Hello, lovely.

Let me start by saying no baby yet. No one is more surprised than me because I have been convinced since finding out we were expecting that this baby would come early.

Maybe you were thinking since nothing landed in your inbox yesterday that’s because I was in labor. Nope not that either.

Energy is definitely becoming a thing. Along with a shortened fuse. I don’t feel the fuel to even respond to loving well meaning texts from friends and family checking in. One word answers is about all the patience and interest I have in response to the repeated requests for updates. Last weekend, I internally snapped, while biting my tongue, at the woman working the mint-ginger limeade booth because instead of accepting my straw wrapper to put in the trash bin I could literally see behind her, she said they don’t have a trash can and there was one about 10’ behind me. Lady, do I look like I’m interested in walking extra distance right now?

Everything is an annoyance except for the things that aren’t, and I genuinely cannot explain what makes the difference or why. I’m just noticing internally I’m kind of a lot right now and I do feel like I’ve mostly kept a lid on it.

What I do know is that there is a little nugget inside me patiently waiting to make their perfect entry into the world and it is taking everything I have. That’s not a complaint, and I’m not totally miserable. This is just where we are. Patiently waiting.

When there’s news, I’m sure you’ll know.

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My mom has been here for two weeks now. She has kept me moving, walking, doing the miles circuit I’m supposed to be doing to help get baby engaged and into position, making dinner with me the last few nights which has been so genuinely fun and special in a way I hope I always remember.

On one of our walks, I started talking about maybe doing some DC things with her since baby hasn’t come yet and she stopped walking, turned to me, pulled me into a hug, looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m here to be here with you. There’s no pressure to do anything right now.”

I stood there and just received that.

I have had a small worry running underneath everything that baby is taking longer than I anticipated and that my mom’s time here after the birth is getting shorter. Then this week I landed on this: she is here exactly when and exactly in the ways I need her most.

Rob has been doing his own version of this. A few days ago at lunch I was grabbing something from the fridge. I turned around, and he was just leaning against the stove, smiling at me. I asked what, and he said, “Just looking at you being pregnant at the fridge.” He wrapped his arms around me and held on. He has done that a few times this week, extra long hugs that feel like a brief suspension in time, and those have felt like everything.

So yes. The inner narrator has been loud, the love is felt, and somehow in the middle of all of it I am being held, by our family and friends across the country, my mom on a DC sidewalk, and my husband in our kitchen, in exactly the ways I need.

That’s what this week has been about.

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A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with a girlfriend, headphones in, doing mindless chores around the house as we chatted, when she asked me what I had noticed changing about myself since moving to DC.

I paused for just a second, surprised by the question. Maybe because I hadn’t stopped to ask myself that question. Maybe because I have a ten-year vision for who I will be and everything between now and then I have just surrendered to the experience of being and doing without needing to narrate it in real time. Then the answer came out without a thought.

I told her what I heard at one of the first speaker programs I participated in back in 2022. You can’t speak about the story you’re still living. You have to finish baking first.

I’m still in the oven. I don’t know what I’m becoming yet because I’m too busy experiencing the becoming of it.

I have been thinking about that conversation ever since.

There is something interesting about being a transformation coach, standing inside her own transformation. I understand how this works. The unconscious mind is the goal getter, the conscious mind is the goal setter. You point yourself in the right direction, you open your sails, and then you let the wind do what wind does. The direction is intentional. What you become along the way is not always something you can name while you’re still in it.

I’m not reaching for anything right now. I am just living, writing my uncoverings here on Substack as they surface, and that is enough. For someone who has spent years helping others articulate their growth, I expected to feel the pull to do that now. Instead, I just feel grateful to be inside it.

One thing I have noticed is how much the content I consume has shifted and where I get it from. I went from following entrepreneurial women I thought I wanted to be like on Instagram to feeds on Substack, YouTube, and still a little Instagram, now full of mothers. Pregnancy. Postpartum. The honest, unfiltered dispatches from women figuring it out in real time. What I keep finding in all of it is that getting lost is not a detour from the becoming. It is the becoming. The unexpected challenges, the mixed emotions, the this is hard and I’m not sure I’m doing it right and here is what I’m learning along the way. The whole point seems to be the discovery that only happens when you don’t know where you’re going.

Rob and I have been trusted to raise a little life, to be its guide, and I know we will not be perfect. I fully expect to learn from the feedback, as we figure it out together. In NLP, there is no failure, only feedback. If I can learn from and model those who have gone before us, that is exactly what I am turning toward.

