The End is Near...

...Or so they say.  Today is my 9th wedding anniversary, it's 90 degrees out, and I'm 9 months pregnant (38.5 weeks).  I still have several braxton hicks contractions daily, and last Friday at my prenatal exam, the doctor checked my cervix for the first time and told me I was dilating, but not much to measure, and my cervix was softening nicely.  Basically, things were falling into place, and I could have this baby any time!

I have to say I'm a little on the fence about how to feel.  I mean of course I'm completely anxious to deliver this baby.  I'm anxious to discover how I go into labor, if I go into labor, and how it goes, etc.  Then I am anxious to meet my daughter (if it's still a daughter!) and how I'll feel holding her and staring at her face for the first time.  All that is a given.  I know pregnancy ends and must end, but it suddenly seems like after all this time of anxiously awaiting the end, for some crazy reason I'm not ready for it to end yet.  Not only do we have a trillion and ten things to do still before we're considered "ready" for the baby, but there's something mental going on in my head about the whole being pregnant thing.  It's not because of the fact that people treat you better when you're pregnant (because they really do), or that my husband absolutely refuses to let me do any chores that might exert me.  It's really not that at all.  It's just that I really have found comfort in being pregnant, finally.  It took me the whole time, but now I love feeling the baby move inside me, knowing she's safe in there with me all the time.  I never in a zillion years thought I'd ever get to experience pregnancy at all, so now that I've gotten that privilege, I'm afraid for it to end.  I wonder if I'll ever get to do it again.  Will I have more kids, or will this be it?  How lucky can an infertile woman get?  At the beginning, being nothing but sick all the time, I wondered who in their right mind would ever want to be pregnant more than once!  But now at the end, I know why.  Because it's amazing to grow a little human being inside you, knowing that you created it and it is yours and no one can take it away from you.  Strangely, it's this fact that makes me so anxious to meet this little being I've been growing inside me for so many months.  

Just last week, my husband & I finally submitted our pre-admission paperwork to the hospital and took a private tour of the maternity floor with one of the nurses.  After hearing about my frequent contractions lately, she smiled at me and said "It won't be long!"