35wks, 2days

I am blown away at the idea that my children will be born and raised in Jerusalem. It's amazing enough to me that this is the city in which I got married and in which I live. Not only live, but actually own property! My husband and I had very different journeys to Jerusalem. I've been here over seventeen years, and he left his family and came all on his own four years ago. It was here we met, here we married, here we forged a new family with a new family name. Here we bought a home, here I got pregnant, and here I will give birth two our two children (well, two for now, hopefully more to follow).

We hope our kids appreciate and take advantage of the US and Canadian citizenship they will have. We hope they have excellent English as a strong mother tongue, though they will go to school and eventually become fluent in Hebrew, probably more so than their parents.

I'm thrilled that they will be able to have a relationship with their grandparents that I never had. I saw mine two or maybe three times a year, if that. Often less. Meanwhile my parents live one bus ride away from our apartment. My kids will be able to visit Saba and Savta whenever they please. It is sad that my in-laws don't live as close, though we do hope they'll eventually make Aliyah.

It's just as exciting that these are the first grandchildren on either side. Both families' futures now lay in Israel. Shawn and I were the first on either side to get married, and the first in either family's history to be married in Jerusalem in over 2000 years. Now we are going to bring the first new lives into Israel, into Jerusalem.