38 weeks and 6 days

As of today, Anneliese has lived outside the womb as many days as she lived in it.  Yep, I totally counted. 

A normal pregnancy lasts forty weeks.  Mine with Anneliese was just shy of forty-one.  But accounting for the first two weeks of "pregnancy" before the baby is actually in there, and basing her fetal age on her first ultrasound (that's a safe bet, so early in gestation), that means Beanie lived inside me for 38 weeks and 6 days. 

And today, she is 38 weeks and 6 days old.  That's 272 days.  She's now officially spent just as much time out here ... as in there.

Mark considers me the queen of this kind of seemingly (but not really) obscure statistic, and loves to mock my wide-eyed wonder when I say things like, he's as old now as she was when such-and-such... or, whoa we're twice as old now as when we met (which, coincidentally -- or notsomuch -- is true). It produces lots of eye-rolling 'round these parts (he's doing it right now, I promise), and reminders that those age relationships are not really interesting considering everyone (God willing) will be every age at some point, and therefore these "milestones" were always coming.

But I continue to revel in this kind of thing* anyway. Because it is interesting. To me. 

Which is why today, I'm thinking a lot about this.  I'm having trouble deciding why Anneliese's doubling of her gestational time is boggling my mind.  In some ways, it seems like she's been with us for years and years.  It's kind of unfathomable to me that the pregnancy, now just a distant memory, lasted as long as the time we've been holding her in our arms.  To be fair, I didn't know about the pregnancy the second it happened, so that could account for some of it.  But still, it sure didn't feel like I was knocked up for that long.

Except, on the other hand... it kind of did.  So much changed over the course of those nine months (most notably, opting out of the workforce), making the pregnancy encompass so many different "seasons" of my life, that it seemed to take forever.  The early weeks of that pregnancy almost seem like part of a different lifetime.  Plus, those last few weeks were loooooong.  (Go back and read blog posts from early October if you don't believe me.)

It's amazing to me that in nine short months, a sperm and an egg can turn into a squirming screaming human.  And it's just as amazing that in that same time span again, the squirming screaming human can become a person -- an interactive game-playing giggling little girl with likes and dislikes and fears and favorites.  It's a miracle.  An everyday miracle.  And just because we can explain how it happened, doesn't make the fact that it did happen, any less miraculous.  How could anything or anyone but God have orchestrated something so mind-blowing?

Anyway, as monumental as those gestational 272 days were for both Anneliese and me, the 272 days since then have been even more so.  She's growing, I'm growing, we're both learning new things every day.  Have I mentioned lately how much I adore my little daughter?  I'm excited for many more weeks, days, and obscure milestones to celebrate with her. 

*And I'm not the only one!