This week, we've begun to try *all* kinds of ways to get Maya to come out. Yesterday, I walked on a treadmill for forty-five minutes. (Which turns out to be much more exhausting and painful with a 6 to 8 pound person lodged in your pelvic bones). I plan to go back tonight.

It is strange to know that any day or hour, I WILL have a medical emergency of sorts. I know I will be going to the hospital sometime. I'm not just being dramatic or a hypochondriac. It is inevitable. And this experience will be one of the most physically painful experiences of humanity. It has to be pretty bad, it's mentioned as part of The Curse!

...and yet, I'm doing everything I possibly can to speed up the process. Though there is a small amount of dread and fear in my mind, mostly...I'm desperately longing for it to happen SOON. I've never looked forward to anything with so much hope and excitement.

This whole process of life...and how a new person is formed and becomes part of our world...has always seemed so normal to me. News of pregnant friends, or adopted children is exciting and wonderful...but never life altering. It happens everyday. Though each neice and nephew that has entered my family has given me a glimpse of how incredible and life-changing new lives truly are, birth has always seemed so natural and...normal.

But it's always been part of some one else's life. Not mine.

"One of the strange things about baby announcements is that they render the arrival of a human as if it were a normal event. Something regular and conventional that we are accustomed-to and prepared-for...
...I love the ways, though, that babies reproduce the social world into which they are born or adopted. They are (in many ways) an embodiement of who-loves-them. All it takes is the focused love of a vast network of people -- into one very small person -- to create a human filled with our potential."
~Maya's Uncle Andy (on the arrival of new baby Madeline)