playing the waiting game

We totally got thrown for a loop two weeks ago when I went into my OB for an appointment at 36 weeks and she said I was already four centimeters dilated and 50% effaced. Now, I don't know much about giving birth (other than having done it once), but I know that 10 centimeters is the golden number for HAVING THAT BABY, so 4 cm already sounded pretty far along! The doctor was very non-committal about whether he was going to come early, but I of course panicked and spent the whole week being worried that I was going into labor or that the baby was going to just fall out of me before I could get to the hospital. But here we are, two weeks later, and no baby has come yet! So we're still just waiting, but I'm not so worried any more. It'll work out, however it happens, and I'm just glad that now we've made it to 38 weeks and that we've gotten a lot more done this past week than I thought we'd be able to finish before the baby came. Now I just need to make it to my class tomorrow night, and then I will really feel like I've made it. Let's make it to April!

One of the major things that we finally accomplished this week was... buying a car! We've only had one car ever since we left North Carolina (Tommy's good old trusty '98 Corolla died before we left) and I've been shuttling Tommy to work ever since, but it just doesn't seem like that's going to keep working with a newborn. We've been talking about how we need to do this--and trying to do it--for months now, but it just never worked out. We were so stressed about it, and couldn't find anything that worked for us, and felt like we needed to find the cheapest clunker car we could find, since we'd probably only need it for two or three years before upgrading to a larger car, so spending more than a few thousand on it felt wasteful. 

And after months of being stressed out by looking and talking about finding a car, we had a thought: why not buy a minivan now? It's totally not necessary, but we need a second car now, and we obviously hate car shopping so much that we're just punishing ourselves by knowing we have to do this process twice (now, and again in a few years). Immediately, once we started talking about it, we both just felt so, so much better about this whole thing and knew it was the right decision for us right now. So we spent a few days test driving and looking at some used minivans close to us. Dane was a champion minivan tester with us--we totally wore him out:

And we ended up finding "the one!" A nice blue Honda Odyssey with low mileage and a decent price tag.

I am thrilled about the convenience of it, and so happy that we found something--anything--that will work for us right now--and so soon before the baby comes too! It's a little earlier than we thought we needed it, but it will hopefully last us for a lot of years and we'll eventually be fitting into it a lot better than we do now (it feels silly for me to drive around with just Dane in the backseat). It will make road trips so much easier for us, with so much more storage space, and since we're tentatively planning on driving to Utah and California this summer, this will be a godsend for us come July.

We were joking about how we now have a house and a minivan and (almost) two kids--it's like I'm 36 instead of 26! My mom and sister were teasing us that we're doing just the total typical BYU grad thing, which I'd sworn in my teenage wisdom that I would never do--married super young, staying at home, having babies fast, living in suburbia (and driving a minivan!). And it's true! It sounds so boring and typical when you say it all like that, but it feels so much more important and interesting when it's your life and you're doing it yourself. Everything is so much more important and meaningful than it may appear when you're working with your money and your body and your family. And even though I wanted to be more adventurous and different when I was my wild teenage self (ha), I can't imagine a life I'd fit better in, or one that would be happier or better in. It may be a stereotypical life, but it's mine, and I'm glad I'm living it!