Waiting for your baby to arrive can be frustrating, discouraging, emotional, and just plain hard.  The combination of feeling uncomfortable and exhausted, dying to meet your baby, people asking every day if you’ve had the baby yet, false alarms of labor starting, and pressure from care providers to have the baby by a certain day can leave you wanting to cry many days.

I get it! But I do believe that we can wait with joy and peace and actually learn to enjoy this season! 

As I type this, I’m 3 days past my due date, but I’ve really found a peaceful place with Jesus as I wait to meet this little guy.

Here are a few thoughts that I pray help you as you wait to meet your precious little one:

1. First of all, we have to let go of the verbiage “due date.”

I mean, honestly, what a terrible thing to call it! Library books have due dates. School papers have due dates. But babies are not “due” on a certain day! What our culture calls your “due date” is simply an average of when most babies tend to come. It is not a day that your baby is “due” by and he is not “late” if he arrives after that day.

(And just a side note – 40 weeks isn’t even an accurate average or accurate “due date.” The average for first time moms if left to go into labor naturally is 41 weeks and 1 day, and the average for moms who’ve had babies before is 40 weeks and 3 days. So shame on the medical world for making us feel like our babies are “late” after 40 weeks).

Which leads to another point. A baby can’t be “late.” She is going to arrive right on time on the day that God ordained for her from the beginning of time. And an arrival anywhere between 38-42 weeks is totally normal and healthy! So 9 days past your “due date” doesn’t mean your baby is 9 days late. She’s still perfectly in God’s time, not late for anything! 

God and your baby will know when it’s time, and they will send a signal to your body to start releasing the right hormones to begin labor. This is a sacred and beautiful process God designed that we can trust! And God’s timing is always perfect – He is never “late”. 

2. This is a season to celebrate, not just a day to wait around for.

It helps to see this month between 38-42 weeks as a season to celebrate and enjoy like we do the Christmas season. Christmas is fun because it’s a whole season of celebration, decorations, good food, time with family and friends, and time to focus on Jesus. We aren’t miserable sitting around just waiting for Christmas day to arrive. We enjoy the season! 

And we can do the same with birth! If we see it as a month to enjoy in anticipation, we can celebrate each day instead of just sitting around waiting for baby to arrive.

This is a season to slow down, enjoy naps, watch fun movies, take beautiful walks, go on dates with your hubby, eat yummy healthy food to prepare your body, buy fun snacks for the labor, decorate for the baby and the birth, spend quality time with family and friends, and give yourself permission to lighten off the work and spend time resting and worshipping instead. 

In our home, I’m enjoying being off from all dishes duty (thanks to my amazing husband), taking naps instead of working in the afternoons, having worship dance parties as a family (to help baby move down and encourage labor :)), foot massages at night, and special times with Jesus.

Plus, I love all the scriptures and words we have up around the home in preparation for the birth! You can watch a video here to see how I decorated for labor!

3. Surrender Control

Sometimes our joy is stolen during the waiting because we allow anxious thoughts to come in and we believe lies that make us think we need to control when baby comes. But there is such peace in surrendering that control to Jesus and trusting His perfect timing and trusting that baby will come when he’s ready!

I started to get anxious about the timing of this birth because one of my midwives leaves in three days for two weeks, my mom is leaving in 7 days for a week, and my husband has a week long work trip coming up in a few weeks. I started to feel scared to face the birth and postartum time without some of these key people and tempted to want to make the baby come now. But after surrendering my fears to God, I have so much peace waiting for His perfect timing. He will be with me no matter what and that’s what I truly need. He is my protector, my good good Father, my defender, and my provider. He will not leave me alone or without support. He is GOOD!

And because of that, Beautiful Mama, we can trust Him to take care of all our needs and with the desires of our hearts. His ways are always perfect and His plans always better than our own!

I find such comfort in these two Scriptures:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
⁹ “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9

And

God’s way is perfect. All the LORD’s promises prove true. He is a shield for all who look to him for protection. Psalm 18:30

Bless you sweet mama as you find your joy and peace in Him during this sacred and beautiful waiting season!

Cheering you on,

Kierra