It's been ten weeks of staying at home and I've found it difficult to write.  I've spent the entirety of our third trimester at home, safe and worried.  I've missed the rituals and routines, things like shopping for groceries early on Saturdays, choosing fresh flowers for the week, noticing the color of the sky on my drive home from work.  We stayed home and our days looked different.  We carved out workspaces, baked cookies and muffins, ordered takeaway from our favorite places, hand-washed masks.  There were mid-morning pauses for cups of tea, afternoon walks around the neighborhood, meetings and celebrations over video conference.  Friends and family sent boxes -- all the sort of things a baby might need in his or her earliest days.

out west

I flew west for a pair of days with my oldest and dearest girls.  We ate tacos and gummy candy and had cups of coffee in the morning sun.  I thought about what it must be like to live every day with a lemon tree in the front yard.  I woke before the sun -- always, always -- and spent a pair of hours alone, just me and baby.

it was

The week when I had the flu -- long days and nights on our couch, listening to rain and watching shows, drinking broth and smoothies.

The week when we hosted friends to celebrate a thirtieth birthday with all his favorite things -- pizza, fried chicken, bagels as party favors.

Most special -- the week when baby learned to somersault, when we first saw kicks from the outside.  This baby dances for nutella danish and the sound of the choir singing at church, for Ella Fitzgerald and morning coffee in bed, and what a dream it is to think he or she has things they love already.

due with the strawberry moon

Half-past forty weeks all I can think of is how these past years have been a terrible, beautiful thing.  How they brought forth the darkest of fears, carried me to the very ends of myself and back, made me so much more grateful -- for a husband who cares so well, for love notes and ever-hopeful thoughts sent our way, for a mama who has listened to my tears across miles and miles.

I still struggle with the delicate boundary between fear and excitement.  With every appointment -- waiting to hear the whirring of a tiny heartbeat -- I pray for safe-keeping until our next visit.  I make lists of things we'll need in our earliest days together. I think of the things you'll tuck away as earliest memories of your mother, and think of the ones I've kept of my own -- how she studied textbooks at the kitchen table and kept black tea in a red tin by the stove, how she could fill a room with her laughter, how she made things with her own hands.