Team Taylor Tidings: April 2016

I should be packing, putting all my things into boxes for yet another Taylor family move. That’s what I should be doing. But writing sounds so much better.

I’m in full blown pregnancy mode right now. I’m feeling enormous all over and it’s getting uncomfortable to shift around. I feel (and see) the stretching happening. And there are aches and pains in special places. There may be glorious things happening with the baby inside of me, but nothing so glorious happening with my own body.

I know this is the price you pay for motherhood – oh wait, I’ve paid a lot of prices for that! – and I should be grateful. And I am. Honestly, my pregnancy has been pretty easy and I know it could be a lot worse, with thick ankles and heartburn and leg cramps and whatever else gets thrown on the table with pregnancy. But I do I feel large and unattractive, emphasis on FEEL because I know I don’t look unattractive, I just look pregnant. But then I look down at my belly and know it’s going to get larger – perhaps MUCH larger - and that definitely scares me! More stretching? More discomfort? For two months?? Oh boy!

As you can imagine, I’m feeling ready for this baby to come now. At least my body is feeling that way. I was telling my husband that I feel like a host now, that my body is not my own, and it’s a little bit freaky and uncomfortable at times. When I had Gavin, I remember feeling sadness and loss, because I felt myself lose that bond we’d had being tied together, occupying the same space. It was a strange and unexpected feeling. Now I’m wondering if I’ll be feeling relief instead, when this baby comes out and I can have my body back. With Gavin, I never got so big and uncomfortable. But this baby is a different story, and I imagine the experiences between birthings can be very different as well.

And I can feel that birthing getting closer and closer, about eight weeks away now! I can’t quite wrap my head around it yet, but then we never know how it’s going to pan out so it makes it hard to really envision it. There are so many unknowns until you’re in the moment. I think I have pretty reasonable expectations, especially knowing things can happen so differently than you expect. Really it’s just about getting the baby here and everyone feeling okay in the end.

I only have two major preferences – to deliver the baby full term (or close enough), and to deliver vaginally. I keep having this fear of a C-Section, just because I know that it happens to plenty of women. I’d be a little nervous for the procedure itself, but I’m more nervous to feel gipped out of my birthing experience. I don’t want to feel let down in that way. Still, if everyone is happy and healthy in the end, then it’ll be okay.

As of right now, I don’t have any reason to expect any trouble. I’ve had a few scares, but they were false alarms. I have a terrible cold right now and was having trouble breathing the other night. It’s always a little difficult to breathe when you can’t use your nostrils! But I found myself struggling to get enough air even when breathing through my mouth. Then I heard this sound on my exhale, the same squeaking and crackling sounds I’d heard when I’d gotten pre-eclampsia with Gavin and my lungs had filled up with fluid. Oh no! Was this happening all over again? Please don’t tell me I’m going to have a repeat experience, get severe pre-eclampsia, and deliver this baby early, with no sleep either!

I figured the cold could produce a similar experience, that my lungs could be hampered down by mucus and produce those same sounds. But I decided to call my doctor, just to be sure. The doctor asked if I had any other pre-eclampsia symptoms, and I didn’t. He assured me that it was the cold. Phew! False alarm, thank goodness!

I also had elevated glucose levels and had to take the lovely three hour glucose test last Friday. You drink this yucky sugary liquid and they draw your blood four different times to see what your body does with all that sugar inside of you. Results came back today and I do NOT have gestational diabetes. Another dodged bullet.

So everything continues to progress normally and I’m feeling thankful. I feel like I can’t really be surprised by anything at this point. If I suddenly had complications and had to deliver early, I wouldn’t be surprised. It happens and I’m familiar with the experience. If we went full term with no troubles, I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s been an easy baby thus far, and seems healthy and strong, so I have no reason to believe things should go wrong. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was late!

