Looking forward…

to making the big announcement on Facebook so I can finally look freely at nursery ideas on Pinterest without worrying about accidentally announcing to friends and family still in the dark about the baby on the way. Copying and pasting pictures from the web into a Word document doesn’t have quite the same panache…

In all seriousness, though, I’m not sure when we’ll be making the big Facebook announcement.

The end of the first trimester is starting to seem too soon — especially since we’re only a few weeks away (which is scary in and of itself because it seems like the pregnancy is flying by and I’m trying to savor this — peeing every ten seconds and all).

Maybe we’ll wait till around 20 weeks or so.  Or maybe I won’t say anything at all, and I’ll just start posting updated pictures of me and see who notices :-)

Nah, I think we’ll probably say something around 20 weeks. That’ll be around July 18. By then, I hope we’ll be comfortable that we’re safely out of the danger zone. And by then I’ll probably be showing so it won’t be a secret to anyone who sees me — now that we’re moving back home, a lot of people who have only seen us on Facebook the past couple years are going to start seeing us a lot more often in person.

(Although it might be kind of funny watching people struggling with whether to ask if we’re expecting or to remain silent because maybe I’m just gaining a lot of weight.)

Hello,Baby! (Week 10)

Obviously, I’m like two weeks behind on posting these.  I still draft one a week on time, but I try to mix them up with regular posts, so sometimes the Hello, Baby posts get a little off schedule in the process.

Salutations, Baby! (Remind Dad and me to read Charlotte’s Web with you one day, by the way.)

Well, Baby, you are definitely a baby!

We saw you for a third time during our final visit with the fertility specialist this week — once again, Dad and I were grateful for technology because he got to see everything over the web.

Whereas the last two times we saw you, we could only assume there was a little baby human growing in there given the uninterpretable shadows on the ultrasound monitor, the third time was definitely the charm. You are without a doubt a little baby human, complete with a little human head, and two arms and two hands, and two legs and two feet, and a surprisingly distinct spinal column. To top it off, your heart was still going strong.

Dad and I are so proud of you and how well you’re growing.

Keep up the hard work, little one!

Love,

Mama and Dad

Never too old

One of the things I’ve most looked forward to once TH and I had children was a second opportunity to explore the world of children’s books.

I was an early reader, and although I don’t want to be a pushy parent who tries to force their likes and dislikes on their children, I hope the love of reading is something I can share with our kids one day. Over the last few years, as our extended family started to expand and nieces and nephews arrived, I started finding any excuse to buy a children’s book for someone. Baby showers, birthdays, “It’s been a while since I last saw  you” — any excuse would do for a chance to wander down the short children’s book section at a big box store, or to get lost in the seemingly endless stacks at a big box book store.

I can almost always find the books that remind of the days when I was small, and when I enjoyed reading just as much for the beautiful pictures as for the words on the pages themselves:

    

   

And when I explore the shelves for older children, I find stories that I loved for being full of words that painted beautiful pictures all by themselves:

  

   

   

And I find the books that I never read (or read once I was no longer a child), but that TH told me were books he remembered reading and enjoying when he was younger, and I can’t wait to introduce them to our kids one day:

   

I once read that one of the best parts about being a parent is having a second chance to be a kid again, and to see the world through a child’s eyes. When I think about children’s books, and colorful illustrations, and the comfort I feel when I go to a library or book store in any city, state or country, I really think that’s true.

I’m looking forward to sharing our favorite books with our kids, and I’m looking to finding new books that may become their own favorites that they’ll one day share with their own kids.

I hope our kids like reading. If they don’t, it certainly won’t be for a lack of an introduction on my part.

Hello, Baby! (Week 9)

Hi, Baby!

This week we have established a pattern, you and I. Or rather, I because of you.

I wake up and immediately eat something before I have a chance to feel sick. Then I get ready for my day. Within two hours, I start to feel queasy, so I stop what I’m doing so I can eat again. I go about my business, and two hours later, at the bidding of my rising gorge, I turn to the fridge or pantry to stuff my face, again.

