Dragging in the Void

My weekend hangover has been a little bit more vicious than usual this week. Probably because of the anticipation and then execution of Hamsgiving weekend (post upcoming), which included three days of drinking and walking long distances in bitter cold.
Not so long ago, when my life revolved not around a loved one but two consecutive off-days per week, I suffered weekend hangovers pretty regularly. Mondays were not fun. I'm not even really talking about physical hangovers (because those would happen on Sundays usually), but the emotional letdown. Much keeping with the hair-of-the-dog effect, a lot of times it seemed like the only cure was another weekend (fortunately our good friend Time ensured that I was never out of stock), and this one is only beginning to show signs of letting up mostly due to the Super Bowl coming up, and my current devotion to creating prop bets for our pool.
I only mention all of this because I haven't had a weekend hangover in a long time. Part of that is simply not getting after it as hard on weekends anymore, but a much bigger part is Sara's steadying influence, plus the not-insignificant fact that lately my life has had much larger anticipatory events than simple weekends. From the time I was engaged, I had about one year of steady build-up with wedding and honeymoon plans. Smaller cycles of months and weeks were washed under by the higher tide of the wedding. Then I had the afterglow from that for a while, and in short notice, Sara became pregnant and it kicked into another gear.
I have to say that--outside of a 2-3 week period of intense honeymoon prep--the depth of education/preparation for a pregnancy just blows away anything wedding-related. And this is how it should be. You get lazy and ruin a wedding and you've got one bad day and a few weeks of residual damage, but you fuck up a pregnancy and you've got a lifetime.
Starting in late October when I found out she was pregnant, through the pretty recent past, I immersed myself in all kinds of pregnancy- and baby-related things. How fast does a fetus grow? Why is a diaper pail different from a simple garbage can? How heavy is a 3-month-old baby? Is it really necessary to take four giant pills per day? Will it hurt my child's rap career to be born in Manhattan instead of Brooklyn? There is almost no end to the topics you can research in this area, and I only barely ever restrained myself. I think we have finally moved into a down period in this regard. We're 6+ weeks since we've told everyone, so that novelty is gone. We've had enough doctor visits so that they're becoming routine (so much so that I'm actually skipping one today). We're far enough into the pregnancy that we basically already know everything we need to know, so the actual labor and delivery is the only thing left (for me at least. Sara gets to deal with the restless nights, back pain, etcetc. Sorry about that). We're not close enough so that we can actually start buying things for after the baby arrives. And, sometime in the last few weeks, I've stopped automatically knowing how far along she is. She's almost 19 weeks now, but I had to stop and think about it.
I guess what this is all about is waiting. Nine months of a pregnancy is a long time, but given all you need to do, both internally and externally to prepare for that huge life change, it can be intimidating and seem like not long enough. Not right now, though. Right now it just feels like a time void between now and June, like I know my life will change and I'm ready for it but it's not here yet. I'm just waiting for the future to happen, a future that I mostly already know, which is weird.