Blowin' My Mind

I was talking with some friends the other day about when we would all be TTC (trying to conceive...remember that one from the good ol' early days of this blog?) again. I blithely responded that our original plan was to stop preventing (if pull-and-pray can actually be called "prevention") when baby girl is nine months old, and then start actively trying again--paying attention to all the fertile signs, etc--when she turns one. It was the same answer I've given a thousand times, the same timing that TH and I have talked about for years.

And then I started doing math.

She turns seven months old this week. Seven. As in, only two away from nine.

Holy hell.

You see, before when I gave that answer, baby girl turning nine months old seemed so. far. away. It was easy to say that we'd be ready to jump back into the game at that point because, well, we weren't at that point.

But now, now we're two short months away from being at that point. Two months. Two months is NOTHING. Consider my mind blown.

I don't think I'm ready. Don't think I'm ready to stop thinking about the here and now and start thinking about the future. Don't think I'm ready to stop giving 100% to baby girl and start having a portion of my mental capacity taken up with a future . . . and then gestating . . . sibling. Don't think I'm ready to return to the world of restricted diets and exhaustion and nausea and clothes that don't fit and swelling and sleeplessness and let's-not-forget-peeing-every-twenty-minutes. And this coming from a woman who LOVED being pregnant. Loved it. Every second of it. Couldn't wait to do it all again . . .

Except it turns out I can wait.

Maybe I'll change my mind. Maybe we'll hit the 9-month mark and I will wake up that morning and be suddenly ready, ready for the excitement, ready for the anticipation, ready to make our happy little family of three a happy not-so-little family of four.

But here, now, today . . . I'm not ready. I'm loving, LOVING our lives right now with baby girl. And I'm just not quite ready to do it all over again.