So today marks 20 weeks – 5 months pregnant. Halfway to 40. Is it really halfway over already? It’s still so strange. There are days when I don’t even think about it. According to our favorite little app, Ember is 10 inches long, 10 1/2 oz and about the size of a paper airplane.

At my last appointment, the doctor asked if I was feeling “constant movement” with her and I panicked. NO?! I DON’T KNOW? MAYBE?! She laughed and said “Calm down, ‘I don’t know’ is a fine answer.” I’d felt a lot of weird gurgling bubbling strange things, but nothing that made me think “oh that’s a baby in there” versus just “my body is doing weird things, like always….”

This weekend my mom and I picked a Christmas Tradition back up – baking Christmas cookies. She and my paternal grandmother spent 35 years baking cookies every year at Christmas. They would hole up all weekend and make hundreds and hundreds – all from scratch, of course. They were in the Times Free Press local newspaper one year, in which I was 4 and apparently sick, but when the photographer came by I crawled off the couch to get my photo taken as I “helped” cut out cookie dough. I’ve got the article framed in my kitchen, the original kitchen where the cookies were always baked, along with a listing of most of the recipes.

When my grandmother began to suffer more heavily from dementia and my mother was out of town in seminary, the tradition fell to the side. Although, the last year the cookies were baked, I joined back in and my mother and I ran the kitchen while my grandmother helped and watched. We lost her in March of this year, and when my mom and I talked about baking them again, we were both excited. We donned our aprons, listened to Christmas music, and talked this weekend (during our 10+ hours of cookie baking) about next year, when we’d be hauling a tiny person around while we baked. Although we didn’t finish them all this weekend, we got a lot of cookies ready and are planning to finish it off with another (shorter) session.

Sunday night, as I laid in bed thinking about my feet hurting from my long weekend, I felt something go -flip flop- and I thought “hmm. I guess that’s her bouncing around in there.” The best way to describe the feeling of the tiny person in residence inside my body is that feeling you get when you’re getting a massage and you can feel a muscle sort of pop around – not that it hurts, it’s just kind of like a little “oh, huh, that’s weird.” And strangely, instead of every other time I’ve felt something weird, I didn’t go “OH GOD WHAT WAS THAT?!” I just thought “that’s what it feels like. Good to know.”

Since then I’ve been feeling her shuffle around here and there during the day. I’m sure it’ll get more prominent, but it’s nice to know things are moving along in the proper way.

Maybe one day I’ll stop saying “strange” and “weird” to describe this process, but I sort of doubt it. My doctor suggested “surreal” but that seems a bit too lofty at this point. Most of it is the sort of thing that makes me raise an eyebrow and go “Hmmm. Interesting.” The Boyfriend asked if I had ALL THE FEELINGS when I felt her move around and I laughed, as usual, not really. I feel like I’m a science experiment – and I have my own little clipboard checking things off and making notes as we stumble through this process.

Medical Update: The AFP test from last week came back Negative, with a quick note from the doctor saying “AFP is negative, this means that the baby is not at increased risk for neural tube defects such as spina bifida, this is great!”