It won't be like this for long...

I'm sitting here at the kitchen table, drinking my coffee, listening to "Darius Rucker Radio" on Pandora, and one of my favorites comes on: "It Won't Be Like This for Long." If you've never heard this song, you should give it a listen. It's especially touching if you have a small daughter (or son) or are pregnant (and emotional) like me.

The song is so true, though. All those little things we dread or that drive us crazy about pregnancy and having a newborn: lack of sleep, not sleeping, not getting any sleep, and then a crying baby who won't let you sleep when she's born, etc - the truth is, we'll each look back at some point and realize how important those little moments were. I can guarantee that I won't miss getting up to pee every two hours during the night, but I sure am going to miss those little baby kicks, rolls, and punches. Someday, when I'm slightly less sleep deprived (like maybe for a glorious minute when she's a little older), I'll probably miss some of those quiet moments during a midnight feeding. Find me in just over two months and I'll tell you that I can't wait for her to sleep through the night, but I know my nostalgic self, I'll miss those moments just the same.

It won't be like this for long. It's meant as encouragement, but it also has something to it that reminds you to cherish all of those moments, no matter how sleep-deprived or exasperated you are. Adam tells me I'm doing a fine job cherishing every bit of this pregnancy, and I sure hope he's right. And deep down, I know it's silly to be thinking now about how much I'll miss those moments that I haven't even experienced yet, but isn't that the motherhood?

How do you cherish these moments before they're gone? Photos, videos, journaling? I'm curious to know what other moms do - although I'm more curious to see what I'll do in the coming months.

All at once, I can't wait to meet our little girl, but I'll gladly take a couple more months of her growing and moving inside me before she arrives. Ahh, motherhood.

Happy Friday!

I love Fridays, don't you? Everything is a little brighter on Friday when you work a typical 40 hour work week. Saturday and Sunday are on the immediate horizon, and somehow that fact always gives me the strength to get through the day without too much stress.

I'm expecting today to be a quiet day at work - we have fewer therapists working than all of the other days, and by the end of the day, it'll be just the front desk staff and one therapist, and the ever present hope that the last patient will cancel so that we can leave a few minutes early. The last couple of weeks have been nice as well, since we have a new employee at the desk who works my hours, I can do a bit of aide work between 5 and 6. What that really means is that I can move around a bit, clean the tables, take people off heat or ice or e-stim (electrical stimulation, if you've ever had physical therapy, you'll know what that is), and generally not be confined to a desk for a little while. It's just one of those little things I enjoy about Friday afternoons.

Another thing I'll be enjoying about this Friday is my next trip to the OB for a checkup! My appointment is at 9:30, and even though it's a typical checkup, I still get excited to hear the heartbeat on the doppler. It's just one of those moving, beautiful things I could listen to for hours on end. Most of the time, I feel the same way about feeling the baby's movements - I could just sit here for hours staring at my belly move. I say "most of the time" because when I was trying to fall asleep last night, she was kicking or punching (kind of felt like poking!) me in this one random spot, and it kind of tickled! It was cute, but I was tired.

It's a little strange to think that after today's visit, I start getting checked out every two weeks, and then near the end of September, every week! When did this happen? February seems like years ago now, but at the same time it feels like just yesterday I was sitting on our bedroom floor, holding a pregnancy test in my hand, and staring in disbelief at the two lines before me. Fast forward to today, and there is a little baby girl who weighs roughly 3 t0 3.5 pounds holding residence inside me! Say WHAT?!


Funny story about the day after I had that positive test, too. I already had plans to have lunch at PF Changs with Michelle (who, at the time, was 9 or 10 weeks along). After we had lunch, we opened our fortune cookies, and mine was quite telling! Actually, I don't remember off the top of my head what the fortune said (it's in my wallet, but I'm being lazy), but my "word of the day" was, indeed, "mother." Really now? I loved that.

I've got to wonder: if time is going by so fast NOW, before our little girl is even born, how much faster is it going to fly by once she's here?! I need to slow down and make sure I savor every moment, I guess, because it's going to be quite the whirlwind experience.

