Deep Breath

I guess it has been a while since I have posted. We are kinda in the middle of LIFE right now. I'm homeschooling the kids, getting more and more pregnant, and (what was that other thing??) oh yeah, packing up EVERYTHING and moving. Argh.

Things are moving forward and we are all trying to go with the flow--the emotions of moving (excitement and sadness), the problems of living in a very cluttered, half-packed house where you can't find ANYTHING, while still trying to maintain some kind of rhythm to our days.

The baby is doing fine--I had an ultrasound yesterday that showed a very healthy little one. Still, for some reason, I couldn't shake the guilt (was it guilt??) that I woke up with the other night. See, I woke in the middle of the night having a bit of a panic attack. I couldn't figure out why I was so happy and at peace with this pregnancy. Babies die, don't you know?? What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks was wrong with me that I was floating along in this blissful ignorance carrying this baby when all along, I knew, truly knew, that there is a chance this baby could not make it! How could that be? What was going on?? Should I be panicking? (Obviously not, which I recognized in the light of the morning, but in the middle of the night, it was harder to stop!) I thought of all the things that could still go wrong. I thought of all the babies I know who were born at 25 or 26 weeks and didn't make it. I thought of the moms I know whose babies died full-term of cord accidents. I thought of Sophie and how my body just shut down and she was such a tragic result of that. And as I laid there in the middle of the night with tears streaming down my cheeks, the baby started to somersault and kick and wiggle. "I'm alive!" s/he seemed to be saying, "don't count me out! Right here and right now, I'm fine!" I drifted back to a fitful sleep, waking tired and cranky the next morning. It has been about a week now since that happened, and I'm doing fine again. When those thoughts hit me, I (try to) just say, "Thank you, brain, for that idea, and now I'm going to put it aside and think of something else." Because yes, there is a possibility this baby could die. There is a possibility I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I refuse to parent out of fear and I cannot make choices for this baby out of fear. Deep breath....

Quote of the day...

Today we were deciding what to do for our volcano unit. Megan has been interested in learning about volcanoes lately, so we decided we'd do a unit on them. The girls want to make an educational video for some friends of ours, so we immediately began to break up the parts. Erin will be doing a "lecture" on plate tectonics and where volcanoes are found. Megan will be talking about the different kinds of volcanoes and how they erupt. Erin goes into the office to write out her part. A while later, she comes back with a page of notes, several diagrams and a description of what her character will do on the video. "Oh, there is one little thing, Mom, just for the action part of the video...is there a safe way to set me on fire??"

Now, if I was a radical unschooler, truly supporting all of my child's dreams and aspirations to the ends of the Earth, I would have told her we could research that. Somehow, though, my mothering instinct kicked in. "No...probably not," I said. (For the record, we are going to see how to make it LOOK like she is on fire with some special effects--that's as far as I'm willing to go on this one!)