Fins

Christmas is my very favorite holiday for any number of reasons, and this year it got a bump.  Not merely mine, which is finally appearing, but also an emotional bump from the baby gifts starting to rack up.  Just because we won't jinx ourselves by buying anything till January doesn't mean we can't soak up the generosity of others in Evie's life.

Evie's not-even-first Christmas went as follows: Christmas Eve, Auntie Sarah send a little pink bathrobe made to look like a shark.  My main heartbreak is that she (Evie, not Sarah) might not fit into it for months, and it's so cute that I'm tempted to use it as a receiving blanket from day 1.  Christmas morning, Evie's brand-new stocking contained the infamous and Amazon-celebrated Nosefrida Snot Sucker, a selection of wee itty-bitty t-shirts (with snaps across the front to accommodate wee itty-bitty umbilical cords), and Piyo Piyo nail scissors with duckies on them.  Duckies!

Grandma & Grandpa upped Santa's ante, though, with a car-seat.  Suddenly, things got real.  I mean, you can casually buy a baby t-shirt and put it away somewhere, but nobody has a car-seat who's not facing the imminent arrival of a child.  You don't get one for your hope chest, is all I'm saying.  Now we have one, and it means that we're really going to have a baby.  I'm almost at the end of the second trimester, so it's not like that should be news.  Heather is nearly done painting the nursery, we've been able to feel Evie's movements from the outside, and next week we start birthing classes-- two and a half hours a session, every Monday.

Still, I can't get out of the early-pregnancy mindset.  I don't feel qualified to buy maternity clothes, no matter what my pants say to the contrary, and I almost feel like the other people in the birthing class will sneer at us.  I want to sign up for prenatal yoga, but what if all the other ladies are further along?  This is like venturing into the Juniors section in a department store as a sixth-grader: do I count yet?  Only I'm realizing that I'm an eighth-grader after all, and someone about to start her third trimester is totally justified in joining prenatal classes.  It used to be that we were blushingly admitting that our much-vaunted pregnancy only amounted to a sesame seed, but now she's a she instead of an it, and big enough that they use real measurements, in units I can recognize.

The whole thing strikes me as kind of absurd, honestly.  Who are we to have a baby?  We're just kids.  We're great at having pets and we take pretty good care of the house, yeah, but you're supposed to be a real grown-up to have a kid.  Only there Heather is, caulking the trim of the nursery, and there's a car-seat in the guest room.  I had to put my only jeans away because Evie is too big for them. 

Yesterday, while Heather caulked, she guilted her oh-so-delicate wife into taping around the trim, and I looked at her and said, "Dude, listen.  I'm sitting in the exact spot where Evie's crib is going to be."  I lay down in the crib's footprint, imagining our sweet baby lying there in just a few months, and all I could think was, That fan is so ugly.  Evie is too good for that fan.  We have to replace it.