”
In the quest to accomplish and finish and do, it’s really easy to forget to live. Stepping away from the To-Do list long enough to swim with my children is not a waste of time – it’s living.
Putting aside the writing for today so that I can focus on preparing for the arrival of my daughter is not a waste – it’s living.
Enjoying a game night with my family instead of folding and putting away that laundry is not a poor use of time – it’s living. (And let’s face it – who wants to do laundry anyway, Amirite?!)
It’s all part of the adventure.
So this one is for all the creatives who feel like there just isn’t enough time to create. Don’t be afraid to set it all aside for a little while. Don’t be afraid to live, because to live is the grandest adventure of them all.
As we close in on the due date, sleep is naturally elusive. Thanks to the heat, I am swollen and uncomfortable, and I am apparently carrying a tiny little radiator because I cannot cool off to save my life.
Incidentally, I also told my midwife yesterday that I think I might be carrying an octopus because I swear there are eight legs kicking me from every single angle in there. She was a new midwife. She doesn’t get my humor. She told me I probably wasn’t carrying an octopus.
If I birth a squid she will be sorry she didn’t believe me…
With sleepless nights come some unreasonable emotions. Being that this isn’t my first rodeo, I know what to expect, and I am offering myself a little bit of grace these days as I prepare to bring our baby girl (octopus?) home.
The other night, I woke up at 3:30. This is par for the course, but as I tossed and turned, a nagging worry began rolling through my heart. It bubbled soft at first, then quickly grew until I was in full blown panic.
Usually I wake up because the baby is playing Tetris in my ribs. This time, however, I noticed that I couldn’t feel her moving. She was very still, and that is unusual. Suddenly the silence of the night and the darkness that surrounded got the best of me, and I feared the very worst.
I never worried about losing a child in utero with my other three. Of course I knew it was a possibility, but I didn’t exercise a lot of mind power on thinking about it, because I didn’t really think it could happen to me. I also had never read a blog, nor been on Facebook the first three times I was pregnant.
I birthed my first three children in the dark ages. We were still using film (FILM!) when Sloan was born.
In the six and a half years since I last had a child, I’ve read countless heartbreaking stories of families losing children late in their pregnancies. It’s much more of a reality to me now and, naturally, more of a concern. I know I don’t need to worry, but again, darkness and fatigue are a wily combination.
I finally got up and drank a little orange juice, then pushed on my belly a little until I felt her shift. She’s not moving as much as she used to due to the fact that there is no more room in there. The Inn is full! It’s time to move on, little one.Thankfully, the shifting set my heart at ease long enough to let me go back to sleep. But the fear was waiting for me when I woke back up.
Having already walked with my older kids through a terminated adoption, I feel more emotion than I know how to communicate at the idea of them experiencing another loss. It nags in the back of my mind, and as I wake each morning I have to lay all those fears to rest. Already, before she’s even born, I’m relinquishing the control over her tiny little life. She is not mine, but merely a gift from God. I will trust Him, and I know I will continually have to lay down this fear throughout her entire life.
I know, because I have to do it with the other three.
I know, because I still pray for the little girl sitting in an orphanage in Russia who had a family ready to meet and love her.
Part of being a mother is dealing with the natural worry that comes with the territory, and with the onslaught of stories passed down through social media, we’re faced with the reality of those worries on a daily basis. So each day begins with a prayer for their safety, and with the relinquishing of control, because I am not in control.
I spent a little time in her nursery this morning. It’s peaceful in there. The colors are soothing, and the room is clean (for now), which makes it the only clean place in the house (for now). As I sat on her bed, I felt her shift and move again, and I was grateful for the reminder that all is well, and I am not in control.
God has been Gracious and Merciful to our family over the last three years. They have been hard years, but He has been faithful. I am trusting in His Grace and Mercy to bring this little girl (squid?) into our family safely (and soon! Oh please, soon!). So when the darkness closes in, and the world becomes still (too still), I will embrace the knowledge that He is Gracious, He is Merciful, and He is in Control.
And I will quit complaining when she jabs me in the ribs, because that feeling is evidence of the blessing.
I didn’t get to decorate a girly nursery for Tia. We never really expected to have a girl, what with the generational pattern of Stuart men only producing boys and all. And since we didn’t find out her gender ahead of time, I operated under the assumption that she would be a boy.
We had a boy name picked out, and I had washed all of our boy clothes and put them in the drawers, so certain that we were going to bring home another little man.
To say we were shocked in the delivery room is putting it mildly.
The best I could do after she was born was buy some girly bedding, but other than that, I didn’t attempt to girlify the nursery, because I knew we weren’t done having kids and I figured we wouldn’t strike the X-Chromosome gold twice.
Can I just tell you how much fun I’ve had putting this little girl’s nursery together?! The amount of cuteness that accompanies decorating a girl nursery is hard to put into words. And the funny things is, I don’t even like to decorate! It gives me hives. Thankfully, I have friends who like to decorate, and who aren’t intimidated by Pinterest. Those friends helped me pull together a nursery that I have come to love.
The aqua paired with the coral makes me ridiculously happy. In fact, I love it so much that I’ve decided next year I’m going to do Tia’s room in similar colors because every time she walks in, she lights up as well. What is it about these colors that makes our girl hearts swoon?!
One of my favorite touches in the room is the bird cage hanging in the corner. My friend Tiffany sent me a picture on Pinterest and all but ordered me to find and hang a bird cage. I mentioned that I don’t enjoy decorating, right? So the idea of hanging a bird cage was a bit intimidating. But when I saw this cage hanging in an antique shop last week, I couldn’t resist. I bought it.
My husband is utterly baffled by this choice in decorating. His exact words were, “Hanging a bird cage without a bird in it is like buying a car without an engine. It doesn’t make sense. You’ve gotten too liberal in your decorating.”
Given that this statement comes from the same man who doesn’t believe in buying clothes from Target, I took his comment with a grain of salt and moved forward with my liberal decorating.
One of my other favorite little touches was finally getting to hang these two drawings. Three years ago, right after we moved to Florida, I had the opportunity to travel to Hollywood for the Red Carpet showing of The Lion King in 3D. While on that trip, we got to meet two of the Disney illustrators, Mark Henn (Supervising Illustrator of most of the Disney Princesses, and of Simba from The Lion King) and Tony Bankroft (Pumbaa’s Supervising Illustrator). Each of the bloggers on that trip went home with unique sketches of Simba and Pumbaa drawn by these talented illustrators.
I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to hang them ever since!
The room is, at this point, completely done. I don’t know that I’m going to hang anything else on the walls except for one more sign that we will get after she’s born. I like having some open space because it makes the room feel bigger and brighter and cleaner.
I am fairly stocked up on diapers at this point, and the teeny little dresses hanging in the closet?
I die.
So at this point, the only thing we have left to add to this baby room is…
