5 weeks to go…

I suppose there’s been a countdown clock going for a while, but today I hear it ticking pretty loudly. 5 weeks to go… 35 days… 16 more work days in my office… holy cow.  It’s like you spend your whole pregnancy thinking this is taking forever – and then all the sudden it’s almost over and the overwhelming feeling of all that’s left to do engulfs you. I’m there.

As I write this I’m hanging out in a hospital waiting room as my husband is in surgery to repair a hernia (a new occupational hazard, I suppose). And so hopefully our household has no need for heavy lifting for a while… yeah, there’s that.

Sometimes life is so busy that you don’t take the time to sit back and think about the enormity of certain situations or bask in the joy of others. And so while I can get caught up in the fact that the nursery’s not finished and all the Christmas shopping I’ve got to do… and ponder how in the heck I’ll be able to wrap presents on the floor in my current state of largeness… what I forget to focus on is how my whole life is about to change in 5 short weeks. In 5 weeks, I’ll have a daughter, Blake will get his daddy’s little girl and Brogan and Beckett will have a little sister. We’ll go back through sleep deprivation, our schedule will get thrown out the window and we’ll be switching from man to man coverage to zone (as my aunt who has three kids pointed out to me this weekend). But all those things will pale in comparison to the amount love and contentment we’ll feel knowing our family is complete. It’s pretty overwhelming when I really think about it.

With just weeks left to go, I also find myself feeling humbled by all of our blessings. Pregnancies don’t always go perfectly, and there are hundreds of far worse reasons I could be sitting in a hospital waiting for my husband to get out of surgery. But I’m thankful that we’ve had a healthy complication-free pregnancy, and that this is a simple outpatient procedure. I’m grateful that my boys are happy and healthy… and that we are surrounded by supportive friends and family who have already started to go out of their way to help us out. And so despite all of the chaos in our lives, the things that really matter are all good.

So I’ll keep reminding myself of these things over the next few weeks when I wonder how it is all going to get done… or when I complain about my lack of mobility or how uncomfortable it is to sleep. And regardless of how prepared we are, come December 17th (and hopefully not sooner!) we’ll get to meet Miss Berkley… and we are so, so excited!