Viability

Dear baby, if you were born today you might live.

You would be the tiniest doll-like thing, and you’d spend months behind glass in the hospital being more wires and machines than baby, but it’s possible. You are officially grown enough now to have a chance even if the worst happens.

Luckily, there is no reason to believe that you’re coming out any time soon. In fact, you seem to be very comfortable in my ever-growing belly. Your kicks feel stronger by the day, and you’re always stretching and turning and moving about as if to tell me that I shouldn’t be silly, you are perfectly fine, and you’re only coming out when you’re good and ready!

But still I felt a little sigh of relief on crossing this date. The first threshold, the magic number that turns ‘nothing to be done’ into ‘here is your baby’. Every week more makes the maybe of you into a reality, and that’s something to be celebrated.

We’re already so looking forward to holding you! Looking into your eyes, counting your little fingers and toes, I can’t wait!

On the other hand, we are still woefully unprepared at this point. We have clothes, thanks to my mother’s pile of freebies we can reasonably dress you for a year at least. But we don’t own a single nappy yet, or a changing table, or a crib. All of that is the plan for this summer, we’ll hunt down some bargains, and turn this flat into something more baby-appropriate.

I still need to start pregnancy yoga as well. We already sat through a workshop about reusable nappies, but we definitely still need one about babywearing. It’s like a whole foreign language we have to learn how to speak, and we’re still at beginner level so far *g* We’re signed up to take a series of classes on childbirth and breastfeeding over summer with the midwives as well, that should be helpful. So you please stay in there and grow a bit more baby! And we’ll try our best at learning about all this stuff.

See you in a few months!

Love, your parents