It’s a balmy 45 degrees and rainy here in Lebanon, PA. If I’ve learned anything from my 18 months doing delivery jobs, it is that delivering in the rain is the worst. It can only be made bearable by choosing the right clothing and becoming one with your umbrella. So today I chose my old (literally, 3 pregnancies old) faithful maternity leggings, a cropped tee with the ironically embroidered word “staycation” on the breast, my hunter rain boots, and this horribly dumpy thrifted acrylic sweater that worked its way into my heart and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I realized the other day that the thing I love about this sweater is how dumpy it actually is. My lack of care or concern for this sweater makes it one of the most used pieces of clothing in my life. My friend Alena was cold the other weekend and i gave it to her to wear around the campfire. The next day it smelled like Alena and campfire. I loved it. Chris wears it when he’s going into the yard to start the grill. Last week he had it on while he changed the inner tube on his bicycle tire. Normally I’d be like “Hey Hun, you and I both know you’re gonna end up melting the sleeves off that sweater, could you wear something else…?”  But not this sweater. It has earned its keep as the resident dumpy acrylic sweater. I hate the pilling all over it, I hated a poorly positioned belt with loop holes and I finally cut that off.  I guess you could say, I love to hate this sweater. Long live the dumpy, faithful, overworked, overused, under appreciated articles in your wardrobe!
A word on cropped shirts.  You imagine they will work out well while you’re pregnant because, well, they’re cropped. The opposite is actually true. They just kind of sit weird on the belly and draw attention to the fact that you’re a pregnant lady trying to make a cropped t shirt work.  But today, it’s what’s happening. 

I’m 30 weeks pregnant with our 7th child. We always know we want babies. We marvel at people who can decide to end their baby making days. It’s never been a strength of ours…hence #7. People have told me they “just knew they were done…”. Well, I think I might be there. And I think Chris might also be there. It’s little things, like not being able to bend over comfortably, again. Not having tons of energy. Doing the math and realizing we’ll be “the old parents” at some sporting event or choral concert. It’s reconfiguring bedrooms, again. It’s the unsettled feeling of the imminent arrival of another person to be fully and completely and utterly bound to and responsible for for yet another 18 years. It’s having to dismiss the older kids to care for the much needier baby in the family. I like to think of our family as the greatest piece of art that Chris and I have or will ever collectively participate in creating, and THAT helps all these other emotional and physical hiccups pale in comparison to the greater picture. All that being said…

Here we are, week 8 or something of this slower pace of life. Quarantine would be wearing on us much harder if we weren’t enjoying the changing seasons and planting a garden and housing illegal chickens and generally making home our primary focus. Little known fact, I have spent the last 18 months digging myself out of credit card debt. How did it happen? Easy. Real easy. Christmases, small business ideas that didn’t pan out, home projects, NEW BABIES!, retail therapy, and a general mindset that “at some point I won’t be the one bound to the home and I’ll figure out how to make some cash and I’ll change my financial landscape…”. That mindset was fine, for years and years and years, but eventually you just want the mail to stop bringing bad news and you want to know what it might feel like to breath a deep, free breath!
So I’m happy to announce that while the school year brings some minor setbacks in my ability to do “gig work” (“I’ll be back in 20 minutes…I have to deliver a burrito 2 miles away for 8 bucks…”) because my ultra responsible twin teenagers are busy, quarantine has been this alternate dimension of “gig work” busy-ness and overpayment. I was able to cram about 6 months of debt payoff into the last 8 weeks. I’m 1 week from complete financial freedom and I’ve thought long an hard about what I might do with my time and energy after next week. While I still fully intend to continue to pay our van payment every month, I can cut back to about 10% of my current work load to meet that monthly goal.
So I’m pretty excited to take some 3rd trimester walks and read all the books I always read that get me all psyched up to push a human out of my body sans drugs and medical intervention. For me it really is a mindset that takes a few months to build up to.  So, I’ll be eating bonbons and reading Childbirth Without Fear and Spiritual Midwifery and the like and just enjoying the last 2 months of what is really feeling like the last pregnancy I’ll know in this life. A true privilege.
But in the meantime, I also couldn’t help but think about the funnest part of every pregnancy for me (besides the baby I get to have at the end!) and at the risk of sounding go like a shallow person who doesn’t have any “real interests”, I have to admit that I absolutely LOVE to dress the bump. While thrift stores have been LOCKED DOWN, I did go on a wild thrifting rampage sometime back in February, before we took an early March trip to Florida. I stocked up on items to experiment with and skirts that seemed forgiving enough to stretch over a basketball and I’ve supplemented from Poshmark and EBay here and there as my thrifting itch gets too great and I just feel bored with my pregnancy options. I never used to think fashion could be a hobby, and maybe it isn’t…but I know I’m not the only gal perusing Pinterest and instagram strictly because I love to see fabrics arranged “just so” over a human figure. Plus, it has to be the funnest way to forget that the world seems a little impossible to navigate right now.
In other news, I am currently hosting one fabulous Krouse lady! Iris and I have waited 14 years for this. I kind of thought what better way to celebrate the life of our second little lady (among the testosterone of the 5 boys) than to spend the next 10 weeks using this magical space I have on the internet to document the fabulous pregnancy outfits I scrape together with a tiny girl tucked in my kangaroo pocket. Maybe my daughters with be marine biologists and forest rangers (I can almost guarantee Iris has that destiny ahead) and they’ll think I was a silly woman for having so much fun getting dressed while I was pregnant, but ultimately I want to inspire them to invest in what brings them joy, the thing that lights their fire. So whether it be veterinary science or astronomy or fashion design or music theory or delivering burritos, I hope they know that they have been an inspiration to me and I want them to follow their hearts.