Tick-tock, tick-tock.

“Maybe I will see you next week at class,” I heard today from one of my mom friends while leaving a gym class with my three-year-old and nineteen-month-old.

“Maybe,” was my response, because I’m at the point where who REALLY knows when this baby is coming.

If this is you, visibly uncomfortable but hanging on, welcome to the when-you-are-in-the-waiting-game-mode phase of pregnancy (also known as the “baby watch” phase). This phase is around the end of your third-trimester where you’re over this whole pregnancy thing. Your everything hurts. I mean, you have sciatica down your legs and butt and get random Braxton Hicks contractions when you walk. You stain your shirts way too often between colostrum leaking and everything you feed your kids or eat yourself hitting your belly like it’s a bullseye on a target. You also find that none of your clothes fit and the ones that do you have to switch off between and because of this you’re doing extra loads of laundry to survive.

Tick-tock, you may not even be late. In fact, if you are like me, you're early, but there are signs of your baby upon the horizons. It could be the appearance of a mucus plug or the baby dropping. It could be that you are a certain percentage effaced or dilated, but what this all means is that your baby is getting ready to enter this world.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

I’m impatient too because I'm watching that clock, like come on baby, give me a sign here! I’m on a need-to-know basis, and with birth, no one knows when it’s going to happen.

So you wait.

You have your hospital bag packed, cord blood kit set, all of it waiting, ready to go, like you are.

So I sit here and wait with all the other mamas in this phase.

To the first-time mom, I want you to know that soon you will have your baby in your arms and it will all be worth it.

Because as an experienced mom, I can reveal that we do it again, for a happy ending.

And that happy ending is our beautiful babies.

This post originally appeared on the author's Facebook. Her book Living FULL: Winning My Battle with Eating Disorder is available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2O4mJId

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