This two-hour cycle repeats all day long. And that’s just the eating — the dashing off to the bathroom every 30 minutes to an hour is also more than a little repetitious.

I’m sure there’s some hormonal and physiological reason for this new way of life for me. But these days, I think this is one of the ways you’re helping me to get ready for when you arrive. You know, for those early days when TH and I will be in the middle of a seemingly endless cycle of ensuring that you are fed and dry.

Thanks for the lesson, Baby — I am definitely taking notes, and I think we will be ready!

This week, Dad commented more than once that he thinks I am subconsciously poking out my stomach because he knows I’m looking forward to you being big enough that I have a bump. I informed him that he was crazy! Sure, it’s way too early for me to be showing, but we are also way too far along for me to even attempt to suck in anymore. Dad and I are still in the midst of quite a few changes, and among those, I’ve been applying for jobs. This week, I even had an interview for an awesome job in healthcare. I really hope I get it, and soon — the skirt for my suit was noticeably tighter in the waist, and I don’t think I’ll be able to get more than another two months of wear out of it before it is too tight to zip  up over the waist.

So wish me luck that I get the job, and soon — I don’t think Dad will be too happy if I have to buy a bigger suit before I’m even really showing!

Love,

Mama and Dad

All, nothing, or something in between

For over two weeks now, I’ve been struggling with a serious decision I need to make soon. I’m no closer to making a decision today than I was when the dilemma first reared its ugly head as a real-life-thing-I-need-to-figure-out and not just a random hypothetical question.

The dilemma:  After the baby is born, should I continue working outside the home full-time, drop to part-time, or will I put my work-life on hold to stay at home full-time — perhaps until the youngest of any future kids we have starts preschool or elementary school?

In my head, I keep seeing the question framed as:  “Work:  all, nothing, or something in between?”

Thinking about this reminds me of my previous post about Plans vs. Reality when TH and I were in the midst of TTC.

Plan: For years — at least since the time when I first understood that I would one day have a choice in the matter — my plan had been to put my career on hold once I had my first child, and to not go back to working full-time until the youngest child was in school.

I’ve always pictured myself doing what my mom did when she had me and my siblings. She was a stay-at-home mom until my sister, the youngest of her four kids, started first grade. That was the same year that I started sixth grade, which means my mom had been a stay-at-home mom for over a decade.

I have a lot of great memories of being home with my mom and my brothers and sister before I started school. She even home-schooled each of us prior to our entering elementary school, and the four of us each entered school already reading and writing at and/or above grade level. I know I benefited from that educational leg-up, and it’s always been my goal to give my own kids that same advantage one day.  But at the same time, now that I’m older and maybe a little wiser, I can see that staying home didn’t give my mom the same advantages in her career as it gave her kids in their educations.  I think she enjoys what she does now, but I know her earning potential took a huge hit when she stopped working to take are of her kids, and it never really recovered. Were it not for the high cost of putting four kids under five in daycare, I don’t know if she and my dad would make the same choice today as they did back then.

Reality:  The reality is that this is no longer looking like an easy decision. In some ways, it’s not looking like I’ll have a real ‘choice’ at all;  I’m no longer sure being a stay-at-home mom would be the best decision I could make.

There have a been a few things in recent years that give me pause about shoving my business attire to the back of the closet any time soon.

In the last two years, TH and I moved halfway around the world and then halfway across the US. Unfortunately, that instability shines brightly on my resume. Two years of working part-time and full-time jobs that I was seriously over-qualified for — because I couldn’t find anything else — has shown me that I miss having a job that makes me feel valued. Feeling like a respected member of the workplace has surprisingly become pretty important to me.  Just this past week, I interviewed for a position at a company in the field I worked in before we moved overseas, and I’ve surprised myself by how much I WANT this job and how much I mess the work I used to do, even though the industry I worked in was pretty stressful. I miss having more responsibility, more money, more respect.

