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i am expecting another baby. i'm at about 8 weeks right now, feeling very tired and nauseous most of the time. but this is my pattern, so i'm not surprised; i do hope that it will get better by 12 weeks, like it did with sena and aiyana. the pregnancy wasn't exactly planned (like most of my life), but it really wasn't a surprise either. ed and i were talking about having another baby, possibly, just throwing the idea back and forth. so now that i'm actually pregnant, i have a lot of feelings about it. i'm excited about having another baby. with two children, i always felt that maybe one more would be nice, but with three i feel that it's perfect. i'm also excited about the timing, because sena and aiyana will be (almost) 6 and 4 respectively, when the baby is born in September. i think those are really good ages in terms of being more independent, and also helpful. they are already super excited and want to do anything they can to help. i already put them in charge of hanging laundry, and sena does dishes after dinner sometimes; she also gets herself dressed and into her car seat when we're going somewhere, which is a great help to me, esp. now in the winter. aiyana is more dependent still, but she's trying. another very exciting thing for me, is that they both do quiet time a couple of hours every day, and i get to nap or rest during this time, which is a huge and allows me to function a little better in the evening. during quiet time, they play, do their workbooks, or draw in the living room. i still can't believe this is working out, but it's been a few weeks we've been doing it now, and so far so good.

my pregnancy is also providing a good homeschooling opportunity. sena and aiyana really want to know everything about the baby and how my body is changing, so we've been taking books out of the library, looking at pictures, and just talking about it a lot. sena already says that she wants to be at the birth and catch the baby, which i think would be great. i'm not sure if aiyana will be ready to witness anything that intense, so it may be better for her (and me) to be somewhere else, but we still got a while to go up to that time, so we'll see.
i'm also excited to be working with my midwives again. i'll be seeing them in a few weeks, and we already talked on the phone.

so there are a lot of positive feelings about this, but also a lot of ambivalence and some difficult feelings. sometimes, when my physical nausea and fatigue are especially strong, i find it hard to be in a good state of mind. this was especially true in Mexico, where i started experiencing a really unpleasant state. i just felt like nothing mattered, like there was no point to anything. even though my mind told me that of course there's a point to stuff, like doing things for my children for example, i just couldn't get myself to do anything, and could not shake that feeling of total apathy. my nausea was really strong over there, and i think that contributed to this awful feeling. since we've been back, i didn't experience anything like that; now i mostly get irritable, especially when i'm tired. sometimes i also get anxious about having a new baby. i know it will be hard no matter how helpful sena and aiyana are, and i don't want to expect too much from them, i don't want to burden them. i know there will be lack of sleep again, and all of that, and sometimes i get anxious about it.

but i realized that having all these feelings is ok, and more importantly i realized that i can hold them all: the excitement, the anxiety, and all the in-between.

peace