The final 3


I’m rounding the corner to the home stretch of my 4th full-term pregnancy. To this point this pregnancy has not been my favorite experience, and considering how close I am to it’s end, I doubt that this fact will change.

So much change and transition has occurred over the last nine months. When the stick showed two lines way back in August 2017, we were living in Las Vegas, our home in Utah was on the market and we were considering building a home in the Las Vegas valley to set down some real roots. Things didn’t set right with those plans, though, and in November things unfolded as to why. Through a turn of events Jordan accepted a job opportunity in the Salt Lake valley which meant we were to head back to Utah. We thoroughly considered staying the course with renting out our house in Springville, but after taking a good look at the rental market and the pros/cons of living in Utah County vs. Salt Lake County, we decided for all intents and purposes taking up our old residence in Utah County.

Over the course of two weeks we hustled like we’ve never hustled before in packing up our entire house and moving our belongings up to Utah into a storage unit. By this time I was 4 months pregnant and already feeling the woes of pregnancy on my aging body. Lets face it, I’m not getting any younger, and growing a human in your 30s is simply not as easy as doing it in your 20s. It wasn’t easy but we were able to be out of Nevada and on our way to Utah by the first weekend in December. Our renters had an existing lease that we saw through, which meant we needed a place to land for a few weeks in between us getting to Utah and them vacating the house so we could get in and get settled. We stayed with my brother and his wife and their 6 kids during this time, which also happened to be the better part of December. It was so hard for me to not get to decorate a house for the holidays. I really felt like we were in such an odd state of limbo during December, but we knew when we took on the prospect of moving back that we’d have to make sacrifices. All the chaos and stress of moving really made it easy for me to forget that I was pregnant, though, until the sciatica would rear its ugly head at the most inopportune times.

When we got moved in to our house in January, we realized we still had quite a road ahead of us with all the renovations and repairs that we planned to do (hence the hashtag #theredbrickGrayhouse) so more projects filled our minds as I continued to brew this new baby. Finally in March, I began to feel like things were settling with routines and being back in our house that I felt like I finally had the extra brain power to devote to preparing for our new addition.

I told Jordan that I felt a bit guilty about the differing feelings of anticipation between this baby and Magnolia’s arrival. With Magnolia we hadn’t had a baby in our house in 6 years so adding a tiny human to that dynamic was a much more drastic change. It was a highly anticipated event, and for good reason. For this baby, I literally feel like we just did this, we just had a baby, and that is because we did! Magnolia is only 19 months old, and so the anticipation of her arrival has felt very different from the outset. But the truth is, no matter what, this new little life that is knocking on our door is loved. And that love will only continue to grow.

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@taraleighgray