What I have come to understand, slowly and mostly through living it, is that growth rarely feels like growth while it is happening. It feels like walking a trail you have never been on before, hoping it takes you where you want to go, not always sure it will. For a long time my movement was driven by getting away from what no longer fit. Then it shifted into running toward what I felt called to. And somewhere along the way, I started to uncover what I actually valued. I write about this in my book, Evolving You, the slow process of becoming someone you can actually recognize. It does not happen in a straight line. It happens in the accumulation of choices, wrong turns included, that eventually point you somewhere true.

Along with the shift in what I consume, I have noticed how much less I am documenting. I stepped back from Instagram and somewhere in that I stopped thinking about capturing everything. Rob is great about photos and family and friends who have visited have filled in some gaps. I still take plenty of photos of Axel. I expect my camera roll to look very different soon.

What I keep coming back to is how much all of this has been a slow uncovering. Over the years, I landed on a simple practice: choosing one word each year, and the words have become my clearest markers.

Freedom. Continue. Simplify. Trust. Grateful.

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Now here I am in Washington DC, about to cross through the greatest portal of transformation I have ever walked toward. Birth. The integration waiting on the other side. A version of myself I cannot yet picture because she doesn’t exist yet and won’t until I’ve lived through what comes next.

I can’t name what I’m baking, besides this baby. I don’t know what I’m going to look like on the other side of this, what will have shifted, what I will finally be able to say out loud once I’ve finished living it. And I think that might be exactly the point. The not knowing is not a gap in the process. It is the process.

What I do know is that I love who I am right now, inside this season, living this life. Something feels fully authentic about where I am. Maybe that’s why I can’t name the change yet. Maybe when you’re actually becoming who you’re meant to be you’re too busy being her to narrate it.

The oven is still on.

I’ll tell you what I was baking when it’s done.

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We’re here. In the life I’ve dreamed of. We’re here. Our birthing month. We’re here. On the ledge, gazing into our greatest unknown leap ever. We’re here.

Everything lately has felt beautiful. This harmonization between getting stuff done and enjoying each day that is passing. June went by in a blink. At the same time, everything feels purposeful and intentional. I’m grateful for all that I’ve been doing in these last weeks and am proud that the to-do list keeps getting shorter, which is its own relief.

Last week we went to a white tie ball and I wore a formal gown at thirty-six weeks pregnant and felt beautiful.

That surprised me a little. How fully everything felt right. Everyone we talked to that night was genuinely excited for us, the kind of warmth that fills a room and makes you feel like the whole thing was arranged just so you could feel it. My body was very much present for the evening too. When I stand for long stretches now there is a heaviness in my lower belly, the round ligaments making themselves known, that reminds me clearly and without apology that I’m carrying something significant. So I

found a table. A group of women had claimed it and they welcomed me in without hesitation, and I just sat and talked and watched Rob mix and mingle nearby in his white tie, which, I will just say, he looked extraordinary. These are the kinds of evenings we came to DC for. I loved being there beside him even from a chair.

Two days later, we were at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Saturday, we made our way down to the National Mall in the record heat to watch flyovers cut across the sky above the Capitol, America turning 250 with all the fanfare this city could produce. When the weather shut everything down we walked home. Friends landed at our place for a bit, and then when it was time to go back out my body said absolutely not. The house emptied. Rob and I stayed on the couch and watched the DC fireworks on television.

I did what I could. I listened despite the FOMO being very real. That felt like its own kind of victory.

A year ago I was not here. Not in this city, not in this life, not in this body. Something I keep thinking about is how much can change in a single year and how you really cannot rush it and you cannot always see it coming and somehow it arrives anyway.

July is our due month. I know I already said that and it’s something I just keep repeating to myself. It’s both everything I know we’ve been waiting for and surreal that it’s here.

Baby has started to move down. Registry items arriving, ready to be unpacked, put away, and being logged so thank you notes don’t fall through. The home birth supply list ordered, midwife home visit to set everything up complete. The birth certificate packet mostly handled. Baby laundry to do and fold. The Montessori nursery patiently waiting for it to become the focus. Rob tells me we will get it all done and I believe him because we always do.

Some days I get a lot done. Last week I ran errands over in Virginia and made a full day of it. Chiro, a seamstress and shopping. I came home feeling productive and proud of myself finding a little groove in this life. The next day I did admin from the couch, took Axel to the park, made dinner, and we went to bed early. I have been here before, learning to let my energy direct the day instead of the calendar. My chronic migraine recovery years taught me that lesson the hard way, and I am grateful I already know how to listen. I expect those same lessons to come back in full force postpartum.

