Veronica is going to be six months old next week and lately I've been thinking a lot about her arrival, and the weeks surrounding it.
Now that I know her, now that she's really here and her little personality is emerging, and now that she has completely and irrevocably taken over my life, I can't help feeling amazed that Greg and I created her in the first place. It's caused me to reminisce a lot about those last weeks, just before she arrived.
I was so full of anticipation and impatience. I had been so sure that she would arrive early, but as the weeks and days dwindled and her due date grew closer, I finally resigned myself to the idea that she would be on time, if not late.
(OMG, I was HUGE.)
I had spent weeks getting things ready. I didn't really feel like the typical mom, the one who stands in the nursery, blissfully awaiting her baby. Instead I was nervous and filled with doubt. I was afraid that I wouldn't love her right away. I was afraid that she would be a boy and that I wouldn't know how to be the mother of a boy. I was afraid that I wouldn't know how to be a good mother to a girl OR a boy.
Day after day I dutifully readied the nursery. I washed and folded dozens of tiny onesies, I mulled over the perfect crib bedding, and I stacked diapers in the caddy. I packed the diaper bag, an orange one that my friend Abby got me, carefully tucking diapers and wipes into its pockets and then I set it down, scanning the nursery, trying to figure out what else to add. It's funny to think that there was a day when I didn't know what to put in a diaper bag. Now that the same bag hangs on a rack in the kitchen by the door, its contents spilling out from every pocket.
Those weeks leading up to Veronica's arrival were like being in a little boat, heading for a waterfall (look Greg, I used a metaphor!). I knew the drop was coming but I just couldn't anticipate how far it would be or where I would end up once I went over.
It's hard to even think about those last days, listing about the house with my huge swelling belly. It was early summer and the world had finally burst forth into green after a long winter. At night the baby kicked and rocked around inside me and together, Greg and I waited and waited.
And now she's here. And she's my daughter, our daughter. And I just can't imagine it any other way. I think about the moments in which her warm, slick body emerged from mine, the very instant in which Greg and I went over that waterfall together, into our lives as parents. Even now, as I type this, I look across the room to where she lays sprawled across Greg's lap, reaching for his magazine, kicking and churning her limbs in happy anticipation of it, and I just feel dumb with love for it all.
Read the rest of this entry and find out who won the diaper bag give-away here.
