I haven't blogged a lot about my current pregnancy (though if you follow @watermelonsgrow on Instagram you'll see that I can't shut up about it there). For those of you who missed it, I'm now 32 weeks with Anne's little sibling, Baby #2 -- which is an important personal milestone for me because it's the point where Anne was born four and a half years ago. In a few days (barring any unforeseen circumstances), I'll be more pregnant than I have ever been. Which is a weird thing to consider.

This pregnancy is as different from my first as a pregnancy could be. With Anne, I had tons of complications starting in the first trimester: too many ER visits to count. Meeting with high risk specialists, tests upon tests, ultrasounds. All culminating in 16 straight weeks of bed rest and a preemie who spent the first weeks of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit. The general attitude of everyone I talked to back then was, well, we have no idea what's wrong or why this is happening. We'll just have to wait and see.



A lot has changed since 2011 in the way we treat prematurity. It's actually kind of mind-boggling how fast everything has moved. New medicines and therapies are available to treat preterm birth that weren't available back then. Studies have come out that show that the way we used to treat the conditions that lead to prematurity maybe aren't so helpful as we thought? Now, each week, I have an appointment with the longest needle you ever saw, which injects a thick, syrup-like substance called 17P right into my backside. In my mind, it's a miracle drug -- it's brought my total number of harried late-night L&D visits down to zero and it's kept me off bedrest entirely. Before, I was allowed one shower a day and one half-hour outside a week. Now look at me, upright! Running and jumping and swimming and painting walls (nesting, y'all. It's real.)

I am so grateful that things are so much better with this pregnancy. But I can't help wishing it could have been this way when I was pregnant with Anne. I'm sorry it wasn't. I feel like I didn't get to enjoy being pregnant with her because of all the worry and stress. Conversely, though I am by and large appreciating every moment of this pregnancy, there are still moments when being heavily gravid in August sucks ... but I feel guilty for complaining about the heat, about the gestational diabetes (that they think was brought on by the very medicine that has made this pregnancy so much easier). I feel like people are looking at me when I complain and thinking: don't YOU of all people know that it could be so much worse? (Though woe betide the person who actually says this out loud).

And of course I still worry. Nothing can get rid of that entirely. My baby is still at significant risk of being born premature, though at this point, the chances of any lingering medical problems are small. Still, I know things now after the first experience that I can't quite forget. I know what it feels like to have your baby whisked away from you though you want nothing more than to be able to hold her and bond with her. I don't know if I can face that again. I know what it's like to wonder when you can bring her home. And I keep remembering this comment I heard when we were in the NICU the first time around, that Caucasian male babies are the least robust when they are born before term (wimpy white boy syndrome, it's a thing, apparently).



Whenever I catch myself worrying, I distract myself. By playing with Anne, or keeping my hands busy (crochet and episodes of Friends on Netflix are my anti-drug). If it gets too bad, I log onto the March of Dimes website and donate ten bucks. (I think if every pregnant woman did this when she worried, we'd solve the crisis of prematurity post haste).  I tell myself a mantra my mom taught me when I was in law school: you've done all you can do and you can't do anything more. So don't spend any more time thinking about it. I have a team of awesome doctors and nurses and I'm taking as good care of myself as I can. I've done all I can do. I can't do anything more.

On the lighter side, there have been a few funny things about this pregnancy that stem from my previous situation. For instance, the first time my feet swelled from walking around all day, I was almost excited because it meant I'd been WALKING AROUND all day. Same thing for the first time I went to put on my shoes and couldn't reach. By the time I got that big with A., I'd been strictly horizontal. And I'm not a touchy-feely person by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm weirdly grateful when strangers want to touch the belly or ask intrusive questions about whether I plan to breastfeed (though I can see it getting old real fast). I didn't get that kind of attention last time and I a starved-for-attention preggo, I guess. Any port in a storm.

And James even convinced me to do a maternity shoot. I wasn't sure if I wanted one because maternity photos can be kind of weird but I remember having a hormonal fit about it after Anne was born -- I at least wanted the OPTION to take silly photos of my bump. So I let him pose us on the dunes of East Beach one 90+ degree day a few weekends ago, and I cursed and sweated, very un-goddess-like, but you know what? I'm glad we did it.

T-minus 7 or so weeks, little one. We can't wait to meet you. But stay put for now, OK?

 A few days ago, I was checking the date and noticed that Anouk would be turning three in exactly a month. The realization filled me a little bit of nostalgia at what's past, a little bit of curiosity at what's to come, a little bit of apprehension over the birthday itself (this is the first year we're having a party with more than just family and I have no idea what I'm doing).

