Last summer, a week before her baby was due, spoke with the Journal about the ways—spiritual and practical—she and her husband Skip were preparing for their first child. After baby Jack came along, Karen talked with us again. Here's what she had to say.
My husband and I are on our eighth year of marriage, and are very active, busy people. We have always known we wanted to have a baby, but it wasn't until we completely opened our thought to the idea that it happened. I think you're constantly preparing, spiritually, for "whatever." But still, even though I was excited when we found out we were expecting, I was also in disbelief that it was actually going to happen—that I would deliver a baby. That we would be parents and that I would grow a baby inside me. These were things my husband and I have dreamed and talked about for years.
Within a few days of finding out I was pregnant, I started waking up in the middle of the night, feeling panicked and frightened by some things I'd been doing before I found out I was pregnant. For one thing, I'd been scraping wallpaper and painting a large room in our house. Both projects involved chemicals that, if inhaled during pregnancy, I'm told, can bring harm to a fetus. When there's a little baby in the equation, you feel very responsible. Because of this, I felt I'd begun this pregnancy all wrong, that I'd messed it up. If I'd known that I'd been pregnant for the past five weeks, I would have done things differently.
