Dear Baby

Dear Baby,

You will be here in eleven days. Unlike many of your baby peers, you will not have the luxury of a fancy nursery prepared and decorated with much care, energy, and thought. In fact, despite your nearing arrival, you do not even have a place to sleep yet. There is not one inch of this house devoted solely to you.

You will not get hours of one-on-one time from your parents. You will not be the center of our lives like your oldest brother once was. In fact, you will often be an afterthought. A tagalong. Your schedule will be roughly forged into our daily activities. I will have to pry you from the warm house early each morning to take your brother to school. You may feel like merely a piece of luggage at times, as you sleep (or cry) in your carseat as we cart you around all over town from activity to activity.

You will not benefit from long, lazy days at home lounging in the living room and being gazed upon as we tend to your every whim. In fact your own schedule will rarely be accommodated to perfection. You will take naps in the car while errands are under way. Your diapers will not be changed instantly. Your cries will not be immediately tended to.

As your birthday approaches, I most frequently see that day as the end of my pregnancy rather than the beginning of you. As a working mom, I don't have a lot of time to think about and dwell on the event much. Don't get me wrong, we are all anticipating that day and counting it down. But mostly, this takes place in quiet. In our silent thoughts as we cook meals, make sure homework is completed, fold laundry, create grocery lists, carpool, answer calls from clients, and send important emails from our office computers.

We all know that the day you are born will be a day of something big and important. We just don't know how to conceptualize that in our present world of chores and mundane daily tasks. Factually we know that your birthday will bring forward a brand new human that will forever change us and be bonded to us. But despite our knowledge of how the whole thing works (and despite having done this twice before) we still cannot conceptualize it or understand it.

Don't let any of what I just said fool you. You are wanted. You are loved. We are eager to meet you. Although we cannot provide you with everything your oldest brother had (unlimited undivided attention and your own designated space), we cannot wait for the moment that the doctor lifts you over the bright blue curtain and we get to see you for the first time, filmy, wrinkly, and covered in white goo.

I can't wait until we finally settle on a name that will be yours forever. A name we will use over and over as we call to you lovingly, scold you, or brag about you to coworkers and friends. A name we will put on birthday cakes and school applications. We don't have that name picked out yet. And it amazes me to think that your name, so unknown and undecided at this moment will become so familiar to us.

I feel the same way about you. Although you exist right now, I do not know a thing about you. And as foreign and unfamiliar as you are to us now, you will become an integral and familiar part of our lives. A part that someday I will not be able to imagine being without.

As we go about our business as usual and as your birthday slowly creeps up on us, it become even more strange to realize that in the course of a couple hours, with transformation of one Sunday into one Monday without much fanfare or buildup, as the rest of the world goes about its business, our lives (and yours) will change forever.