Matt and I had an engagement period of 128 days (from August 16th to December 21st), and as I've been watching the Polka ticker in the sidebar, I've watched the days count down to where we now have the same amount of days to wait before Polka's due date on January 9th:  128 days until blast off!  Our engagement was short (I'm all about short engagements), and to realize that we are at the point where we only have about 4 months more before Polka is born is both exciting and unnerving at the same time.

I told my sister-in-law, Julie, yesterday that I had my first panic attack last week.  Literally, I could not breath as I was pondering parenthood.  The fears were too much at the time and overtook me; I felt like I was being choked by fear's gruesome tentacles.  "I'm going to be a rule-monger"; "Will I emphasize manners too much over heart issues?"; "How am I going to help Polka to know and love Jesus?"; "My perfectionism and worry-wart tendencies about what other people think is going to overtake me"; "How do I get the baby on a good sleeping schedule/routine?"; "How do I make sure our lives and schedules don't totally become revolved around Polka, but Polka to ours?"; "Matt and I are so different; how are we going to agree on anything in parenthood"; "I don't want to give up my life so much."  And on and on it went.  I can't even pick up a book on parenting.  Something in me just wants to leap, to jump straight into the pool of the unknown and simply go for it.  That's totally opposite of my natural personality of planning, but I literally feel paralyzed to do anything but that.  Well, this blog post wasn't supposed to be about all that; I digress.  But I will say that one thing that comes to mind when I fret about being a mommy is to keep in mind the simple calling on my life to be Meg totally and completely dependent on God.  That's all I can do, and that's all I can think of in the moments of sheer terror.

So back to my point.  128 days to go.  During our engagement, one of the creative and fun things Matt would write about in letters and emails to me to help countdown to our wedding day was to chart different gestation periods of animals and how they compared with how many days left we had until our wedding.  A totally "Matt" thing to do!  <grin>  So for instance, 122 days before our wedding, I'd get a note saying that beavers would be born on our special day; 108 days to go and a lion would be born on our wedding day; 68 days, guinea pigs; 42 days, a kangaroo; 21 days, mice; 11 days, finch...and so on and so forth.  It was certainly an entertaining way to countdown!  And now, even while there is much anticipation and the desire to have this baby out of my body as soon as possible to return to normal bodily comfort, I am so glad Polka's gestation period is as long as it is! Well, "so glad" is probably an understatement!