I never knew I'd be so excited to meet someone...

Cleona could be here tomorrow. Or in 43 days. Or somewhere in between. This little girl has shown her personality to us from early on in utero. We learned that she is stubborn, for sure (and she comes by that honestly--Matt and I are both very stubborn people). We've learned that she's sassy, and she's a mover and a shaker. And apparently leans towards liberal. (No really, I've got physical proof--if you check out my left side and right side of my body, you'll see that I have about 8x more stretch marks on my left side of my hips/torso/chest than the right--because this little girl--wait for it...--leans left!)

All silliness aside, I find myself wondering what she will look like all the time. Will she get her daddy's eyelashes? My ears? Will her hair be straight or a little wavy? Heck, will she even HAVE hair?? What about her nose--there's a lot of noses she could inherit.

And will she be outgoing and loud like her mommie or a little more reserved but also a cut-up like her daddy? Will she be a leader? An observer? An uber-nerd like both of her parents?

What will she do with her life? Who will she become? What will her favorite color(s) be? Will she sing and dance or play soccer or be a bookworm--or all of those things?

Only time will tell.

Pregnancy has been a long process for me/us. We've been preparing to meet this girl for going on two years--from the moment I visited my doctor and said "okay, tell me about this whole going-off-the-pill thing...." We've been planning and anticipating, scheduling and determining, hoping and praying and really, spent a heck of a lot of time wondering.

And then we finally got that positive sign...and although I've spent the past 8 months growing a human being, I haven't spent all of them thinking about how I was going to get to meet her--like, really really meet her, because at some points it was just too much to think about.

But now I think about the first time we will see her face. And it makes me smile and brings tears to my eyes. And then--after a very appropriately timed kick or round of hiccups from inside my belly--I smile even bigger.

:)