We did our maternity pictures this past week. Our original date had to be rescheduled because of weather and it landed on a weeknight, which I always try to be mindful of around Rob’s schedule, and he was just game for it, which he always is. As it turned out the Supreme Court released final decisions that day and his stream schedule had already adjusted, so it felt like the timing arranged itself. We went to a neighborhood neither of us had been to before. He looked so handsome. And the way he looks at me right now, carrying our baby, his baby, sends something warm all the way through me. We walked hand in hand and I let myself be completely in it. We took Axel too, so he got to be in the photos, which felt exactly right. Those are the moments I keep trying to stay inside instead of moving past.

When people ask what my plans are for the baby I tell them honestly: keep it alive. I say it and I mean it and I think it might be the most grounded answer I have. I have read the books, listened to the courses, found a team I trust, and I am still holding all of it with open hands because I know enough to know I do not know what is coming. Scited is the only word for it. Excited and a little scared and both energies at the same time without one canceling the other out.

Something that has been surfacing lately is that for nine months this baby has known only me as home. I have kept this pregnancy close. Mostly just Rob and I touching my belly and I liked it that way. I am not naturally good at sharing, I know this about myself, and soon I am going to have to figure out how to hand this little person to other people, coordinate visits, let the people who love us love them too. I have been pretty direct with my side of the family: first three months, come as a helper or wait to come as a visitor. I’m anticipating what I need. I expect to want to be completely Velcroed to this baby. And underneath all of that is something that feels less like worry and more like a quiet certainty. I don’t quite know how to navigate all of it yet and I also just don’t care. I will figure it out.

I just want to make life fun for them. Rob and I are both Virgos, serious by nature, and I have been thinking about how being playful is something I did not really learn until my late twenties. I want our baby to get that early. To know from the beginning that life is a game worth enjoying and that wonder is not something you have to earn.

On the other side of all of this I hope I get to say that I surrendered. That I trusted. That I opened and flowed and moved through it with grace and stayed soft when softness was what was needed.

This woman is close now. Each day I am drawing closer to meeting her.

I’m nearly ready.

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I came up from the basement Monday morning after moving a load of laundry, walked into the kitchen where Rob was starting brunch, opened the refrigerator door, and just looked at him.

“I feel very pregnant.”

It was the first time I had said it that way. Not “I’m doing well, just feeling the heat a little,” which was the answer I gave his mom last week when she asked if I was uncomfortable yet. I genuinely said that I was feeling good overall. This was different. This was my body making an announcement I hadn’t prepared a response for.

I’m thirty-four weeks.

I have known, in the way you know things that are obvious and growing and literally visible from across the room, that we have been building to this for eight months. The belly. The little brown line running from my belly button. The necessary daily nap, sometimes more than one. The winding myself making the bed back in week twenty-something and laughing about it. I have known.

And still. Monday morning arrived after a weekend of building and something shifted.

It started with intentional preparation for our approaching birthing date. Release, which funny enough is of course the right place for everything to start. Friday, I saw a prenatal chiropractor for the first time and followed it with my third or fourth prenatal massage. Whatever my body had been quietly holding through all of this growing, the tension it had been carrying without complaint, suddenly got to have a voice. Since Saturday, I’ve been working through rib pain and shoulder tightness on my right side, significant enough that I went back to the chiropractor that day, and I’m currently wearing muscle tape along my shoulder blade and doing what I can to find the balance between movement and rest and stretching and just letting my body lead.

What I keep thinking about is how long it had been holding that without yelling at me. The body presents exactly what is ready to be addressed when you finally give it the space to speak. I said I wanted to prepare, and it showed me what was in the way. Thankfully, at the time I’m writing this, I’m feeling much better.

The heat hasn’t helped. DC in early summer is not Arizona dry heat, which at least had the decency to be a known quantity. I moved to Arizona for the heat as a self-proclaimed Colorado native with zero cold tolerance. This is a different kind of hot, combined with a built-in growing human heater, and it pushed me to the absolute limit of a wardrobe I had been stubbornly refusing to expand for months. I hit my limit. I went to TJ Maxx. Linen, light fabrics, nothing pulling across my ribs or rubbing against skin that has decided it has opinions now. I have been wearing the new clothes all week and it is one of the better decisions I have made recently. The resistance finally cost more energy than just going, and I waited long enough that when I went it felt exactly right.

