A pending goodbye...

Here we are at 31 weeks. Sometimes I feel like I got caught in some sort of fast-forwarded time warp and poof! here I am.
We got some pretty upsetting news this week that most likely Greg will be deploying to Afghanistan for one year sometime next fall. I couldn't help but cry thinking about all that my husband will miss of our son's life during that year he will be gone. What hit me the hardest is that he'll miss our son's first Christmas and his first birthday.
Of course, we're a military family and we know that there's always a chance that something like this can come up. But, we've been married for eight years now and he's never been gone more than six months. Now that we're finally on the verge of being parents after all these years, the orders come down. I might have known it would happen this way.
I guess the blessing is that our son won't remember that his dad was gone for a year. But, my husband will, and it breaks my heart to think about it. And, of course, the prospect of a year without my husband is very daunting.
And, now there's a whole host of things we have to do to prepare for this deployment and many big decisions have to be made. I can't imagine staying here for a year without Greg, being that I don't have any family or close friends here. So, we will have to sell or rent our house and the baby and I will have to move back to NC. And, then when Greg returns, we'll have to move again.
I don't want to sound like I'm whining about this -- this is part of Greg's job, one that he chose for himself and families go through this all the time. We've been very blessed that we haven't had to do it before. But that really doesn't make it any easier and the timing just stinks.
Physically, I'm starting to feel some of the pregnancy associated misery I've heard about from other women. Specifically, I have heartburn at night that sometimes wakes me up so I keep the Tums on my night table and that does seem to help. I've also had some pretty painful leg cramps. I had one in a muscle I didn't even know existed and I've even had them in my feet. Hate it. It's also more difficult to get comfortable at night even with various configurations of pillows. Another new symptom is my least favorite -- many mornings I have a couple of hours of feeling like my heart is beating too fast and I get sort of short of breath. I've talked with my OB about it and he thinks it's just due to the increased blood volume and the upward progression of the uterus.
While telling Dr. Carter about my episodes, he laughed and said -- "You're really feeling pregnant now! But I think you asked for this. I mean, you wrote a few checks for this."
Yes, yes I did. And, I'm not complaining, just explaining!
My weight gain this visit was back within the normal range and our baby's heartbeat was very strong at about 136 bpm. And, our doctor said the baby is growing like a weed. This was NOT news to me!
I swear somedays I can feel him growing. On Monday for instance, I woke up one size and went to bed much larger. All the materninty pants that my niece gave me are starting to fit quite snug (her prepregnancy weight is much less than mine!) so I'm almost certain I'll have to go buy some things in the near future. I hate to spend money on clothes I'm only going to wear for the next two months, but being comfortable is pretty important these days.
We had our epidural class (mandatory at our hospital) and toured the labor and delivery department on Tuesday night. The same "lunch lady" from our breastfeeding class was our tour guide and once again she said many off the wall things but it was nice to get to see the ins and outs of where we'll have the baby.
We start our birth classes tonight and there's no telling what this crazy woman might say.