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A few weeks ago Eric and I took a trip to the coast for a short babymoon. We spent two days outside of Lincoln City walking the beach, playing disc golf, sleeping in and making faces at the fish in the aquarium.

The trip was perfect. Firstly, Eric and I sometimes go days without seeing each other. He works at Torii Mor winery on the weekends, which limits our time to an hour or so in the morning and a few hours at night until I fall asleep around 10. He also works at a hardwood floor company in Eugene, which means he usually spends two days down south each week.

Having several days of uninterrupted time with my husband, then, felt like luxury.

Secondly, the beach is my favorite place in the world. I am happiest and most relaxed shuffling my feet across the sand and listening to the rhythms of the surf.

I’m lucky my little family feels the same way. Finn starts to smell the salt air about 20 miles from the ocean and can barely contain himself until he gets to sprint donuts on the beach, bark at waves and chase down seagulls. Eric is equally puppy-like: He’ll chase after Finn and play chicken with the tide, seeing just how close he can get to the next wave without it soaking his jeans.

Growing up, my family spent a lot of time at the beach. We’d rent either the little cabin with the tea towels for curtains or the spacious house next to a creek that swelled with the tide. We would build sand castles with elaborate moat systems and name them after kids in our class we didn’t like so the structures would get washed away when the tide came in. We’d play Red Light, Green Light in the dark or walk so long—and step on so many jellyfish, squishing them between our toes—that our toes would be swollen and red by the time we finally ventured inside.

We spent plenty of stormy weekends at the coast. The morning after one particularly fierce gale, when Amy was actually lifted off the ground by the wind, my dad had bounded in with coffee, donuts—and a clear blue sphere: a Japanese fishing float.

“I found it on the beach,” he said. “It must have washed up with the storm.”

We all poured onto the beach to try to find our own floats. And we did: They were tucked behind driftwood and nestled among rocks, hiding in tangles of kelp and lying out in the open. We shouted or squealed each time we found one as if we were searching in a maritime Easter egg hunt.

We ended up with at least a dozen floats that day. I still have one of mine, which sits on a bookshelf in the living room.

Years and years later, at Christmas, I think, when we were all grown up, my dad confessed that he had bought the floats at an antique store in Yachats and spent the morning planting them where we’d find them. I was dismayed. I had spent half my childhood and adolescence believing in our amazing luck that the sea would gift us such treasures. The truth eroded some of that magic.

Maybe it would have been better for my dad to keep his secret forever. But I never would want him to undo the fantasy he created for us that morning.

Peeper, Eric and I will definitely continue with trips to the beach as frequently as we can. We bought a membership to the Oregon Coast Aquarium as even greater incentive to go. I hope that Peeper finds the same discovery and adventure I do at the coast on sunny days and overcast mornings after a storm. And maybe someday Peeper will find a clear blue orb, a fishing float—a piece of magic.

I woke up with pain gripping my lower back. It snaked its way around my side and dug into my lower abdomen. I clenched a pillow in my fist until the wave subsided, then I drifted back to sleep. Minutes later, though, the same discomfort jolted me conscious.

This was yesterday morning. The pattern continued for about 45 minutes before I woke up Eric and asked him to rub my back. It helped, but I decided to get up and see if a change in position would relieve the pain and what I realized were contractions.

I’ve been feeling Braxton-Hicks—the “practice” contractions that tense my whole belly but don’t really hurt—for months, but this was different. The contractions felt stronger and came more frequently. About an hour after I first woke up, I started to time how often they came and how long they lasted. 3:58, 60 seconds. 4:01, 50 seconds. 4:03, 50 seconds.

In response to the pattern, I didn’t gather the things for my still-unpacked hospital bag or bring the still-uninstalled car seat to the car. I didn’t call our midwife or my mom.

I cleaned the kitchen.

I paused from washing dishes and wiping the counter whenever my belly clenched. I dutifully recorded times while Eric alternated between pacing (“I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said) and trying to rest on the couch with Finn.

After another 45 minutes, the waves slowed down. By 5am, I crawled into bed. Soon I was asleep.

When I spoke with our midwife later that day, she assured me the experience was normal. “It’s just your body’s way of getting ready,” she explained. Peeper’s been as active as usual, which stopped any leftover worry.

Still, I felt unsettled. During those few hours, I wasn’t particularly scared about labor itself. I was anxious because I didn’t know if I was actually in labor. Is this it? I asked myself. Are we on?

I was afraid of overreacting. Was that really a contraction, or am I imagining things? I didn’t want to jump to the wrong conclusion. It’s probably nothing; go back to sleep. My inner voice was full of doubt.

