Opening the Floodgates

When you are trying to have a baby, I think you play a lot of scenarios out in your head about how you will feel, what you will do, who you will tell when you do eventually get pregnant.  Nick always said that when the day came, he would burn the city down twice out of excitement.  I said that I would quickly develop an addiction to buying cute baby things.  I imagined a lot of planning and cleaning and organizing and partying. 

The funny thing about infertility is that it squashes all those plans with fear.  A lot of fear.  It makes you think that if you celebrate, something terrible will happen.  If you plan, something terrible will happen.  If you tell someone, something terrible will happen.  You get the idea.  You just get used to terrible things happening to you, so you come to expect them.  So in our household, when we found out we were expecting, the city didn't burn down.  Nothing was purchased.  The few people we told were sworn to secrecy and threatened with bodily harm if they mentioned anything baby-related to us or anyone else.  We couldn't risk something terrible happening.  We couldn't risk dealing with those emotions, and managing all the emotions of the people around us.  So we sat quietly and hopefully counted days.

Our biggest challenge as we have entered the second trimester is pushing away the fear, and embracing the fact that we are having a baby.  Convincing ourselves that it's happening, that we are going to be parents, and we should probably do a little planning.  I actually resisted "graduating" from my fertility doctor and meeting my midwife, because I just didn't trust that I wouldn't be going back to the fertility center again.  I felt defective, and defective women don't go to a midwife - they sit in the fertility center, with a partition wall separating them from all the pregnant women.

So now I'm on the other side of the wall.  It's freaking us out a little bit. We were warned by our midwife that it would take a very, very long time to convince ourselves that we were now considered "normal", we were having a baby, and everything might just be fine in the end.  Still, we're taking it day by day, and trying to focus on the positive.  Our first step was letting the world know.  The secret's out.  And then, well, then I bought this:

And then I bought these:

(Courtesy of www.etsy.com/shop/veryKIKI - Seriously now, are they not the cutest things you've ever seen?)

And then I went online and bought myself new clothes, because I no longer fit into any normal clothes. 

So we're opening the baby floodgates.  This is happening people.  Cute things are being purchased, nothing's a secret anymore, the bump is clearly apparent, and my Pinterest board demonstrates that I'm 100% in planning mode.  We're having a baby.  And I think we actually believe it.