Back in the saddle

Last weekend we took a long weekend to travel home to Texas to spend the weekend with family and friends. It was relaxing and wonderful. My mom (with the help of Mr. D. and my sister and my brother) managed to surprise me with a baby shower, something I wasn’t sure I was going to have here where we live (we haven’t been here that long, so I don’t have a circle of friends to host a shower, and we’re far from any family). The whole thing was a complete surprise — and I am not easily surprised — and was really just what I needed.  I think I really needed an opportunity to sit around with family and friends and just talk about being pregnant — about how excited we are, about how nervous we are, about all the things we just don’t know. I mean, I talk to Mr. D. about this stuff, obviously. But other than Mr. D., I spend most of my time with people at work and I haven’t exactly been sitting around at lunch chatting about the baby! So it was absolutely wonderful to have a chance to focus completely on the baby for a couple of hours.

Of course, as soon as we got back, the proverbial excrement hit the proverbial wind machine at work, and I’ve been pretty busy — too busy to worry about baby stuff!  I did take an hour off yesterday, though, for the anatomy scan, which was, frankly, amazing. All of the parts we could see look perfect, growing right on schedule.  Of course, it’s a good thing we don’t want to know the sex, because this baby was just not cooperative.  Baby’s legs were all curled up — so much so that the tech had a hard time getting a good shot of the feet and legs.  She said there was almost no chance she’d’ve been able to get a look at the goods anyway, so fate was on our side.

Anyway, things are progressing. I’m halfway through and the list of things we have to do continues to get longer. And work hasn’t slowed down at all either. One of the partners I work for told me yesterday that he realizes I have a lot of stuff on my plate for him, and to let him know if it gets too overwhelming. Of course, he followed that up by telling me that he’s comfortable giving me so much to do because he knows how capable I am. That’s a nice thing to hear, even if it kind of makes me hesitant to go back to him and tell him I don’t think I can get everything done by our deadline. Right now, I think I can get everything done (though it does mean giving up some of my weekend), but we’ll see how I feel Monday night, when I’ll need to be ahead enough to take a few hours off to take my cousin, who’s in town for her Fulbright orientation, out to dinner.

I do love my job — I feel consistently lucky to have landed at my firm, which is such a good fit for me both professionally and personally — but I don’t feel guilty at all saying that I’m really looking forward to taking my maternity leave in about five months. But that’s fodder for another post.