My recent conversation with Rob’s mom didn’t put this in my body. I know that. But I did laugh telling Rob about her asking if I was uncomfortable yet, and how confidently I had answered, and how quickly the universe apparently decided to offer me a more honest answer. I’m not uncomfortable exactly. I am just finally, undeniably, completely here. Thirty-four weeks pregnant, muscle tape on my back, new clothes from TJ Maxx, registry just finished, and baby shower invitations just sent for a virtual shower happening in five weeks, which I am choosing to call perfectly timed and not last-minute, and currently saying a quiet prayer that our family and friends feel the urgency because I put the essentials on that list.

All of it arriving at once, the way the last stretch of anything tends to.

I’m not looking for it to slow down. I just wanted to name it, right here, while it’s happening. I’m doing everything I can to embrace it because after eight months of this first pregnancy, we’re close enough now that close really means something. This is what the end of waiting actually feels like. Not a countdown but a body that has decided it’s time.

Five and a half weeks.

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A few weeks ago, a gift box arrived in the middle of our unpacking. Baby clothes, a soothing bear, a card so thoughtful it stopped me where I sat. I teared up right there among the boxes, and what surfaced with the tears was something I had been carrying quietly for weeks. A worry that this pregnancy had been an afterthought. That the first two trimesters had been so consumed with logistics, with the move and the building of a new life in a new city, that I hadn’t let myself fully turn toward what was actually happening inside my body.

I hadn’t thought about the nursery. I was amazed every day at my changing shape and still wondered if I had let myself sink deeply enough into the wonder of it. There had always been something more urgent.

And then I caught myself. Because I know what I would say to a client sitting across from me with these exact thoughts. I would help her turn her attention away from what she felt she was missing and toward everything she had actually experienced. I would remind her that where attention goes, energy flows. That the story of absence is rarely the whole story.

So I decided to do it for myself. To sit down, look back, and find what was actually there.

Hello, lovely.

I know you have been concerned about something you didn’t feel ready to say out loud.

First, the worry that you weren’t doing it right. That the first two trimesters slipped by in a blur of logistics and moving boxes and figuring out where things go, and that somewhere in all of it, the baby got pushed to the back of the line. That you should have been more present. Written more in the baby book. More focused. More pregnancy.

Here’s what I want you to know: you were exactly where you needed to be. And you have loved this baby more than you are giving yourself credit for.

Let me remind you.

You spent the early weeks quietly determined. Nausea showed up and you negotiated with it. Almonds by the bathroom sink at three in the morning, protein at every meal, and an affirmation you repeated so specifically it borders on genius: “My body can grow this baby with zero or none adverse symptoms.” A quick note on that wording, because it matters. The unconscious mind, the part of you that actually runs your body, doesn’t process negatives. So “no adverse symptoms” risks being heard as simply “adverse symptoms.” Zero or none leaves no room for confusion. You knew exactly what you were telling your body to do. And your body listened. Since week seven, not a day of sickness. You built that.

You listened to your body change in ways you didn’t have language for yet. The fluttering feelings in your belly in those early weeks, the quiet wondering of “I think I feel something,” gradually becoming certainty. You watched your belly in photographs from week eight, certain there was a bump, and smiled later when you realized there was almost nothing there yet. You watched the linea nigra appear slowly down the center of your belly, that faint brown line that showed up like a quiet signature, your body marking itself as occupied and only visible to you in the mirror. You’ve watched your belly button get shallower by the week and told Rob it has probably never been so lint-free, and laughed at yourself, and that laughter was presence too.

You noticed baby most often settled on your right side and started to recognize its patterns as you were already learning each other.

You pulled your energy inward deliberately. You uninstalled Instagram. You stopped taking in what didn’t belong to you. A close friend taught you to call your energy back at the end of each day and you added it to your nightly practice, writing something close to: “I’m so grateful to call all my focus, energy, and entire consciousness back to me fully now.” You were protecting this baby before you even had the words for it.

You learned. You listened to What to Expect When You’re Expecting on your walks, the same book your mother read when she was carrying you. You found a free birthing course taught by a doula and absorbed everything you could before the move took over. You filed it all away, and it is still there. You continued to explore birth philosophies and stayed diligent in your search for the care that felt right for you and baby.

You rubbed serum and balm onto your belly. Slowly. Every night. That was presence.