Actually, I’m getting more and more convinced that a scheduled induction is the right way to go this time because I really cannot have him be late. We have too many things going on later in June and July so if he decides to cook extra long in there, it will complicate things a little. For now, I’m eye-balling the weekend of June 18^th as my induction weekend. That’s only a few days shy of his due date anyway, so he may have already come by then, which would be great.

Hopefully I’ll have figured out his name by then! I’m really wishing I had one ready so I could start calling him that, make it feel more like he has an identity other than just, “baby.” I am an over-the-top perfectionist when it comes to names, probably the most name-obsessed person I know. I mean, I’ve spent hours – HOURS – coming up with names for my video game characters. So you can imagine the struggle to find a name for my child. Hey, you’re stuck with this thing for LIFE! It better be a good one. I need it to look good and sound good, but it’s been a never-ending struggle to find something I LOVE for a boy name.

The search continues, but he’ll probably be named Ethan, since I haven’t found anything else I love quite as much and I’ve definitely been searching and searching. Just need to find a magical middle name to go with Ethan, or a unique name that goes well with Taylor and sounds super rad. Haven’t found that yet. I think he’s going to need a good strong named, based on his punches and kicks. I’ve even gasped while writing this blog because he punched me so bad and it really hurt!

I may be ready physically, but this is definitely not the time for him to come. We’re right in the middle of a big move and this move is different from the others. Yes, Nick and I are finally buying our first home! It feels weird and different and scary and exciting. It took a lot of searching for us to find what we wanted, and we had to make a few compromises, but it’s really a lovely home and will be good for our growing family.

I’ll include some pictures, but I’ll tell you a little bit about the home. There were two major selling points for us. First, the home is just a four minute walk to the Trax station. Because of our medical bills, we’ve been a one car family for a while now and probably will be for some time. We were hoping to keep it that way, and this is a perfect opportunity to do that. Nick has been biking to work, but the winter months were difficult when biking wasn’t an option. Now he can take Trax directly from his home to his work, no matter the weather, so it’s a great year-round solution to our transportation dilemma.

The other big selling point was the openness. We both really love an open feel and this home definitely has it, with vaulted ceilings and an airy feeling that’s very inviting. I really really love that about the home.

There are some other great features too. There are some mountain views and a very cool deck in the backyard that’ll be great for entertaining. There are some pretty swank showers in the home that are very accommodating for tall husbands. The home itself is very clean, with no major projects needed. And the neighborhood is really quite lovely, with very nice homes, cool parks, and the Jordan Landing shopping center nearby, which has every store and restaurant you could want in it. They don’t have a Cheesecake Factory though. Hmmm, probably a good thing.

It’ll be exciting to move in, which happens this Saturday, April 30^th. Gosh, it will be weird to actually own a home, to paint my walls and decorate and do repairs and upgrades and landscaping, all how I want to do it. It’s going to be a lot of fun and I’m excited for Nick especially, for him to have projects to work on and something to be proud of. It’s been a long time coming, that’s for sure.

Funny thing is, there are a lot of different emotions involved. I’m actually quite sad to leave our place. There are annoyances with our condo, but it’s been a good home for us and that’s been the case with just about everywhere we’ve lived. We lived in two different apartments in Albuquerque, four different places in Hawaii, and this will be our fourth place in Utah now. And each one has had its charm, and has led us to new people and new experiences. This move is especially hard because I’ve really enjoyed the neighborhood and the people I’ve met here. Not to say that I’m closing that chapter on everyone. I’m pretty good about staying connected and keeping in touch. But I would have liked to have had more time getting to know everyone here before moving away.

It’s made me realize how a home is so much more than the walls around you. It’s more about the experiences you have in the home, the memories you make. It’s about the people who come into your life, time with friends and family, the neighborhood and how you feel there.

I look back and remember things I loved about each place we lived, certain rooms or a particular layout I liked. We had this apartment in Albuquerque with a stellar patio. It looked out onto the Sandia mountains, which would blaze in the evening sun and turn a beautiful pink. We had a condo in Hawaii with the cutest tropical yard and vaulted ceilings in the living room. We had an apartment in Utah that had the perfect floor plan and such beautiful grounds, with rivers and ponds and lots of plants. We’ve lived in some nice places.