The false alarm was good, though, for being a wake-up call. It reminded us that Peeper is now 37 weeks and could safely arrive at any time. It demonstrated what a painful contraction might feel like—and proved that a whole bunch of not-painful contractions in a row doesn’t equal active labor.

I’m hoping that with this experience, the next time won’t make me so anxious. This practice round helped take the novelty and utter unknown out of early labor, so maybe bout two—and three and four and beyond, if that’s the case—will inspire less uncertainty.

Then, when we arrive at go, I hope we’ll be ready.

I recently had tea and cookies with my friend Mira, who’s getting married in Beirut in a few weeks. We traded updates on wedding planning and baby anticipation while protecting our coveted table from browsers at Powells. As we talked, I couldn’t help but notice parallels between our two momentous life events.

“People come together like this only three times in your life—for weddings, births and funerals,” Mira said. “Except you can’t enjoy the last one because you’re dead.”

Regardless of your stance on the afterlife, she has a point. We’re both in the midst of witnessing friends and family come together to pull off something big.

I thought back to our own wedding, in October 2008. We had been living in a little apartment in West Harlem then moved cross-country for Eric’s graduate program and so didn’t have a bottomless savings account to pay for anything extravagant. With the help of loved ones, our nuptials were very DIY: We cooked and prepped all the food; made our own music mixes for dancing; and set up everything in a rural site outside Junction City, Oregon.

Before I walked down the aisle, friends mopped up rainwater that had fallen on the assembled chairs earlier that day. They folded napkins and strategically placed potted ferns over stains on the less-than-pristine rented tablecloths. And when dusk approached, everyone pitched in to clean up the dirty cups, plates and utensils.

Sure, the efforts of our guests saved us loads of money we simply didn’t have to spend. But the communal work felt like much more than a way to cut costs.

Getting married was, for me and Eric, a public way to share our commitment to each other. We also recognized that we wouldn’t be there without the support of loved ones. Our wedding celebration ended up being a representation of that idea. We couldn’t have pulled it off without everyone arranging centerpieces, cutting up fruit salad and stacking folding chairs. Everyone who lent a hand became an integral part of that day and, by extension, our union.

Peeper hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m already sensing similarities. My friend Ember, mother of a sassy five-year-old, advised me to accept help from whatever quarters it comes. So far I’ve followed her recommendation. Friends have lent us a stroller, car seat, co-sleeper, maternity clothes and a closet-ful of other baby goods we have no budget for. And I’m pretty sure we’re not far off from offers of dinner deliveries, babysitting and hand-me-downs.

And really, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Even if we could afford all-new baby gear and an on-call nanny, I love feeling like part of a tight-knit community coming together for something important (even if that something is small, say 7 or 8 pounds!). As on that drizzly October day almost five years ago, I’m grateful for our closest and dearest for lifting us up and making it work.

This is getting real.

It’s as if this week is coming together with the sole purpose of reminding me that Peeper is coming. Soon. And that his or her first few months won’t be a tearless shampoo-scented cloud of joy—at least not exclusively.

First, I had a day at work when my belly made me so uncomfortable that I ended up lying on the floor for a half-hour. There I was, fingers pecking at my laptop as I sprawled as modestly as I could on the industrial light-pile carpet next to my cube. Very mom-glam.

And today I got a blister on my pinkie toe. But when I bent over to put on a band-aid, I couldn’t reach around my belly. It took several tries to maneuver enough to perform the once-thoughtless task of administering first-aid to my foot.

The internet has been hinting at the difficult days ahead, too. I read Jody Pelatson’s essay “Before I Forget” on The Atlantic, which was a refreshingly honest perspective that caring for a newborn isn’t a one-way ticket to “cloud nine.”

“We thought it would be sitcom-style hard—not necessarily with a feel-good resolution at the end of every episode, but at least punctuated by those frequent moments of uplift indicating that, in spite of everything, life really is beautiful, isn’t it?” writes Pelatson about the challenges of becoming a new mom. “I’m pretty sure it’s like that for some people, but for many of us, it’s not. For many of us, it’s not good hard, as in a ‘good hard workout’; it’s bad hard, as in, it sometimes feels like something bad is happening to you.”

Lest anyone think Pelatson is trying to dissuade anyone from procreating, she goes on to say that she now loves parenting, and that those trying first months have blended into a soft-focus “New Motherhood Montage” in her memory.

When I told Eric about the article, he was somewhat aghast. He doesn’t think it’ll be quite that traumatic, and it might not be. But the essay was reassuring to me, not terrifying. It felt good to read an account of early parenthood that recognized and validated the fact that it can be lonely, confusing and extremely difficult at times.

This week the internet also provided a counternote to the Atlantic article, and to what I’m beginning to suspect is the cult of perfection around motherhood.

