The past 14 weeks.

School has started, which means Murdo and I wake up around the same time, silently wishing for double sinks in the bathroom as we stumble around slowly, bleary-eyed, through the early mornings. It also means longer commutes, and shorter days, and a constant mess of second graders' drawings and math tests cluttered around our family room.

And oh, it means summer is over. How did that happen?

This summer, besides not writing here, I have managed to NOT do the following:

- Pick up another camera besides my iPhone.
- Go to the gym.
- Eat the giant cucumbers spilling from our vegetable garden.
- Weekly laundry. 
- Cook much of anything besides bacon for BLTs. 
- Wake up earlier than 10am on a weekend. 

But but BUT! Before you go thinking that I am a complete sloth, here is a list of my accomplishments in the past three months:

- Sunk my toes into a white sand beach in the Dominican Republic.

- Ate the best grilled lobster of my life, served in the ocean by a man with a tray, a small inflatable raft and a cooler.

- Shucked, blanched, stripped, bagged and froze approximately 100 ears of farm fresh sweet corn.

- Made elotes and corn chowder with said sweet corn.

- Long after-dinner walks with Murdo most days of the week.

- Danced all night long with my closest friends at an epic wedding in Madison.

- Painted interior doors. Painted baseboards and trim. Taped, painted, taped, painted....

- Tomato and mayo sandwiches. YES.

- Made a baby.

OK, that last one can't really be checked off the list quite yet, since Baby isn't due to arrive until early March. But I'm telling myself that the reason for all the items on List 1 is for that last, really big, energy- and appetite-sucking item on List 2.

You guys, Murdo and I are expecting. I've just begun my second trimester, and while I haven't suffered from any nausea (thank goodness!), I have spent most of my summer feeling very tired, very bloated, very hungry or, on those very special days, all three at the same time.

My regular appetite changes on a weekly basis. The first couple weeks, I wanted chicken. Then, cheeseburgers. Lately, spicy foods (yup, it's definitely Murdo's kid in there) -- extra spicy Pad Kee Mao, hot giardiniera straight from the jar, Flaming Hot Cheetos right before bed. Fresh heirloom tomatoes plucked from our little garden, roughly chopped and simmered in butter and salt with several generous shakes of crushed red pepper flakes, tossed with spaghetti and basil. After a brief obsession with beef, my love for vegetables is finally starting to come back. Those poor zucchini and cucumbers from my garden. I've been picking them like crazy, setting them on the kitchen table and ignoring them for weeks. But I did manage to slice, bread and fry a couple of zucchini, and over the weekend, as we prepared food for possibly the last cookout of the season, I shoved a bowl of about 10 cucumbers at my friend Ryan and told him to make something delicious. He delivered a Thai cucumber salad that we served alongside pancit, Filipino BBQ pork skewers and handmade brats we picked up from a local sausage shop. This past weekend we ate well, and laughed hard, and by the time it was over and I was sweeping up stray blades of grass in the kitchen and Murdo was collecting empty beer glasses in the backyard, I felt incredibly happy and excited to be bringing a child into our little world filled with friends and family and food and love. 

Our child. In the year leading up to this pregnancy, as I was mentally preparing myself for the huge life change we decided to jump into, I imagined myself in a constant state of awe that my body would be making a human. This hasn't really been the case, at least not now in these early months, when my growing belly is mostly due to gas and lack of exercise, and it's easy to let the symptoms take over my brain because right now, the symptoms are all I can feel and see. But sometimes, when I let my mind and my body go very still and quiet, I remember that I'm never alone anymore. That there is a tiny human taking shape just below my belly button, and that I'm carrying this tiny human with me everywhere I go, and even though six months from now this tiny human will be a real, live, slightly bigger and more demanding human no longer in my belly, I will still carry him or her with me wherever I go, every day of my life.