I’m worried that if I make the decision to stop working and stay at home to take care of our kids full-time, I’ll be setting myself up for a lifetime of menial jobs once the kids are in school and I go back to work.

Yet, the idea of trying to juggle work with parenting is scary, and it makes me sad to think about. TH and I have been looking forward to having kids together as long as we’ve been a couple. Add in the struggle to get pregnant at all, and it almost seems like sacrilege to put a brand-new baby into daycare for 40-plus hours a week if we could afford not to.

At the same time, the idea of staying at home until our youngest child is in preschool or elementary school — which, depending on spacing and whether or not I can even get pregnant a second, third, or fourth time, could be ten years from now — and then being faced with working dead-end jobs for the rest of my career is just as scary, and makes me just as sad.

All this is complicated by the fact that TH doesn’t work a regular 9 to 5. It’s difficult to even quantify the number of hours he works. In the off season, he works all day, some evenings and occasional weekends. During the season, he works all day, almost every evening, almost every weekend, and when the team is traveling for games (or when he has to be on the road recruiting), he’s gone for upwards of three days a several times a month until the end of the season. Before we got married, that was justification enough for me to assume that my staying at home would be no problem. Heck, wouldn’t it be too complicated to try to work full-time while he worked what counts for full-time for coaches? What if I had an urgent meeting that I couldn’t miss, he needed to be out of town, and meanwhile one of the kids was sick, or otherwise needed us to leave work for something?

Of course, then there are all the unknowns, the scary possibilities for which things like unemployment insurane, life-insurance and wills exist. The things no happily married couple on the new path to parenthood wants to even think about:

• What if TH loses his job, and then we’re both unemployed with kids to provide for? How could I support us if I’d been out of the workplace for several years?
• What if our marriage ends and I’m on my own with a family to care for and a crap resume in a tough job market?
• What if TH were to get sick, seriously injured, or, knock on wood and God/Heaven/Universe forbid, die?

And I can’t forget the opportunity costs, the things I’ll give up if I choose one over the other.

On the one hand, I can be a stay-at-home mom, and in doing so, possibly screw up any chances of landing a well-paying job after the kids are in school.

On the other hand, I can choose to work, whether part- or full-time. If I do that, I hang onto financial security, but I know I’ll be missing out on all the ‘firsts’ that I’ve looked forward to witnessing as a parent of young children.

But I’m not completely naive.

Given the fact that TH’s job requires us to be ready to pick up and move at the end of every basketball season, I’m looking at a long future of uncertainty when it comes to my career, whether or not kids are a part of the picture.

And when it comes to kids, I know it’s not all laughter and playing at the park and baking cupcakes in the kitchen. Parenting is hard work, and I don’t have  a ton of experience in dealing with kids, especially small babies and toddlers. There are no guarantees that I won’t be ripping my hair out and counting down the days until I can return to work.

In the end, I go around and around in circles and I know the final decision will come down to me. Right now, I’m leaning heavily towards working part-time, meaning no more than 30 hours or so a week. But I know part-time jobs are like leprechauns and unicorns in the working world — they’re pretty hard to come by. TH is supportive of letting me make this decision, but I know he’d prefer I work at least part-time, even though he’s always known that my personal dream, at least  until recently, was to stay at home. I think he worries about being the sole income earner and carrying the burden of maintaining our lifestyle with his salary alone,and I totally understand that.  I think he also worries that our kids might not be socialized well if they spend the first few years of life at home with me rather than in a group care setting with other kids. To a degree, I understand this also, and I agree with him that socialization prior to elementary school is important. I’m in favor of putting our kids in a group child care setting by the age of three for the socialization benefits alone, even if I’m a stay at home parent.

Head is swirling.

I guess I have another seven months or so to figure this out. In the meantime, it’s back to applying for jobs and interviewing so that there can even be a choice to make between working or staying at home.

