I am starting to feel like a children’s book character of some sort of round, loveable, and slightly slobbish monster.

I snore. I waddle. I wake up in the middle of the night to eat. An odd series of marks have bloomed across my stomach, and every outfit goes in the laundry at the end of the day because I can’t sit up straight enough to eat without spilling. Normalcy seems a thousand miles and two mountains away.

It’s hard, in moments like this, to remember that pregnancy (as any difficult thing in life) does not last forever.

Night comes, and sleep runs off with the cows that jumped over all the moons in Ellie’s bedtime stories. The babies wake up and my stomach becomes host to all manner of roiling appendages. Rest becomes elusive. And in the thickest, darkest parts of the night, I start to worry. Life as it was will never return. Life as I know it is really hard. And life in the future – well, that change is anyone’s guess.

What I’m trying to remember in my cognizant, waking hours is that we wanted this change. Not because life was bad before, but because the happiness and enjoyment we found in our daughter was so unexpectedly great that we wanted our family to keep on growing. (And just because we didn’t necessarily plan for the exponential growth part of the equation doesn’t mean we were any less thrilled about it.)

But this business of change is tricky. It’s like a construction project – no one likes the tear-down, mess in the halls, plastic drop cloth phase. Or in our case, like the nursery, which remains empty and unpainted because I lack the energy, time, and creativity to do anything but stand in the middle of the room and try to imagine what it’s going to be like to have two tiny infants wailing away at one time.

I know the finished product is worth the discomfort of having life taken apart for a while. The empty gray room will grow into a place of color and laughter. My stomach will return to normal proportions and I will be able to bend over without grunting like a stuck pig. Our daughters will quickly change from infants to babies to toddlers, and two years from now I’ll be blogging about how silly it was that I made such a fuss over being a pregnant monster.

Be that as it may, 27 weeks feels like no man’s land, and waiting for change is almost worse than adjusting to it once it finally happens. So in the meantime, I’m going to eat another tub of yogurt. Take the sleep as it comes. Throw a towel over the full length mirror and put on my favorite green pants.

This too shall pass.