But honestly, one of my favorites was a teeny tiny home in Hawaii, a little one-bedroom unit with all our furniture crammed in there. But it was the best of times, because we had such awesome neighbors that all looked out for each other and we all had fun together, with all of us going to school at the college there. And we had the beach just down the street so that was a huge bonus and added to the laid-back Hawaii feel of our home there. Maybe the home itself wasn’t so great, but we loved our time living there and made amazing memories.

So yes, the home itself is only one part of a much larger equation. I feel blessed to have had so many different experiences, to have met so many different people, to have lived in some really nice places, and to have learned a lot along the way.

But all that has made me nervous for this big change, to be living somewhere for a longer period of time. This will be our tenth move in ten years. The nice thing about being so transient is that you can move on from the bad things you don’t like. Maybe you aren’t loving the neighborhood, or the home itself, or you’re having a hard time making friends. No problem! You only have to give it a year before you’re on to the next experience. But this time, I’m feeling seriously nervous about our new place and hoping I will like it there.

I suppose I have a pretty good track record thus far. In fact, the places I didn’t make friends were only that way because I made no effort. The more effort I made, the more success I had, and trust me, I’ve gotten REALLY good at making an effort and having success. Still, you wonder what kind of people you meet and how well you can dig into the community there. Settling down is something completely foreign to me. We’ll see if I can hack it.

And that’s the funny thing. There’s certainly more sense of permanency with buying a home. But I still look at it like a huge unknown. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that life is completely unpredictable. We may have plans to stay, but we can never know for certain how circumstances may chance, or when. So in many ways, I see this home the same way I saw all the others, another place for our family, another experience. We’ll be making the best of it, like we usually do, and we’ll see how long it lasts. It may be a few years. It may be a good long while. Who knows!

So we do our packing this week and move this weekend and then the beauty of moving in begins. It will be so nice not to have to find nooks and crannies to cram our belongings into. And it will be fun to decorate the boys’ rooms and get ready for this baby. Maybe – just maybe – once we have some painting done and some furnishings bought and a few home projects completed, we’ll have a few weeks to breathe and let it sink in that this baby is coming. I’ve been so busy these past few months, it just hasn’t felt real at all. There’s just too much going on to really think about it. It’d be nice to have some time to prepare myself mentally and emotionally for all that, for the birth and the newborn stage. How nice that we’ll at least have a home, have some real space to do my mothering thing. I can’t tell you how especially excited I am for Gavin to have a yard. Yeah!

I’m still keeping busy with a few different art projects, trying to cram in whatever I can before the baby comes. It’s been fun to focus on that and develop my talents. Gosh, there just isn’t enough time in the day, especially for a mom! And I only have one child right now! I could do a whole other blog post on just how overwhelming it is to be a mom and try to juggle it all, try to find balance in all there is to do! It’s a lesson I haven’t quite learned yet, but life will teach it to me, I know!

But I do love being a mom, especially to this amazing little boy I have. I am in constant awe of how adorable he is, how smart he is, how fun he is, and how loving and nurturing he is. And I'm loving the phase he's in right now, where his communication is advancing and he's getting a little easier to talk to and reason with, and saying and doing some of the cutest things.

Lately, he's been getting so good at memorizing songs and singing along and we just love it, especially when he's dancing too. We had a playlist going this evening while we were packing some boxes, and he was cracking us up with how well he was singing along with some of the songs. He's definitely paying close attention, way more than we thought he was. I swear he's going to be smarter than me by the time he's 10 years old.

And I love how affectionate he's become. He loves to hug his parents and to show his love to little babies and other kids. I see him love his bear, care for it and kiss it like a baby. He's going to be the sweetest big brother with that big heart of his. How have I been so blessed?