What Child is This?

There's so much *mystery* in this whole pregnancy thing. Even the initial decision to "try" is fraught with uncertainty. Will it happen the first month? Or will it take six months, or a year? Walking around through your days, wondering with more intensity than ever in your life what on earth is going on deep inside your own body.

And then those first days of mild symptoms. Is this PMS? Am I coming down with some sort of virus? Should I take a test? Is that a second line, or what? This was, for me, when the mystery went more public, at least encompassing the audience of my poor, patient husband, who calmly squinted with me at the first (inconclusive) test, and equally calmly suggested that we wait "a few days" (A FEW DAYS!?!?) and test again.

Thankfully, that mystery resolved rather quickly, with the help of a digital pregnancy test. (Best. Invention. Ever.) But the other mystery, wondering about the newly complex inner workings of my body, still hangs on today.

And this week, as the little critter finally kicked big enough and hard enough for me to feel it, the mystery deepened. Who IS this baby? Why does he (or she - that's a mystery that we'll hang onto until June) kick when he does? Is it just predictable reactions - lulled to sleep when I'm on the move, awakened when I sit still, reflexively jabbing back if I push at the right spot on my belly? Or are there preferences starting to show? Does he like the late afternoons, when I'm usually sitting quietly working on one computer or another? Was he especially excited by the pub fries I had with lunch today? (If so, he's clearly his parents' child... we were pretty excited ourselves.) Was he really scolding me the other morning when I rolled halfway over onto my stomach - "Hey, Mom, you're squishing me!" I don't know, but the mystery makes for a very... active private life these days.

This all comes to a head when I think about what to NAME this child. Well, when *we* think about what to name him. Or, more precisely, what to name her, should that be the case. This only seems to be a struggle for me... my husband very quickly came up with (solid, very nice) options for male and female, and now is content to wait and see which option becomes reality. For me, though, that just seems so, easy I guess. I can't help but wonder whether the little pipsqueak really matches those names. Are they too serious? Or maybe not serious enough? It's not that I don't like the names my husband prefers - I do. I like them quite a bit. But... there are so many good names out there, so many choices. And probably we'll only get to do this, to literally put a name to a face, a couple times in our lives. And, as I've said before, I like names, like sorting through them and testing them out and puzzling over the challenge a bit. But in another of life's mysteries, is it worth it if my husband's mind is already made up?