Preggo Update--32 weeks

My lovely, 32-week self portrait:

The official countdown has begun, people--only 8 weeks left to go, give or take a couple!  We are getting VERY excited to meet this little girl.  When I was pregnant with Avery, I had so much anxiety about her birth and about caring for an infant that I think I lost a lot of the joy of anticipating a new arrival to our family.  But this time around, I feel so much more confident and at ease about the whole thing!  That's not to say I'm not dreading labor or anything, but I'm not losing sleep over it! (What I AM losing sleep over, however, is going to the bathroom every 45 minutes around the clock! :) 

I think I was saying in another post that second trimester is awesome, but it actually has not been an easy past couple of months.  It all began with Avery getting a terrible, terrible fever/cough/cold combo that lasted a couple of weeks and kept her and I both up at night.  So then of course I caught the same thing, and at the end of it ended up with an I-wouldn't-wish-it-on-my-worst-enemy sinus infection.  There were a couple of times in the middle of the night that I almost checked myself into the ER the pain was so bad!  THEN, after over two weeks of dealing with that it was Avery's turn again and she got some sort of painful mouth virus.  THEN, guess who got not only the same mouth ulcer/virus thing but an additional wisdom tooth infection to go along with it??  I had thought the sinus infection was bad--not compared to this!  For real.

It's been a little over a week now that I've been feeling better, and let me tell you, I do not take my health for granted anymore.  Not to belabor the point, but it was a really hard time.  I am so thankful now that our whole family is feeling well, sleeping well, eating well... I think, too, that this is part of the reason I'm so optimistic about the arrival of our second: if I somehow by the grace of God got through the past two months, I really feel like I can do anything!

I'll end with a cute Avery story from yesterday.  She decided she wanted to read the baby books, so she pulled up my shirt, opened her book, and put it face down on my belly for a second and held it there.  Then she turned the page and did it again.  It was adorable.