Company

So today is the first day of my third and final trimester. Today I read all my blogs since the beginning, and I am amazed at how fast the time has gone by and how different everything feels to me now. More than ever, as the baby moves inside me and reacts to music or my sudden changes of position, I feel him as company. He's sort of like an imaginary friend, a silent but tangible presence in everything that I do. We have secret conversations, he and I. I can be sitting on the bus, people crowded all around me, and the baby will move against me and I will try to touch him back through the layers of flesh that separate us. And it is this incredibly intimate and wonderful time between us.

There have been a few milestones since the big sonogram that I last wrote about. Obviously I am feeling the baby move much more definitely now. I am thinking of him as a he, which took a little time to adjust to. John and I have bought a few things. Last weekend when we were grocery shopping we were in the diaper aisle and John suggested that we buy diapers. So there they are, waiting in the little nook under our stairs where we are collecting our baby items, waiting for baby. We have attended all but one of our childbirth preparation classes (more on that later). At nearly 27 weeks, I look obviously pregnant now, and feel my belly preceding me like this hard, basketball-sized announcement everywhere I go. John has had to endure me putting his hand on my stomach to feel the baby kick too many times to count. . . I am learning to crochet, and have just begun work on a baby hat and blanket. And a couple of nights ago I felt my first Braxton-Hicks contraction, where it felt like my abdomen turned to stone, practice (so I read) for labor.

And so the weeks past, moving steadily forward as time always done, to the time where the baby will be born, fourteen weeks from now.

Today: another appointment with my doctor.