I thought I might have a hard time sleeping last night, what with our all-important appointment this afternoon, but it turns out that an event this huge is, for us, too foreign to break into our reality. Since The Husband and I will shortly be first-time parents, we can plan and assemble and list, but in the end, we can’t contextualize this next part of our lives. We just have to live it.

So last night, I slept.

This after a weekend spent going out on one final dinner date, lazing around on the couch, eating way too many sugar cookies, finishing a DVD of How I Met Your Mother, cleaning up, listening to The Niece laugh. I gave the husband a Nursery Tutorial, showing him where all The Kid’s “stuff” is, which drawers hold socks and hats and which hold hooded towels; he, in turn, assembled the stroller and the Pack ‘n Play in the next room while I listened to his vented frustration over a company providing their instructions in twelve languages and still not expressing them adequately. Then I went upstairs to read in bed and listened as he, speaking my primary love language, hauled the vacuum out of the closet and got to work again.

And now, the waiting, sans food just in case they end up cutting on me later; the nervous pangs over the arrival of a new member of our household and the inability to quite believe that it’s finally happening; the bag-packing for a stay of unknown length; the uncertainty of it all. The culmination of months of growth and preparation and waiting, and it looks like this: quiet typing, dishwasher running, baby kicking, our joint coughing from poorly-timed colds. Waiting to receive even more than we already have. I think about how little of it, ultimately, has to do with me: the doctors’ assessments and decisions and handiwork and retrieval, my being in many ways just a vessel. How helpless it can make me feel. And then, when my mind and heart rebel against that helplessness, that not knowing, and I feel the irreverent words begin to form underneath my prayers for wisdom, for understanding–What could He possibly know about helplessness, about waiting?–then the gentle reply unfolds in my heart as the meaning of Advent, of Christmas, shines all around me and answers any question I could ever have: Everything.