You wore your Oura Ring and your Whoop and you watched your body’s numbers shift in real time, your resting heart rate climbing, your HRV adapting, your body doing exactly what it was built to do, and you trusted yourself enough to rest when it told you to rest. You laughed at yourself for getting winded making the bed. You kept moving anyway, weight training, walking, stretching, choosing your body over and over again.

And then there was the night he rested his head on your belly and started to read. You felt the baby move toward his voice almost immediately. You ran your fingers through his hair and let the sound of him reading move through your whole body, and you felt three heartbeats in one room. That was not an afterthought. That was everything.

You are entering your third trimester with a doula you trust, a body you continue to tend carefully, a mind full of things you have learned, a heart ready to surrender to the transition from maiden to mother, and a baby who already knows the sound of the people who love it.

You were never absent. You were building.

And now the boxes are mostly unpacked, the nursery room plan is forming, and you get to turn fully toward what has been growing all along.

You didn’t miss it.

You were here the whole time.

With love and total belief in you,

Alexus

I needed that more than I realized.

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There’s no reflection. Three mirrors, three angles in the bathroom, and not one familiar pair of eyes looking back at me. Just steam covering everything. It’s been a crispy couple of spring days, and tonight I was feeling chilly, so I left the fan off.

After lathering on my nighttime face cream and wrapping myself in my fuzzy fleece robe, I made my way down the hall to our bedroom, where I’ve set up my vanity. Equipped with a red light panel and all the lotions, potions, and beauty tools I need. I’m not crazy overstocked, I’m no beauty influencer, I just have what I like.

Sitting down in front of the red light, pulling out the five bottles of varying moisturizers, mostly 8 Sheep Organics, which I highly recommend for all women and especially the expecting ones (link below), it really settled in. Like an epiphany I’d already known but hadn’t recognized until right now: I don’t have that much more time for a full routine like this.

I’m twenty-six weeks pregnant, and somewhere in the last year I gave myself permission to actually slow down. Not the kind of slowing down that happens when life forces your hand, I’m familiar with those. The intentional kind. The chosen kind. Women are calling it the soft girl era and that’s exactly what it’s been.

For most of my adult life, there was a producer living inside me who never fully clocked out. Always building, always planning, always with one eye on what was next. And then 2025 arrived, and something shifted. I let myself be soft. I let myself receive. I slept in. I wrote a book, worked with clients, attended trainings, arranged flowers, cooked dinner, and somehow still felt like I was finally breathing.

So far into 2026 it’s looked like naps without setting an alarm. Sitting in the park on a blanket with Axel for an hour, throwing the ball, and calling it a full afternoon.

It sounds simple. For me, it was a revelation.

Tonight is one of those moments.

When I started to feel like I was fighting something off, instead of pushing through, I took it easy. My husband would remind me to rest and I’d actually listen, which if you know the version of me that existed a few years ago, you’d understand why that alone felt like its own evolution.

The routine itself has become its own kind of ceremony. After the shower, I start with a serum on my belly, slow and deliberate, then focus on my calves and lower legs with my sleep body lotion, the one with magnesium in it. Next, the peppermint foot cream, rubbed into each foot before my fuzzy socks go on, which is honestly one of my favorite moments of the entire day. Then lavender goat milk lotion from a small farm in Prescott, I’m nearly through my last bottle and I’m not ready to talk about it, on the rest of my body. Back to the belly for the final balm. All of this happening during ten minutes in front of the red light, which by now feels less like a skincare step and more like a closing ritual. The kind of thing you do when you’re actually living inside your life instead of just moving through it.

I don’t know exactly what life looks like on the other side of July. I have a feeling, an educated one, but I also know better than to think I can fully picture it from here.

What I do know is this: I’m twenty-six weeks into the most expansive years of my life, and I am not taking a single fuzzy sock moment for granted.

This is the first season I can remember where the pace was actually chosen. Where soft wasn’t a consolation prize for not doing enough or some health crisis slowing me down. Where presence didn’t have to be earned. And somehow it took growing a whole human being inside my body to remember how lovely it is to live this way without guilt.

Maybe that’s the real gift of this season. Not just the naps and the red light and the Prescott lotion I’m rationing like it’s the last of something irreplaceable. But the proof that I can do it in this season too. That the woman who always had one eye on what was next is capable of being right here, in a steamy bathroom in Washington D.C., twenty-six weeks pregnant, with no reflection and nowhere else to be.

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