Hope everyone is doing well. The leaves are changing here, and we're switching to our flannel sheets (although Justine is consistently hotter than Nate now; when they say "bun in the oven" it's more about the mom being an oven than the kid being a bun). For so long we've been talking about our autumn baby, and the cool weather makes everything seem much closer.
Time is a very strange thing when you are pregnant, and we thought that we would use it as a framework for talking about the pregnancy itself. Before getting pregnant, Nate and I and most of the people we spent time with measured things in YEARS. In fact, in the last few years, we'd been more lax than that, having to actually do math to figure out how old we were because we weren't paying that much attention. We gave weight to important birthdays like 30, but pretty generally measured time by the calendar year and when we got close to birthdays.
Once you start talking about having kids and planning a pregnancy, things start to be measured in MONTHS. As in, if we got pregnant right now, our baby would be born in (count back three months) July. Or I wouldn't be able to get X-rays done at the dentist for nine months. Or let's stay on birth control for a little while longer because nine months from now will be X event or time of the year.
Then, once you get pregnancy, time switches into WEEKS. First, the pregnancy itself is 40 weeks, which, when you think about it, is more than 9 months. And when you're nauseous and exhausted, you feel like someone lied to you just a little bit and this thing has just gotten a little longer than you signed up for. It's difficult that so much of the roughest time during pregnancy is before you start showing, so you feel tired and gross but don't have much to show for it yet. At least later in the pregnancy, when you get bigger, people let you cut in line.
Here are a few photos and corresponding weeks:
13 Weeks
21 Weeks
25 Weeks
32 Weeks
36 Weeks
Anything after 37 weeks is considered term labor, and they let the baby come as long as there are no warning signs. Our pregnancy has been low-risk so far and we hope that it continues that way.
Now that we are so close, time gets counted in DAYS. We are due 11-11-14, which is 30 days from yesterday. So we have 30 days to get the nursery ready. We also have an OB appointment every 7 days to measure the growth of the baby. And between the rush to get things done, and the misery of waiting, each day feels both very long and depressingly short.
Once labor begins, time starts to tick by in MINUTES. As in, once the contractions are five minutes or less apart, its time to go to the hospital. Then, as the person having the baby, I'm guessing that I will be counting minutes. Also centimeters. Until the baby is out.
After the baby comes, time reverses. Instead of counting down we begin counting up. The baby goes from minutes old to days. The baby is 5 days old, 10 days, 20 days. Then months. From observations, people tend to go up to around 18 months. Then years. It's interesting that you go from measuring time by the progression of your life to measuring time via the life of someone else, which I feel like is a good allegory for the transition we're about to make.
Which reminds me, we need to get back to painting the nursery. Pictures of that epic feat should be coming shortly. Hope all is well!
Love,
Nate and Justine
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