20 Weeks, and Emotional Progress

There have been small steps in emotional progress this week, but steps none the less.

We've been hanging out at R's parents in preparation for having a garage sale at their house. Most of the stuff we're going to be selling is down in their basement, which is also where all of the baby stuff resides from our failed adoptions. (After we sold our previous house and moved, I refused to let any of that stuff cross the threshold into our new house.)

So there we were on Wednesday night, and curiosity got the better of me. I had R pull out one of the suitcases of stuff. It had somewhat less emotional stuff in it - a baby carrier, the thingamajig you put into a carseat to make it smaller so that an infant is snug in it, some plastic-backed swatches of rather stiff fabric that I'm thinking are maybe mattress protectors that go under the mattress sheet.

I think it would have been harder if I had opened the suitcase to find all the onsies, receiving blankets, towels, etc. we had bought. But what was there was okay - I could handle it.

We have more stuff in boxes down there, but R's brother had piled a bunch of clothes on the boxes, so we couldn't easily get to them for now. That was okay, too. But R also showed a little bit of emotional progress/forward thinking/hoping: he asked his brother to begin removing some of his stuff over the next several weeks so that we could eventually get to it.

And I also got a pleasant surprise - we have more baby furniture than I remembered.

I knew we had two cribs, given to us by two different friends, a very cute dresser R had refinished, and an armoire from my mom. But I had forgotten that the friend who gave us one of the cribs also gave us a tall chest of drawers and shorter chest of drawers that match the crib. So I'm thinking (imagine me, allowing myself to consider the possibility of a happy ending in the near future!) that we could put one of the cribs and the small chest of drawers downstairs so that we would have supplies more easily at hand without having to always run up and down the stairs.

Then, in a sign of even more progress, when we went to our appointment yesterday, I forgot to stare at the ceiling until the heartbeat was announced. It took a couple of seconds of staring at the ultrasound screen before I realized what I was doing. Then, just as it occurred to me and I quickly glanced away, the tech announced the heartbeat.

But there are still backwards steps sometimes, too. I was at work on Thursday when I began to have a lot of anxiety about not having felt the sensations I think are movement in a while. I texted one of my friends to say that I was tempted to leave my desk and drive around in my car with the radio on to see if I could elicit some movement from Kiddo. I didn't, but I was still super stressed about it until I finally felt some movement again late Thursday night.

So, like I said, small steps, but steps none the less.