Time is moving quickly – faster than I anticipated. My mental calendar starts and ends with the New Year, so when January hits suddenly everything that was “next year” seems a whole hell of a lot closer. Like Devin’s birthday. Less than 2 months until his second birthday, and I’m not exactly sure how that happened. Oh I can look back at all the treatments we’ve gone through, and I’ve gone through plenty enough to fill up 2 full years, but still. 2 years? It’s a little mind-boggling. I’m two years older, having my second baby. And I still have some anger issues about the fact that there are 2 years in between…

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My life has revolved around food lately. I’ve been spending what seems to me to be an atrocious amount on groceries, to make sure I have the right stuff at hand to keep me well fed with protein-rich foods. Unfortunately I am still dealing with a little bit of nausea. I really do mean “a little bit” – but it’s enough to sometimes make eating not so enticing. Saturday afternoon I had a hot dog and milkshake (with protein powder) for a late lunch, which gave me indigestion the rest of the day. I ended up trying to force down some yogurt before bed. I’m constantly pulling up that mental list of “foods that have a lot of protein” and then trying to figure out what I can do with that. (Friday evening we made pasta with ground turkey in the sauce. It quickly became apparent that I still dislike meat sauce on my pasta.)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to stuff myself. I’m still trying to stay away from empty calories and other junk (with some exceptions, of course). But I just find I’m not hungry very much. I go from starving to full in a very short span of time – and the fullness lasts for hours. So I just keep trying to snack. My favorite go-tos are crackers and cheese, yogurt, apple or celery with peanut butter.

I am gaining weight, just… slowly. Oh well. Other than making sure I eat, and eat the right things, there’s not much more I’m going to do about it. Maybe my body just doesn’t like to gain too much. At least my ass isn’t expanding too quickly. Yet.

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Baby girl continues to be active, though of course some days are quieter than others. I am enjoying every bit that I can, but still when I get up in the middle of the night to stumble into the bathroom I wonder in my head, Are you alive in there?

So much of this journey revolves around faith. No, not faith in a higher being – while some have that, I do not – but rather faith in my own body, and faith in The Way Things Work. The thing is, most normal, healthy, already-passed-scary-milestones babies in utero don’t just randomly die. If they did there would be a lot more basketcases in this world and I’d have to seriously re-think this whole gestating a baby thing. So I put my faith in the fact that the odds are very very good that this is going to have a happy ending and continue about my day even when I don’t feel a kick for an hour, or two or three. I function on the assumption that everything is fine, unless I get some sign that it’s not.