How to Strike Fear Into Your Husband's Heart

Early on in your relationship, tell him you are fine with him being Mr. Mom if he wants, but you will be a career woman, thankyouverymuch.

Several years later, buy obnoxiously large house so that your mother can move in with you and have enough space to avoid wanting to kill each other. Try not to think about obnoxiously large utility bills that come with said house.

Rack up credit card debit trying to have kiddos.

Finally have a kiddo. Handle putting her in daycare surprisingly well.

Have a smooth first month or so back at work (at least, in terms of adapting to the whole working-mom scenario).

When kiddo comes down with a cold, spend the night sleeping on the floor next to her while she sleeps in the swing, spend the early morning hours cuddling her in the glider after a diaper change.

When it comes time to hand her sweet, smiling, but snorty and sniffly little self over to hubs so that he can take her to daycare (because she doesn't have a fever and you have no vacation days left after maternity leave), look at him and say "I don't want to work anymore."

And, "What kind of house do you think we could buy for $100,000 so that we don't have to have a mortgage anymore and I can stay home with her?" (His answer: "Not one large enough to allow all of us to continue to live together.")

Like I said, how to strike fear in your husband's heart...

Unfortunately, I don't think staying home is going to be realistically feasible for us right now, especially if we want to try for a second kiddo anytime soon. So I have moved on to plan B - get a new, higher paying job that will allow us to sock away more money so that I can stay home at some point in the future. The job hunt officially got underway today when I submitted a resume to a company I'm interested in.

I still want to keep downsizing on the table, but it will be a tough sell with R. Mostly because he just doesn't want to move again, more than a particular attachment to this house or the size of it.

Maybe we can find a compromise - I get my way with downsizing if I give him his way with only having 2 kids instead of the 3 that I was hoping for?

I Just Want You to Know...

I’ve started this post a hundred times in my head, and even a few times on the computer.

I don’t think I’m feeling “survivor’s guilt” exactly. But before Miss A was born, when others would go on to have success, it stung to read about it. While I was happy for them, at the same time it felt a little more lonely in the IF boat. I still know how that feels, and I don’t want to cause anyone any bit of that kind of pain. So I’ve been quiet.

On the flip side, though, so many of you did such an amazing job of holding my hand through the past year, and I want you to know how grateful I am, and how everything is turning out.

I realize I was high strung (to put it mildly) during the pregnancy. I’m sure many of you thought “If she’s like this now, what is she going to be like when the baby is born??” R certainly wondered about that, and so did others who know me offline.

The answer, it turns out, is “surprisingly normal”. As I mentioned in the post about Miss A’s birth, once she came out, I let out the breath I had been holding for 9 months. She is here. I am a mom to a living baby. This is what I’d hoped for, and it’s even better than I could have imagined it.

Several of my friends have commented that I’m much more laid back than they expected. Sure, I checked on her frequently when she was first born to make sure she was still breathing. I still do check on her, but now I don’t hold my breath and think “Dear God, please let her still be alive” like I did at first. I’m coming to trust more that she’s okay.

And I’m living in the moment. When I was pregnant, I kept worrying about the “what if’s” – what if I got pre-eclampsia? What if I had a placental abruption? What if the baby’s heart just stopped beating while in utero for no obvious reason? What if the lack of movement meant something bad had happened? Etc.

While there are still certainly plenty of things to worry about, for the most part, I don’t. I just want to enjoy her, and I don’t want that to be constantly clouded by worry. And somehow, I can’t explain how, I’m doing that – living in the moment, enjoying every moment with her, and not obsessing over the “what if’s”.

Reading this over, I feel like I’m still not doing a really great job of making it clear how happy I am. So here’s a scene from a morning at the end of last week that I’ll leave you with:

I had just finished feeding Miss A and getting her dressed and ready for day care. A song came on the radio that made me want to dance, so I picked her up and was dancing with her and singing to her. R came out of the bathroom and came over to join us. She was already smiling, and then he started tickling her, and she was laughing a lot, which she has just started to do this month.

So there we were, the three of us dancing around like fools before work. And I realized my cheeks were hurting, literally. It’s because I had such a big smile on my face.

That is my life now – dancing around with R and Miss A, living in the moment, smiling ridiculously large smiles and loving the sound of baby laughter. I am so happy, and so very grateful, and very thankful.

It Goes Without Saying...

...or at least, I thought it did, that even if it's been a couple of hours since baby last ate, it's still probably not wise to hold said baby in the airplane position over a basket of freshly laundered and folded clothes.

Apparently, it needed to be said.

On the bright side, they were R's clothes rather than mine, which I thought was poetic justice. ;-)