Patience has never been my strong suit. I skip to the last page of every book I read before I'm halfway through. Before I see a movie, I look up the plot summary on Wikipedia. When I was a kid, I found Mom and Dad's Christmas present stash every year - and hell yeah, I peeked! So it is completely amazing to me that I haven't broken down and called the OB's office yet, begging for an early ultrasound. After all, I am the ultrasound junkie...

Most of the time, I feel like this is good practice for parenting. I'm sure that the worry never really stops, and I'd better learn to deal with my anxiety now before there's a little person here for me to project it all onto. Someday, be the good Lord willing, this little baby is going to be going off to school... Learning to drive... Going to college... All kinds of terrifying stuff. I don't want to be the crazy anxious mom in tears every time her kid takes a step towards scary, scary adulthood... I want to be able to feel the feelings and let them go. So that's what I'm trying to do here - to trust that even when I can't see it with my own eyes, everything is going to be okay.

But then there are the moments where I'm convinced that this is all going to go south, and I just don't want to know. I want to soak in the joy of being pregnant for as long as possible, and I worry that the next ultrasound will once again be the beginning of the end. And then I squeeze my boobs to see if they're still sore, and I imagine eating chicken to see if I'm still nauseous, and I wonder if anxiety is intuition and then I wonder if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One more week from tomorrow.