Tags: decision, dilemma, parenting, SAHM, stay at home, WOHM, work outside the home

Um… so, scratch that…

So I’m hanging my head here, but I seems I just needed to call my own bluff to be re-inspired with ideas to write about again. (I won’t make a habit of it, promise. (Crap. I feel like I might have said this at least once before…))

I made the decision to shut down this blog yesterday and then, after two weeks of finding myself struggling to put words on the page,  I woke up the very next morning with all these ideas of things to write about.

I thought about ignoring those ideas because it seemed melodramatic to announce that I’d no longer be posting, only to start posting again,  only to then again be faced with the issue of not really feeling like writing. But with a little encouragement from TH (who has seen me start and stop and restart blogging several times now, and who knows that I’ve now established a pattern of wishing I was blogging when I wasn’t and wishing I wasn’t blogging when I was), I decided to instead challenge myself:  if I could come up with at least ten new posts (outside of the Hello, Bab posts) within two weeks, then I can consider my temporary writer’s block resolved, and I’d start posting regularly again.

It ended up only taking less than two days and now I have a box full of drafts that I’d like to share soon. So yeah, this is a little embarrassing, but I guess if there’s something I can share with you in full disclosure, it’s that I’m wishy-washy and indecisive, and I have a hard time figuring out what I want.

I’m not promising to start divulging tons of details about my life than I don’t put out there already, and I still stand by my uncertainty about where to draw the line at sharing things about my life with TH (especially as his job in coaching becomes increasingly public and therefore makes him — and us — all the more Googleable), this baby on the way, and any future kiddos we have (should I still be blogging by the time future kiddos show up).

But I am promising to take the pressure off myself and to lower in any personal goals I’ve set for myself to update this blog constantly or share everything I’m thinking about life and parenting, because that has just led to writers block and self-consciousness and the urge to quit because I’m overwhelming myself (I guess I hate to do things I don’t feel I’m doing well), and it’s just not me. Instead, I’ll write when inspired, and I won’t when not. I do appreciate you bearing with me — I love to write, but I’ve never gotten totally comfortable with writing for anyone but myself, and it’s really making me second guess myself. I’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, I encourage you to subscribe to posts by email, if you aren’t already. That way, if a longish gap between posts arises (as I expect will be the case with the upcoming move, and — fingers crossed that I get that job — once I start working full-time again), you can get the updates in your inbox.

I should probably add that TH (and my family, some close friends, and few random strangers) is always encouraging me to write professionally. He’s seen the notebooks and journals I carry around and have saved for years, and he knows writing is something I really enjoy doing.  A couple of years ago, I finally admitted to myself that it really would be a dream to publish something one day, even though the thought of it scares me because there would be no taking it back. Maybe a children’s book, or articles for an online magazine, or… who knows.

So I think this blog is serving a purpose, even though I’m struggling with it. If I want to write a book one day, I need to get used to the idea of putting my ideas out there into the world. Not anonymously on a message board, or among a closed group of friends on a social networking site, but truly out there, to strangers, with my name (well, initials) attached. So this blog is like a trial run at maybe one day writing professionally. It’s definitely a work in progress in leaving my comfort zone and I appreciate your bearing with me.

And finally, since I fully admit that writing, and blogging in many ways, is therapeutic for me, I realized overnight that it’s probably not the best idea to close that avenue to myself now that things are going smoothly in life, right now, in this moment.

TH and I are just starting our journey to parenthood, and I imagine there are going to be days in the future when I’ll want to reach out, and that includes to strangers on the internet. I have a feeling that I’ll regret this blog not being here when that time inevitably comes.

Anyway, stay tuned for some new posts. I’m setting them up on a schedule that should hopefully get me through the move to the East Coast.

Crossroads

I am feeling pretty ambivalent about this blog these days. I’m sure you’ve been able to tell.

I’ve always enjoyed writing, and for the most part, private journaling comes very easily for me. Public blogging is another thing altogether.

