I have been thinking about 2008 a lot lately. Did you know on July 25, it will be exactly FOUR months till Christmas?! That sure puts holiday shopping in perspective! I told Kevin I was doing my shopping early because I am tired of being tired around the holidays. But I also want to enjoy this Christmas because it will likely be out last as a three person family... well five if you count Peaches 'n Cream - yeah, that's what I call my dogs... whachya gonna do about?!
More to the point, I have been thinking a lot about pregnancy with a child in tow and parenting two kiddos while being a working momma. I am trying to mentally prepare myself for these (courageous) acts... I know that there is no amount of preparation for this because as prepared as I thought I was for Matthew, I was SO not prepared AND it was terribly different (in a good way) then I ever imagined.
I do want to note that I have really changed my way of thinking about pregnancy, child birth and parenting the past two years. I was pretty "hard core" to some degree two years ago. This hard core attitude came from BABS. I love this place and it is a great thing for our community but made me feel wholly inadequate at best because I was not a hard core mommy to be (nor was I had hardcore vegan/vegetarian and I gave birth in hospital - OMG!) I had these beliefs and ideas about these things that seem so absurd to me now. With that said...
First, there is no way to replicate anything from my 1st pregnancy because Matthew is now a part of our world. There will be none of that dreamy sitting around and wondering about the baby... I mean there will be but that will likely happen at work! It just won't be 24/7 like it was with Matthew. After two years and much time to think about these things, I am making the following "promises" to myself... I do not hold myself accountable for these promises because I now always have a Plan B (and C).
1.) Kevin and I have discussed this extensively. While we have not conclusively decided this - we are probably going to find out the sex of the next baby. It was fun and exciting to not know the 1st time around but we feel like Matthew has the right to know whether he will be a big bro to a little sister or brother. He will be old enough to understand the differences between boys and girls. Plus I feel like it will help him get used to the idea of sharing his life with another little person. On top of that, we can plan the baby's room much better and it will make it easier to get what we need all around. And finally, finding a name we could agree was hell the 1st time around. Eventually we did it but was it ever hard. I would rather just know and be able to haggle over names for one sex versus coming up with six million names for two sexes.
2.) I plan to take A LOT more photos of my developing belly. I really planned to do that Matthew. I was going to keep a baby journal (I bought a cool notebook and everything...) and take a monthly baby belly photo but I did not... I am so sad about that. I wanted to do it because it meant a lot to me. I am a photo hound. I love photos and I look back at my pregnancy and there are hardly any of my developing belly. I think it will be special to look back at that one day.
3.) I promise to enjoy pregnancy even more this time around in all ways. I want to buy some fun clothes. I was so boring and conservative (okay I was really just broke...) I can now afford to buy some of the cute stuff out there and since the plan is to have the baby at a radically different time of year then when I was pregnant with Matthew, I am pretty excited to get some cute stuff. I will enjoy eating and being pregnant a lot more - I worried about EVERYTHING with my 1st pregnancy. So what if I had 400 lb ankles, acne like a 15 yr old and gained 895645 pounds... I did it for Matthew and that was worth every bit of it. My body did what it was supposed to do and it did it well.
4.) We have more loot this time around so can pimp out the next baby's pad! Not that we did not get the best things we could for Matthew because we did. It will just be fun to get nicer things without all of the worry and anxiety. I love to look at all the cool things that have come about the past two years. Little things have changed and, of course, we will re-use the stuff we already have but, for instance, basically Matthew's bouncer broke after approximately 2.5 uses so I can go out and buy a new bouncer without any qualms.
5.) Matthew will hopefully be close to three and a half by the same this mystical Schmidt baby would arrive. He will be very different by that time. He is already radically different. I mean recently Matthew developed this INCREDIBLE, RICH, and OMG it is so BEAUTIFUL imagination. I love this part... I love it so much so that it brings tears to my eyes as I type! I can relate to this because I am still a child at heart. Being a mommy means I can also be the kid at heart I have always been. All of this is for another post at another time but Matthew will be more mature which is a good thing for us. AND hopefully one step closer to being mostly potty trained though some friends of ours told us their SIX year old son (okay both of their sons were like this...) just stopped having accidents in bed at night - ACK!
... to be continued (this post is getting out of control!)
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