A Saturday in our shared life

Good Morning PunkieKid,

Yesterday was a big day for busyness and fun. I went to the fair in the morning with a good friend. She is also expecting a baby, so she wasn’t disappointed that we couldn’t go on any rides. Instead, we walked around and looked at the craft shows, flower shows, and my favorite, the farm animals. We stopped for a funnel cake for me and a milkshake for her. Mostly we just chatted. It was really nice.

Perhaps the most wonderful part that came from the fair yesterday was the knowledge that my friend will soon be very publicly pregnant too. She’s starting to show a tiny bit, though no one who didn’t know her well and wasn’t looking anyway could tell. She looks amazing. She’s glowing and radiant, but still carrying a tiny, tiny secret. She’s only gained one pound in her entire first 12 weeks of pregnancy. I can’t believe it. I think gained a pound the first day I was pregnant. Oh well, these things can’t (or really shouldn’t) be compared. We’re all just too different.

You are going to grow up with her baby. I’m in school with her husband and she’s looking at Ph.D. programs in the area (as am I), so her child is very likely to grow up with you, at least for the first several years of your life. When we finish with each stage of baby clothes, each baby contraption (car seats, playpens, etc) we’ll likely hand them off to her. I’m already at the stage that maternity clothes have stopped fitting (or it’s now clear that they’ll never fit this body type of mine) and it’s time to hand them off to my friend. We’ll babysit for one another. We’ll confide in and support each other.

I love that we’re so close in gestational age, and that her child will be your friend. I love that we can gripe about sciatica to each other and that soon we’ll celebrate both your kicks and her baby’s kicks together. I love that your dad and I aren’t pregnant alone anymore. It’s so good to have community in pregnancy – with all the fears and new experiences it brings.

In the afternoon, I sat ate some lunch while your dad followed football scores simultaneously on both the internet and TV. It is very important in this house that we know how the Gamecocks are doing, but we have too many screens in this place. In case you’re interested, though, they lost to Vanderbilt, by the way, in a classic Gamecocks way. That is, according to your dad, they lost to an athletically inferior team because of they are systemically, perennially intellectually stunted. After a quick nap, we dashed off to Don’s for some more pregnancy photography. You’ll see images from that when Don gets a chance to process them, but it’ll have to wait for now because Don’s off to Houston in the morning.

Have a good day kid, and I’ll fill in you more sometime soon.

Love, Mom