Dear Sloan (?), your Mom really loves you.

As Amy said in an earlier post, there sure are a lot of things for someone who likes to obsess to obsess about when you're going to have a baby. Did you know there are a gajillion and two paint colors in the world? Not to mention finishes like eggshell or satin or semi-gloss, etc.? And I'm sure that somewhere in a laboratory, there is some evil baby scientist developing a stroller that has a slight difference than the other thousand and eight strollers out there and there's already five blogs with reviews for every stroller.

Yeah, so, you think to yourself. What else is new and what's the problem? Well, take a new mother with some obsession issues, some internet issues, a sprinkle of anxiety, a dash of informational diarrhea, an Emeril-like - BAM! - of exhaustion and raging hormones and you have the recipe of what I've been eating for the past week.

It's all good though. I am as awesome as Amy describes me in past posts so I've almost let it slide. Zen-like, it rolls off my back like snow falls from a cedar branch. I'm there with a comforting word, maybe a nice dinner taken to her at work from Calypso (some healthy protein for my vegetarian mama-to-be) and all is well with the world. Right.

Well, it hasn't been easy but maybe it's the voice in my head (or my mother or her mother or her sister) telling me to be cool. Maintain. She's a swirling sea of mood right now and even if she's wrong she's not. She's right.

What I do know is she wouldn't be having these freak-outs if she didn't care. She wouldn't be worried about lead dust in the air from paint that's cracked on some of our trim in the house if she was a thoughtless mother. She wouldn't have an anxiety attack over having a "used" crib if she hadn't read that that increase the chance of it spontaneously collapsing - most likely when the baby is gently asleep in it - if she was a nonchalant mama.

But she's right. She does it because she loves her baby, our baby, so much it scares her. That and she googles too much.

They're right. I give like that cedar branch, I don't break and so when the snow no longer weighs me down, I'll go on living and thriving.

I just need to wait till the spring, right?