“No matter how many doubts you might have, you never need doubt this one thing: You are not perfect,” writes Lea Grover on her blog Becoming Supermommy (and on the Huffington Post).

“And that’s good. Because really, neither is your child. And that means nobody can care for them the way you can, with the wealth of your understanding and your experience. Nobody knows what your child’s squall means, or what their jokes mean, or why they are crying better than you do.

“And since no mother is perfect, chances are you are caught in a two billion way tie for Best Mom in the World.”

Granted, the premise of this blog is that I’ll become competent, or even expert, at being  a mom after devoting 10,000 hours of practice to caring for Peeper (a la Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers). I’m not striving for perfection by any means, though. And the recognition that the very lack of perfection is what your child needs is a beautiful, even liberating, idea.

So although this week has thrown some ridiculous reality checks at me (barely being able to reach my toes—come on!), I welcome them. Because with them arrive the understanding that those challenging moments are precisely what I need.

On Sunday my Portland girlfriends gathered for my baby shower. My somehow-do-it-all friend Erin, who had a beautiful baby girl only five months ago, planned and threw it for me—and I’m still in awe of what an amazing job she did. The whole party was worthy of a million Pinterest pins.

Plus, Erin somehow read my mind and served my favorite pregnancy food, tomatoes with balsamic vinegar, and lemonade, something I’d been craving since going to the Saturday Market the day before.

I had a wonderful time catching up with friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in months.

As I sat surrounded by these incredible women, I was struck by how fortunate Peeper and I are to have a community of such strong, compassionate, loving women. I feel so lucky to bring a child into the world knowing he or she will have these women to look up to. They will show Peeper what it means to be a woman. I couldn’t think of better examples. I thought the same thing at my previous shower in Eugene. How lucky am I?

Baby showers are so often a punch line. They’re what women supposedly drag themselves to in order to ooh and ahh over diaper pyramids. They’re meant to be venues for ridiculous games (like figuring out what kind of candy is melted in a diaper—yuck) and froo froo baby outfits. But from the showers I’ve been to, and the two that were thrown from me, this isn’t what showers are about.

To me, a baby shower is a chance to soak up wisdom from your women friends. From conversations at showers, I’ve learned about the best (and cheap) nursing tank tops from Target and how to soothe babies with the 5 s’s.

Perhaps more important that practical knowledge, I’ve gained a sense of complete support. I can call new mom friends for camaraderie and the assurance that whatever I’m feeling is completely normal. I can ask women of my mom’s generation for the knowledge that my child will grow out of the phase making me want to cry, scream or collapse at a given moment. And I can rely on my non-mom friends to remind me that there is a world beyond diapers, pacifiers and sleep schedules.

So thank you to all of you ladies who came to my showers. Thank you for so much more than the adorable onesies and receiving blankets you gave us. Thank you for being there for me, for celebrating with me, for making me feel like I have the support to withstand anything.

Last weekend I spent a wonderful few days visiting friends (including the intrepid toddler Tai, who led me to relive childhood memories at OMSI) in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

When I arrived Friday shortly after 9, I took Finn for a walk in the dark.

As he sniffed at scents left by critters and other dogs, I listened to the chorus of frogs croaking in the creek leading to Lake Cushman. Reminded of Peeper’s namesakes, I touched my belly.

About six months ago, Eric and I heard a similar cacophony of frogs while on a walk at the Sandy River Delta, a 1,400-acre park where dogs can run off leash, sprint in the sand and roll in mud pits. I had recently taken a third pregnancy test—better safe than sorry, especially when you’re peeing on sticks from the Dollar Store—and we were giddy but grappling with the knowledge we’d soon become parents.

One of the first orders of business, of course, was what to call the bun in the oven. “Blastocyst” and “embryo” just don’t have a nice ring to them. “Baby” is serviceable but somewhat impersonal. For a while we used “Appleseed,” the size of the wee one at five weeks.

As we were talking at Sandy River, a tiny frog hopped across the path in front of us. And it made sense: We’d call the baby Peeper.

In my family, we call little frogs peepers, after the sound they make. Ryan lore recounts the time my older sister and brother, then barely older than toddlers, crossed the highway where we lived in South Dakota in search of the bulgy-eyed creatures. My parents were terrified when they learned, of course, but it makes me smile to think of children’s obliviousness. “What? We were just catching some peepers.”

I love that our little one’s nickname carries family history, even if no one else outside the Ryan clan knows what a peeper is. Better yet, it is a history that entails innocence, mischief and adventure.

I feel even closer to our Peeper whenever I hear frogs singing to each other. Out in the dark in the Olympic Peninsula, with my belly growing bigger and Peeper’s arrival growing closer, I couldn’t wait to meet our little frog.