reality and a lot of hot cocoa

reality check- here is the size of my 24 week fetus, a cantaloupe.  only it's a rotting cantaloupe, because life is keeping us busy and i couldn't find the right time or lighting or take 2 minutes to pull my big girl camera out and get the settings right to photograph the cantaloupe when it was perfectly ripe and colored.  so instead, i had to photograph it like this.  way over ripened and in the trash right after i took this photo.

but it's ok.  i've let it go.  in huge part thanks to a friend who went to throw my fruit away telling me it was rotting, and when i loudly protested, she set me down and set me straight.  she made me realize in a loving, friendly way that i had way too much on my plate and i was stressing out over the little items on my to-do list that just didn't matter.  this baby won't look back at photos and care that i took a picture of food items that correlates to it's ever growing size.  and i had kind of already started to let it go when i failed to take a photo of weeks 13-18, 22 and 25.  i missed the baby at peach, lemon, apple, avocado, turnip, green pepper, papaya and cauliflower.  but i did capture week 23, mango.  literally on a weekday school morning when crosby asked for mango in her lunch and i only had one left and needed to capture it before i cut it.

which now that i look back, i realize it was a mango at 19 weeks, too, which is the result of following 2 different charts.  ok, done, letting it all go, and focusing on enjoying the present, which lately includes the movements of the baby noticeable now through the outside and the girls being able to feel them too with their hands resting gently on the bump, enjoying the magical moments in the preparations for christmas, and being off on break from school which allows for snuggling under blankets on the couch with hot cocoa and an afternoon movie.  i'm looking forward to a lot more of this on my to-do list.