Baby Fever, and How It Grew

I'd say I've had the normal cycle of procreative urges: meet a nice boy, fall in love, decide he'd be the perfect father to my one-day kids. Get married, have that moment six months in where I want to have a baby, since that's what you do when you're married and all (riiiiiight?). Grab ahold of my hormones with both hands, remind myself that I'm waaaayy too young to think about such things, and put it off. Push it back hard -- in fact, push it back so hard that I actually reach a point where I can't imagine myself with kids, where I'm terrified at the thought of kids.

The Horror.

Actually, that turned out to be a really, really, REALLY good thing, because it gave me time to actually work on me, and my marriage, and blah-de-blah-de-blah. Three years later, my life is sorta sorting itself out - or at least beginning to reach a point where it could sort itself out. And some major scary health things happened in my family, and it brought my priorities into perspective. And I realized that seeing my family meet my child is more important to me than pursuing grad school right away, or a whirlwind trip around the world, or being able to go out to fancy restaurants whenever (or almost whenever) I feel like it.

Hi-five, younger self.

So the Mr. and I had The Talk - and we figured out that 2014 would be our lucky year for having a kid. Coincidentally, this lines up perfectly with my 12-year-old self's life plan: marry at 22, have kids at 27. Of course, I never thought about the logistics that go into having that kid at 27 (hiya, nine-month gestational period) - so here I am at 26, working to get all my ducks in a row so that we can start FFB later this year (it's like TTC, only more fun and more accurately-phrased). And I'm still terrified, in a way - but I'm also excited. Like, really excited. And I can't wait until we have that little mini-us on the way - but I still have to get those ducklings fully in line.

Until that happens, I'm just going to have to stay where I'm at, counting down until we're ready to launch into the next phase of our life. Here's to learning to love the process.