Thirteen weeks until we meet our newest little Baer. Twelve weeks and six days if he follows in the very nice pattern his big brothers have laid out for him by all coming the day before their due date.

It’s certainly too soon to be starting any sort of countdown, but I’ve been feeling more and more like we’re in the calm before the storm, and I am enjoying it to its fullest.

I mean, as much as you can enjoy something when you have heartburn, find yourself short of breath, have random aches and pains, and are heavier than you’ve ever been in your life. It’s the best sort of uncomfortable.

The boys' ages are seven, almost six, and almost three, and while there are bad days when nothing seems to be going right and everyone is grumpy and everyone is fighting and no one is listening and everyone is talking at the tops of their lungs, there are more good days than bad. Days where Alec comes home from school bursting at the seams with a project to do. Days where Sebastian spends hours outside riding his bike or putting his shovel to good use. Days where Emmett plays and plays and plays, without needing much of anything.

And I am so much enjoying not being quite so needed at the moment.

Best of all, I have my evenings back. For the longest time, I would sit beside Emmett’s bed for an hour or two while he “went to sleep,” but the night we moved him into the big boys’ room, that all changed. Eric started putting them all to bed, and I got to make myself a new little routine. I now get to sit on the couch and go on Instagram or read a good book while *almost* all of the requests for a drink to be had or an ouchie to be attended to or a scary thought to be warded off are tended to by Eric.

What a life. 🙂

Knowing it won’t last makes it all the sweeter in the moment.

I wish I would’ve known what I was in for when I was pregnant with my first baby. In both the good ways and the bad.

I wish I would’ve known to enjoy more fully those last few days of just me and Eric. I had no idea how much our life would be turned upside down by that one, tiny, seven-pound, five-ounce little boy who was both of us and neither of us at the same time. It felt like life would never be the same.

I wish I would’ve known that we would find ourselves again, that we would find new rhythms, that we would come to love our new life even more than we had loved the old one. That children make life all the fuller and all the more beautiful, no matter how hard birth and postpartum and parenting can be. I wish I would’ve been able to see even just one year down the road, when I was myself again and that needy baby was the happiest, funniest little boy who everyone wanted to talk to after church because he would actually talk back. Baby Alec was a marvel. 🙂

I wish I would’ve known how to enjoy him better. I wish I would’ve marveled at him more, how tiny and perfect he was, how dependent on me, how very much my own he was. I wish I would’ve enjoyed him being my only baby and my only responsibility. I wish I would’ve known to fortify myself beforehand with good books to read and good movies to watch and good music to listen to. I wish I would’ve made myself do those things while I held him and just let myself feel no obligation to anything other than him.

I wish I would’ve known how to listen to his cues better, that it was okay to follow what little there was of my own intuition. I wish I would’ve known that scheduling naps and feeds is great but that sometimes it’s not the best method in the moment and that that’s okay. I wish I would’ve known that I could relax a little, even if he wasn’t taking a nap at the “right time.” I wish I would’ve known that catnaps were a thing at a certain stage. I wish I would’ve known that “this, too, shall pass.” It goes so, so fast, the more babies you have.

I wish I would’ve let my baby be the most important thing, no matter where I was or who I was with. I wish I would’ve known that it was okay to keep him close. I wish I would’ve known that I would feel that “giving away” panic less and less with each subsequent baby and that it was okay and normal to feel it so intensely with the first.

I wish I would’ve felt more at peace in my mind, instead of staggering through loneliness and fear and sadness like none I’d ever experienced before. I wish I would’ve known what to do to help myself, that Progessence Plus would help tremendously and that Postpartum Balance would help even more. I wish I would’ve known that more than anything. It might’ve made everything else come together better. I wish I would’ve gotten outside more, would’ve walked more, would’ve eaten healthier food.

It's amazing, the things you can learn in just seven short years. I told Eric that the first thing I want to eat after this baby is born is two great big doughnuts that I can eat all by myself. But I also know better. What better way to derail your healing and wreck your body and your hormones and your mood than by throwing processed sugar and chemicals and fake food into the mix?

So maybe just one doughnut. 🙂

There are so many things I’ve learned since having my first baby that I wish I would’ve known back then.

But I didn’t, and sometimes there’s no way to learn except by living it yourself and figuring it out for yourself.

Not that you ever actually arrive when it comes to parenting of course. There’s always something new around the corner, and hindsight is almost always clearer than trying to figure out what on earth to do in the moment. We made mistakes when we were starting out, and we make mistakes now.

Alec was our guinea pig, in so many ways, but the other day he was watching an old birthday video, and he gave the happiest little sigh and said, “I had such a wonderful childhood.” 🙂

I’m glad it doesn’t take a perfect parent to make a happy childhood.

And I’m thankful that the same God Who calls us to walk in holiness before Him and Who tells us to “train up a child in the way he should go” also says that He will “lead gently those who are with young.”

How we need that.

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22-23, ESV)