Hiatus

Ack! I've been away from blogging for so long, I don't even know where to begin. Two months is a long time. SuperHusband and I have been caught up in a whirlwind of school, holidays, deployments, family crises, and oh yeah, we're pregnant, too. Check me off the list -- I, too, have joined the ranks of Pattersonites with big bellies and bursting budgets.

We started telling people around the tail end of November, just after we safely completed the first trimester. The pregnancy comes as a wonderful blessing after a round of what I like to call "remedial fertility." Nothing too cosmic -- we didn't struggle through rounds of emotionally, physically and financially exhausting in-vitro or anything. My body just refused to ovulate. If there's a black and yellow paperback on a shelf in some Barnes & Noble called, Fertility for Dummies, I'm sure my picture's in there somewhere.

So we've joined the club. We'd like to extend a huge congratulations to our friends Ben and Erin who've recently celebrated the birth of their newborn twins, and best wishes to Dawn and Greg who expect their little one in March. We're due June 12. We're officially half-way there, having just completed the 20th week.

We've adopted the same, incredibly sane philosophy as our friends, adamantly refusing to discuss potential name selections. And there's another twist: We've decided to be surprised. We're not going to find out the baby's gender. SuperHusband wanted to at first, but seeing as he's deployed and couldn't attend the far more substantial ultrasound during my 18th week, the poor guy didn't get much of a vote. Ever the loving wife, however, I had the tech seal it in an envelope, and if my Sweetheart gets to a point when he simply can't stand it, I'll send it to him. (With him halfway around the world, I can navigate most of the remainder of the pregnancy without him accidentally spilling the beans.) Still, he's been so busy that I don't think he's had time to really worry about it.

People never ask, "when are you due?" It's always, "Do you know what it's going to be?" I think I'll start saying, "Yes, we were concerned it might be a kitten, or maybe even a calf -- I've been accused of having those before -- but we can gleefully proclaim that it will, in fact, be a baby."

Friends, family, books, websites...people the world over have posed a multitude of good reasons for finding out the gender, but for me, I guess it boiled down to this: The military has turned me into a Type-A control freak. Yes, before the comments start rolling in, I realize I had some obsessive-compulsive tendencies in college, but it's not the same. Attention to detail, (the unofficial Air Force motto), time management, planning and organization -- in pre-military life I saw these concepts as foreign, far preferring a life lived extemporaneously.

So after years of cultural immersion in a world where surprises get a gal fired, (or cost lives in SuperHusband's line of work), the idea of one pure, blissful, God-given surprise, strikes me as incredibly romantic. I'm so excited to have that one precious moment of life impromptu.