Five more weeks until baby!

With only 35 days left until Baby, here are some of my recent musings:

• I’m ready for maternity leave. I know it’s not going to be as simple as, “Yay, I get 6 weeks off from work!” because, well…baby is going to be a lot of work. But I’m so exhausted right now with my two jobs – it’s all I can do not to crawl under my desk sometimes and take a nap. So while I know maternity leave won’t bring relaxation and extra sleep, at least I won’t have to focus on anything other than taking care of my family and myself for a while.
  
• My dreams are getting stranger and stranger. I’ve had every kind of anxiety dream – scary dreams, guilt dreams, abandonment dreams, death and dismemberment dreams – all very vivid and clear when I wake from them. My brain was kind enough to give me one dream where I went through labor and delivery, and everything was really easy, virtually painless and effortless, and baby was just fine. Though that may have just been a trick to give me false hopes and expectations…that sneaky brain.
  
• Though many books talk about how annoying it can be when random folks come up and touch your belly without permission, I haven’t really been annoyed by that at all. To be fair, I haven’t had a complete stranger do that to me yet – that might change my thoughts on the whole “personal space” issue. But people who I wouldn’t expect to want to touch my belly have done it, so it’s been a bit surprising though not obnoxious. I just think it’s funny how some folks touch my tummy. Like when people sort of tickle my belly. Or just touch it with one finger. Or put their mouths to it and start talking to the baby (that one was my brother, by the way). Very strange.
  
• While I enjoy reading and learning as much as I can about pregnancy, I do have to wonder how helpful all this knowledge is. Chason and I attended part one of our child birthing class on Saturday, and I learned that when the baby drops, it means that you’re close to labor. I’m now convinced that I’m carrying the baby lower than I was a week ago – but I can’t tell if it’s because she truly has “dropped” or if I just think she has because of this new knowledge. Plus they made us watch two videos of babies being born, and all I can say is, yuk. Watching that did not teach me what to do – it just reminded me that this is going to be weird, scary, and a little gross. And magical, of course…isn’t that what I’m supposed to add? Magical…