Check, Check, and Check

As I've said, preparations for Baby G2 have been very different than round one. Our lives are more hectic , and our focus is split. Over the past month, we've finally checked a few things off our list.

#1.) I started going to prenatal yoga at Blooma in Minneapolis. Prenatal yoga was a huge part of my pregnancy with Lydia, as was my standard vinyasa practice. Because the complications with this pregnancy happened to occur the night I went to a hot, intense yoga class, I had a very hard time breaking my association between that kind of workout and things going wrong with my pregnancy. As a result, I stopped the standard yoga and switched to prenatal.

Blooma is an amazing place. They are almost totally focused on pregnancy, birth, and babies. They offer education series as well as baby and toddler yoga on top of prenatal yoga classes. I love it. It's a place where pregnancy and birth is celebrated, and that's been tremendously helpful for my mindset.

Blooma is also the place where we met the person whom we've chosen as our doula, so on to...

#2.) Yesterday, we officially chose our doula. Brooke is one of my yoga teachers at Blooma, and last week as she was adjusting me, I thought to myself, "I wonder if this lady is a doula..." Something about the moment made me think,"If she is, I think this is our person." We had initiated conversations with six different doulas and interviewed two, and I was starting to feel like I just had to accept that I wouldn't have the same connection as we did with our first doula, Kristen.

Enter Brooke. We had a great conversation after the yoga class, and I emailed her that evening to set up a meeting with Robin and me; Lydia ended up tagging along, also. We met yesterday before we headed out of town for Christmas, and chatted for two hours. Robin joked later that the conversation only needed to last three minutes--we both knew pretty quickly that she was going to be our person. We reflected on Lydia's birth and some ideas we would like to incorporate this time around, talked budget a bit (since her fee was slightly higher than we had originally planned), and I left feeling really excited. Yay!

#3.) Finally, we have started nursery preparations. Robin painted the baby's room, and I spent a snowed-in weekend sewing eleven stuffed birds for a hanging mobile. Robin and Dale are talking about making the baby's crib as we speak, and I have identified my next craft project. (This one involves the baby's name so it will have to stay under wraps until he makes his big debut.) It's nice to see the baby's room begin to look less like a storage locker and more like a nursery.

It's clear that preparations for this baby will just not look the same as they did for Lydia, but it feel good to do a little nesting and see things start to take shape.