Oh dear, once again I have let weeks and weeks pass by without writing anything here. I am at 38 weeks, so ridiculously close to the end of this journey. I keep waiting for some Moment to come that will signal to my brain that it’s time to write — candidates for The Moment include: finishing the baby’s room, baking something new and inspired and sugarfree, coming to some profound and meaningful insight, etc. Not to mention the biggest impending Moment of all, the one where I give birth to a wee snuggly girl and start life as a mother.

But instead, life has been filled with ordering lots of stuff through the mail. Or you know, the internet, whatever. It comes in the mail. Every day when I pull into the driveway, returning for work, I have to strategically slow down and peek at the front porch for packages, or wait for my bus-commuting-hero husband to find them and bring them inside. Babies need a lot of stuff, yo. Plus for the couple weeks around my baby shower, more lovely packages would arrive.  I have been totally overwhelmed by the generosity of friends and family, who through their gifts have graced us with enough onesies to weather any upcoming plagues of Onesie Blight (bad tomato joke, sorry), and all the basic and not-so-basic things necessary for our upcoming ordeal little one.

One amazing gift was that my dad finished restoring my grandfather’s cradle, a project which I gamely started way back in April (at a now-distant 18 weeks pregnant), and slowly became too preoccupied to finish. I will have to wait to share pictures of the amazing finished cradle, since he has one finished touch remaining, but it is essentially done, and I am amazed. And humbled, again, by his talents and generosity, devoting such time to a project when he has been working away from home for 4 days each week. Is there anything better than an awesome dad?

I’ll just share one picture here in closing, of the beautiful sunflowers given to me at my shower. They contain every bright drop of late-summer sun, something I know I’ll savor when the crisp autumn nights and Oregon rains come back to us very, very soon, though I know with that chilly weather we’ll have one very excellent reason to stay inside and snuggly warm…