It's always hard to know how to start up again after a long absence from the keys....lately I have felt so distant, so distracted, and so disconnected from my writing, blog, or even my own thoughts for that matter it has been nearly impossible to think about catching up in this little space. 

But now I feel it is time. 

   Because I have something I really, really, want to share, and it is breaking past all of the writer's blockage erected mainly by my own piles of insecurity, and I'm tired of not writing because of me, because I really, truly, have something worth saying.

   June 2015 is quickly shaping up to be one of the best months of my life................






 
   Indeed, my friend, you counted THREE balloons in those pictures.  Three!  Soon I will be a mama (well I guess I sort of already am) to three precious little souls!  What a privilege!  What a gift! What a treasure.

    If I was surprised by the quickness of the first two, I was surprised by my intense desire to see that positive test with this one.  It didn't happen right away like the others, and I found myself thinking, dreaming, seeing, hearing and feeling BABIES everywhere.  I just so badly wanted another.

   I'll be honest, I have been sort of sicker than normal with this one, which of course is sending all sorts of images of a little boy dancing through my head, when really it could just be that I'm getting...well...older. 

   The yuckiness and fatigue and food aversion, and general crappy-state-of-being has done it's best to diminish my excitement, but let me tell you....I. Can. Not. WAIT.  We are so thrilled to be adding to our family, and we are so grateful to God for blessing us yet another time with this precious, precious gift of life!  Who are we that we should be entrusted to raise yet another soul?  I feel so grateful, so thankful, and so humbled. 

   So.  That explains some of the break.  I have felt the "pregnancy brain" fog roll in like usual and completely crowd my brain until the simplest of decisions loom up tall and impossible and everything in my life seems bigger and harder and crazier and just.....MORE.  The hormones, the estrogen, the emotions, the sickness, all smushing in there alongside the waves of joy, the tears of expectation, and the DESPERATE gratitude.....it all just took me like a tidal wave this time. 



   And those moccasins?  I was shopping with my sis-in-law who spotted them and they were one of those "I'm not even pregnant but they are $8.95 and so I cannot pass these up and I'll just really hope I have a reason to use them someday!" buys, and now my heart does little flips whenever I see them.    
   Oh and then there was the secret-keeping.....quite possibly my LEAST favorite phase of the entire pregnancy.  I mean, first of all, it's just hard, am I right??!  You're bursting at the seams to tell everyone and anyone and you can tell NO one, at first.   And then you have to tell everyone in some kind of certain order, but your family and friends are far away, and you feel like sleeping 15 hours a day, and not making 1,500 phone calls.

   So then you hatch a plan to tell everyone in a special way, because somehow sidling up to them at the next family reunion and saying, "Hey, I'm preggers" just doesn't have a ring to it.

  So you plan outfits, and pray for nice weather, and plan a photo shoot, and decide to hand out pictures (that double as Thanksgiving/Christmas cards of course, we're not superhuman here) but then obviously, you have to tell your photographers.  So you do, which is no problem at all except that then your husband really wants to tell your 3 year-old daughter. 

So you give in.

   And you tell a toddler, who then proceeds to tell her Sunday school teacher, and cousins, and friends, and anyone she can really, before you've had a chance to tell ANYONE YET.  

   So all our well-laid plans worked about.....40% of the time, and I felt like I was just making everyone mad at me some way or another and it was so frustrating because I really was just trying my best to tell in a special way and I just felt like laying in bed ALL DAY EVERY DAY and figured my feeble efforts had to count for something, ya know? 

   ANYWAY.  I am thrilled and tickled and super, super jazzed that it is officially out of the bag, and the secrecy is over.  We are really, really excited about this little one, and I am so glad I can stop secret-guarding and just be happy again.  Just be excited, and thrilled, and giddy while dreaming of June, and holding a brand new little Smucker babe in my arms. 

   And now I have 1,735,462 more reasons to wish summer would hurry up and get here.