Last Sunday afternoon David and I were sitting in the living room doing our usual quiet Sunday activities. It was quiet – no music or anything. Just a peaceful, restful lull in the week, interrupted only when one of us thought of something to say or had something to share from a book.
All of the sudden I realized… Wow. This is going to end very soon. We are usually home on Sunday afternoons and we’ve spent a lot of them this way. Approximately 496 of them since we were married. I counted how many were left. Probably around 11.
We’ve talked about a lot of different aspects of Little Miss Peanut coming – taking her to church, taking her grocery shopping, taking her to the farmer’s market, having her for the holidays, etc. But I hadn’t thought yet about how Sunday afternoons will be different. Truth be told, it made me feel a little panicky for a moment. But it passed.
So today we spent one of our last 11 Sundays in much the same way we usually do. We also spent some time looking through a baby name book, finally actually writing down some of the names we’ve tossed around. We’ve been pretty casual about this whole name thing, but I’m starting to feel a little more sense of urgency. David now has a new front runner, a name I had thrown out a few times before and he had never really said much about but now he really likes. I would say we’re tossing around about five names seriously at this point. It is such a huge responsibility to give someone a name! Peanut has to live with it the rest of her life – as a child, as a young woman, as a middle-aged woman, and as an elderly person. I would like her to have something that will be enjoyable for every stage of her life.
You know, in a lot of ways waiting for this baby to come feels a lot like counting down the days to graduation or summer vacation or the end of a job. There’s this longing for the days to pass quickly and yet a realization that at the same time you don’t want them to pass too quickly because that will mean a phase of your life is over. Forever. So we continue to live in the now and think about the not yet and ponder the transition inbetween.