We Three Peas

As Lily has passed her six month mark and Jeff and I have both celebrated our 39th and 36th birthdays, respectively, I can’t help but consider the idea of another baby. People have assured me that I have time, maybe not all the time in the world, but certainly enough time where this decision doesn’t have to be made today, this instant, right now. But the thing is, with Lily here, time has become slippery. Baby time is different than normal time. Hours stretch out before you, endlessly (at three in the morning when the baby won’t sleep, at noon the next day when you’re on your fifth cup of coffee), and then, suddenly, you look up and you have a great big six month old baby and you have no idea how it all happened but you have over 1,000 photos to document it, so you must have been there for all of it. And this notion of time being this tricky thing has me worried that while this decision doesn’t have to be made today, it does need to be made sooner than I might imagine.

And this is where I’m stuck, because the truth of the matter is that I adore our little family right now. Lily is a happy, bright, funny baby who has carved out a perfect little space for herself in our home, in our hearts, in our lives. Things feel balanced. I feel like, even with a full time job and a baby, I still have a little time to myself here and there. I think Jeff feels the same way. I worry that another baby will throw off this balance, that what little time we have to allow ourselves to breathe will disappear, that I’ll lose myself in the minutia and be unable to see the big picture. I’m hoping that I’m only feeling this way because I’m CURRENTLY lost in the minutia of caring for a small baby, that this fear will ease as Lily gets a little older and I get more confident in being a parent, but the fact that we waited until our mid/late thirties to have children has us on a different time schedule than if we had started earlier.

I’ll admit that as Lily gets older and cuter and more fun by the day, I do wonder what the next one would be like. But, as this decision really can be put off for a little while, I’ve decided to embrace the summer and enjoy this special time with my very merry little threesome of a family. Maybe a little mindfulness will also serve to slow things down a bit, because I can’t help but feel that I’ve been thrown into warp speed, and who would want to miss all this?