Gestational logorrhea: week 14 (and preschool countdown T-3 weeks)

The heat. The HEAT. I'm so grateful I'm not in the home stretch of this pregnancy in this weather. I met a woman yesterday who was four days overdue with her second kid. Unimaginable.

I may be starting to feel some phantom movement in the belly. It is so subtle and so easy to confuse with intestinal burblings (which are plentiful). The first time I felt Jonah move, I was sitting at my desk at work and I distinctly felt something like a hand brush lightly on my belly... from the inside. It was subtle and extraordinary.

Jonah starts preschool in three weeks. We got a mailing from the school with procedural stuff and a list of things to buy, which is making it much more concrete. I'm hoping that the concreteness also dries my tears, because I've been bawling every time I try to focus on the fact that he'll be missing for four hours of the day, five days a week. Now that we have a schedule, a to-do list, I've been talking to him about school, slowly divulging details, waiting for one of them to trip him up. So far, he hasn't flinched. He is looking forward to having a "cubby." He knows we will leave him there and come back later.

I am unduly worried about the collapse of my influence on Jonah. I've tried so damn hard to shelter him from evil and/or unnecessary cultural influences thus far, carefully cultivating the influences he has had. (Geez, that makes it sound like I've curated him. How calculating.)

I must be an idiot, crying, because it sounds so wonderful in theory, having all that time to myself - more time than I've had to myself since I quit my full-time job. But it's so hard not to feel like I'm being pushed out of a job, or at least asked to scale back my hours considerably. I left my career over a year and a half ago, not at all unwillingly, and this is the first significant change of duties I will have had. Of course, the respite will be brief, since mid-February will bring me back to the trench warfare of newborn care and the various weapons of immediate postpartum: peri-bottle, maxi pads, nipple cream.

I must be an idiot, but I'd be more of an idiot to keep it bottled up and have it come spewing out the day I have to drop Jonah off at the door of his school (after the first week, we are not allowed to follow him in) and tear-stain his brand new experience. I hope I can be a better mom than that.