A few years ago, during a rather stressful time in my life where I was working full-time and going to school full-time, and juggling a ton of other things in between, I realized that journaling had slowly transformed from my regularly writing about random events and the ups and downs of my life to a more  sporadic unburdening of my soul during times of distress. One day I found myself flipping through my journal from the previous year and realized that over the previous six to eight months, I’d only written about things that were troubling me, making me sad or angry, and generally just bringing me down.  I realized that writing was in some ways therapeutic for me, but at the same time, was becoming an anchor tying me to negative parts in my life that I didn’t truly wish to be tethered to.

I knew that there had been plenty of great things that had happened during those times, but for some reason, writing came more easily for me when things weren’t going all that great. It was hard to break the cycle of focusing only on the negative to write about. So that was day that I decided to take a break from journaling. For the next two years, I worked on capturing the good parts of my life in other ways. I didn’t start journaling again until after TH and I got married, and I’ve learned to be much more balanced in the things that I choose to capture in written form.

This blog has become a little bit like what happened when I decided to stop journaling for a couple years. Writing here is no longer coming easily, and I think it’s because I’d gotten into the habit over the past year of turning to this blog when I was sad and mad about being unable to get pregnant.

There are so many awesome things going on in my life right now. But when I think about putting those things into writing here, I put it off and off and off. I think over the past year, writing off and on here was very therapeutic for me.  Particularly in the three months or so before we found out that a dream was coming true and we were on our way to parenthood. At those times, writing here was almost effortless. But it isn’t any longer. Now, when I write, it feels too much like bragging and it feels too much like tempting fate.

I plan to chronicle my pregnancy, and the lives of our growing family, and I’m actively doing so. But I don’t know if that is something I wish to do publicly on a blog anymore.

I enjoy pregnancy and parenting blogs and websites, and I admire women (and men) who are comfortable sharing the details of their lives for all to see online, and in doing so, build a network around themselves that turns utter strangers into friends and makes the the world a smaller place. I’ve been a part of something similar when I participate in online message boards, and over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a few women who today I consider close friends and who I never would have come to know were it not for an internet connection. I understand and appreciate the power of sharing parts of life with people online. And just as there are websites and online communities that I frequent, there are blogs that I’ve followed for years, and plan to continue following as long as I can. But I don’t know if that life is for me.

Maybe I’m too much of a worrywart. I worry about leaving a trail of myself on the internet — we all know the internet is forever. I worry about putting details about myself, my husband and our future children online. Even though I feel like I do a relatively good job of maintaining my privacy online, I worry that I’ll one day regret being open about the few things that I did choose to share.

Maybe I’m too possessive of my memories. I’m by no means a hoarder, but sometimes I wonder if my attachment to things like photographs and journals and old letters and cards makes me a borderline case. This blog is just one more thing to hold onto, and I find that I don’t really care to get attached. I’ve been working on letting go — letting go of my attachment to this, so I can better appreciate that. Cutting back on doing this, so I can do a much better job at that. I am working everyday to be present and to stay present. To enjoy the things that are happening today, and let go of the things that went wrong yesterday, or the things that could come tumbling down tomorrow.

Thinking about blogging, and doing a good job at blogging, and one day sharing this blog with our family and friends so they can be a part of this experience is weighing me down.

I don’t want to do it.

This blog served a purpose, and now I’m ready to let it go. Maybe one day I’ll change my mind (anyone who has followed this blog through it’s various iterations over the past couple years would say that is probably likely to be true). But for now, closing this blog seems like the best decision I can make.

I’ll keep the blog open and this post up for a few more weeks — probably until TH and I have finalized our move back East. After that, I’m closing things.

If you are someone who I’ve come to know through this blog and you’d like to stay in touch through Facebook, please email me at byplanorhappenstance at gmail dot com.   I’d love to stay connected. And while I don’t to make myself a candidate for this website now (or ever),  I’m sure I’ll post updates about our growing family on Facebook from time to time once we’ve shared the news about the baby there.

Thanks for reading — this post and all the others. It’s been an interesting ride!