Making Progress and Feeling Stuck

We’ve made progress…we bought a car seat, a stroller and a portable changing pad. I know it might not sound like much but to us it was. We have been so afraid to buy anything for fear that something would go wrong. We didn’t really plan on buying anything but I wanted to go and check out a coupe of stores to see what was available over here. There isn’t a big Babies R US or Target that I know I can get things from so I was getting a little worried that we would need something in a hurry and we wouldn’t know where to go. Plus there are sales here in August and I wanted to see when they ended so we could take advantage of them.

I think my husband and I both feel strange about buying these things. As I said, we still can’t believe that this is all happening. It’s strange, you try for something for so long, hope and pray for it, picture yourself as a parent and then when the time is getting close and it looks like you might actually make it, you can’t picture it any more. I don’t know how to describe the feeling. I do feel excited but a strange excitement, like I’m living in someone else’s body. I am afraid to get attached to this baby out of fear. My mom called today and told me that my brother and sister in law are already picking out names for their child who isn’t due till the end of January. She said this is normal. She can’t understand that we don’t feel comfortable doing the same. Our baby should be arriving in the next 3 – 6 weeks and we don’t have names. We had a girls first name picked out for our first pregnancy (that baby would be 3 next month) but I don’t know if we should/are going to use it or not. We have no boys names and we haven’t even talked about having middle names or not. They don’t use them over here but we do in the States. We said last week that we would start thinking about it after our next appointment, next week, at week 30. This has been the story throughout our pregnancy, things we are scared to do we say we will do it after the next appointment, then when that appointment comes and goes we say the same thing over and over. Is this normal for a couple who has struggled and lost other babies?