“I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream…” You know the feeling. You’re in familiar territory, though it’s not déjà vu. Maybe you know what to expect, but some of the variables have changed. That’s where I feel I’m sitting with 20 days to go on a countdown to an approximated date on the calendar. We’re in the waiting. The waiting is fun, but also hard, and certainly different now with three kids in the mix who all have their own feelings about it. We’ve been here before, but it’s new.

We’re all staying busy in our own ways. H is reading 25 hours a day and building LEGOS for another handful. E fills up her days with imaginative play, any opportunity to get something else “ready for baby,” and reading for about five waking hours. C wants to build, play cars or house, be read to, get outside and ride his bike. (Not much has changed there.) Dad is hard at work at all hours, or if not, he’s likely hanging up a curtain rod or putting something else together for baby. And I’m either moving around like I have all the energy in the world or sitting completely still and unable to muster up even enough to tackle a single additional task.

We’re all coping in our own ways, too. Maybe a paragraph on this aspect would sound similar to the one above, or maybe our coping mechanisms aren’t only our activities, but the ways we’re engaging with each other, not engaging with each other and sometimes letting our emotions come out sideways. Normal, hard, new, familiar. I wish there was a how-to book on welcoming a baby when your kids are our kids’ ages. Maybe there is. I haven’t looked for it. That’s kind of how this whole thing is going these days. 😉 As we come closer to the day we’ll head to the hospital, there are a lot of things I haven’t considered in prep until now. It’s possible I should have a birth plan (and by this, I just mean our specific wishes written out so they’re clearly communicated to hospital staff…not a plan articulating exactly how I expect things will go). Maybe I should order items we’ll need or want right when we get home. (I did buy two boxes of diapers and four packages of wipes, so that should get us started anyway…) I mean, I’m not totally behind, there’s just a lot more going on in everyday life now than there was the first or second baby around. I’ve stopped being stressed by most of it, so that’s a good thing. See? We’ve been here before.

This morning, E and I went to get pedicures. It felt like a rite of passage of sorts, like it has before. Last pedicure before baby, most likely, and probably for a long time after baby, too. As we walked out the door, the nail tech said, “Good luck with everything!” which made baby’s birthday feel closer. I loved that. These days of walking so near to a life-changing event that we know is coming…it’s just such a unique feeling that becomes part of the whole story. And the “leading up to” dictates successes and failures in new ways when there are more people in the mix to be impacted by what’s next. We’ve been here before, but it’s new.

So everyone is learning. I have a feeling most are not articulating more than a fraction of what they’re experiencing, and it’s hard to guess a pulse on all of the people at once. Everything feels kind of pent up, with anxiousness and excitement and a lot of questions all rolled in together. Of course there are also moods and behaviors, which are new and engaging these days as everyone works through their own part of the story. It’s a time for loving each other exceptionally well in a season when no one has extra to add. I’m relying on God to fill those gaps and to narrow the divide as necessary, and while we’re merely human and lack the ability to fill in our own shortcomings, there’s no doubt God sees each one of us and cares about all of our extra needs.

We’ve been here before. And it’s still new. I think most things will feel like that in the days to come. It’s a stretching, growing, be still and move forward kind of time, and the best way I know how to proceed is one foot in front of the other. That’s about our capacity and maybe all we should expect of our very human selves as we’re moving through it. His mercies are new every morning. Thank goodness.

MM