But mostly I felt determination, that I will try my best to enjoy every one of these last days of having a two-year-old. It's not always easy, as I'm sure anyone who's ever had a two-year-old will attest. But I feel like it's important to try to appreciate it. Am I wrong or does three kind of officially mark the end of babyhood? When your kid is three you can't really say you have a baby anymore, even if that's what James and I still call her when we talk about her -- "the baby."

Anouk at the tail end of two still says things like "ockapuss" for "octopus" and "oh-plane" for "airplane." (But she has distressingly stopped saying "hungen" for "hungry" which makes us a little sad). She can identify all of her letters and numbers but still only has a tenuous grasp on the fact that the latter are supposed to happen sequentially and when you ask her to count to 10, sometimes a fourteen or fifteen will sneak its way in. She thinks her full name is Noukie Ouisa and when you ask whose baby she is she almost always says "I'm MINE" with a sort of duh tone in her voice like, whose else would she be?

Anouk at almost three runs to the window every morning and asks, "Is it spring yet?" She has a deep interest in the seasons, and where things go, which leads her to ask all sorts of impossible-to-answer questions like, "Where is fall?" Anouk at almost three is a serious extrovert -- the saddest day for her is one that we spend in our pajamas, lounging around at home (which is kind of the perfect day for her mother, oh well). She brings out my better angels every day by making me say sorry when I yell at other drivers. Anouk at almost three loves painting, Barbies, trains, and will do almost anything for toddler press-on nails. Lately her favorite color is shifting hues from pale princess pink to a more vibrant red. Anouk at almost three will run into the room to shout, "I LOVE you" and when you ask her what prompted it, will say, "I just thought you should know."

Almost three feels like the cusp of something. Sometimes I can't stop my mind from racing ahead to think about what she'll be like at four, five, six, fourteen, fifteen. But then I remind myself to slow down and enjoy her babyhood -- which is over in just a few more weeks, officially.

Unofficially, well. You know.

Anouk got her first haircut over the weekend -- two years and four months in. We took her to a kid-friendly salon in VB, let her choose whether to sit in a fire engine or taxi while the stylist snipped her ends, and had a lock of her Spanish flamenco Barbie's hair shorn to acclimate her to the general purpose of the visit. A. left the salon a half-inch or so less ragged around the edges; I left with a small plastic bag of curls that I will probably keep until the day I die.

When I was pregnant with Anne, I wondered (like most new parents do) what she would look like when she was born. Would she have my eyes, my grandfather's cleft chin, James's long legs? One thing I crossed my fingers for was that she would inherit James's hair -- thick and mostly straight, with only the barest hint of a wave. My own extremely curly hair has always been a little bit of a struggle for me. It never seems to do what I want, it has the kind of uncontrollable moods that require professional regulation -- exuberant on dry days, angry and puffed up on rainy ones. My whole life, I've been trying to wrangle it -- buying flatirons and hot rollers off of late-night infomercials, spending hundreds of dollars on products in the search to find one that would work, even, for a while in 8th grade, wrapping my hair in an Ace bandage every night to try to tame it by morning.

Sometimes I think of all the chemicals, the money, the time -- the not going for that run or swim because I wanted to keep my hair nice and frizz-free -- and I want to cry.

When A. was born, the first thing I noticed was her hair, dark and straight. I held my breath. But as the months passed, it only seemed to grow thicker and straighter. Maybe she had escaped the curly hair gene, after all?

Then around A.'s first birthday, I started noticing the first curls forming. Just a few. But then, suddenly, those few curls became a riot, seemingly overnight. They grew fast and thick, mostly horizontally instead of vertically -- they stuck out from her head in all directions like hair at a surprise party. Soon we had to put away the baby brush, with its flimsy plastic bristles. It just couldn't handle the explosion of her exuberant curls.

And even though I had been worried about this -- even though I've spent so much time and effort wrestling my own hair into submission -- I wasn't disappointed when I saw those curls on my baby's head. Anne's curls make her who she is and they are (objectively, says the mother!) adorable. Literally every time we're out someone will approach us to tell me how much they love her hair. People will smile at the sight of them and call her "curly top." They'll say, "I wish I had that hair!" But sometimes, a fellow curly-haired person will sigh and add something like, "She'll hate them when she's older."

I hope she doesn't. I couldn't imagine my daughter without her curls. I want her to love them as much as I do. But how can I expect her to when the only example she sees is me wrestling with mine? And in the first place, why shouldn't I like my hair? It's the same as Anne's, after all.

In thinking these things, I thought that maybe I should put down the flatiron a little more often, to try to teach her -- and to learn myself -- how to be happy in our own skin. To stop the negative self talk, the I wishes, and just be happy with what I've got.

So here you have it. Two curly tops, happy. It's taken one of us a long time to get here, but here we are, all the same.





Is there something about yourself that you started to love because you saw it in your child? Please share, let's keep this positivity party going.