There are my thoughts for today, I hope you had a good Friday! I'm looking forward to this evening - Adam's sister Kate is coming over for game night, and that's always fun! Thankfully she doesn't mind a messy apartment...'cause that's how ours is right now. Who cleans on Fridays, anyway? ;-)

Pets and Parenthood

If you or someone you know have ever been pregnant, you know that the mere announcement of said pregnancy seems to always invited plenty of advice. Some of the advice is welcome, some of the advice is annoying, some is offensive, but usually it's well-meaning. I say "usually," because I don't see how sharing every last gory detail of a horrible, painful, 96-hour long labor can ever be meant well. But that's just my opinion.

The reason I've titled this blog "Pets and Parenthood" is because of one piece of advice I think every mom to be hears about 1,000 times during a pregnancy: "Sleep now, because you won't be sleeping when the baby comes!" I've heard this one a lot, most of the time from patients in the office where I work. Most of them will also tag on some bit about how I have no idea what's coming, and how nothing can ever prepare you for motherhood. I disagree. Don't get me wrong, I know that you're never truly "ready" for parenthood, and nothing can fully prepare you for the experience, but I've found one thing that can come pretty close: owning a pet.

People (usually non-pet owners) tend to roll their eyes when I say this, but in my experience, it is beyond true. Adam and I got married on June 30, 2007. On January 20, 2008, we decided to adopt a cat, Smokey. We'd only been married six months, and we hadn't lived together before getting married. As much as I thought getting a cat would be a field of daisies, it was a shock to my system. I'd only ever owned two betta fish, and a frog named Freddy who didn't live all that long. None of these pets required much maintenance, and they couldn't wake you up in the middle of the night. Smokey, however, was different. The first thing I noticed what how, all of a sudden, our life together wasn't our own anymore. It wasn't just Adam and me, me and Adam. There was this other little life wandering around our tiny apartment, knocking things over, and generally being very much a little boy of a cat. Most people had told us to try to keep the door to our bedroom shut at night to keep out the cat, but he would have none of it. He howled, meowed, and scratched at the door for hours on end until we opened it. For 2-3 months, I didn't know what to do with myself. He was the sweetest cat, but Adam and I couldn't sleep, we were both grumpy, and Smokey was probably a bit stressed out himself.

My breaking point was when Adam, bless him, said we could surrender him to the animal shelter if I thought I couldn't handle it. I remember the next day, sitting on our couch, looking at this sleeping kitty (currently annoying no one), and I burst into tears. I pictured his little gray face and his big yellow eyes watching us walk away, and I couldn't take it. We'd adopted this little boy to give him a better life, and that's what we were going to do. Surprisingly, once we stopped closing the door to our bedroom and let him come in, he calmed down a bit. He marched back and forth over our heads for a couple of nights, but after that, he'd just come in, survey the room, maybe sleep at the foot of our bed for a while, then leave. He was a different cat, just a cat with a rule against closed doors.

Much like parenting a newborn (perhaps not quite as intense), we experienced months of sleepless nights, and we had to learn to live in a way that supported this little guy - our life revolved around him now. His litter box needed cleaning, his belly needed feeding, he needed to be played with, etc. Honestly, the thought of being "up all night" with a newborn doesn't scare me so much now that I've been through it with a cat.

You may be rolling your eyes right now, especially if you've never owned a higher-maintenance animal, but I really do think that the best preparation a couple can have for parenting is to adopt a pet. Owning an animal forces you to put yourself and your own comfort aside as you acclimate a new little furball to your home. One of the things I've heard a lot from new parents was how it was very strange to bring a baby home from the hospital and find that suddenly, you're not alone. Something else, someone else, is there, breathing, making noise, eating food (albeit a different kind, from a different source), and generally disrupting the way of life to which you'd become accustomed. While I know I'm going to have some major adjustments (and perhaps a bit of mommy shock) to make when we bring our little girl home, I am so thankful that I've had the last 3 years of hanging with Smokey to prepare me for having another life form depend on me for everything.

Now, I know that nothing still compares to parenting a child, and I know I'll never be truly ready for what's to come in the next two months and beyond, but I think that the very best experience in my parenting preparation thus far has been the owning of Smokey The Cat.

Speaking of Smokey, he hopped up and lounged next to me for a while as I was typing. He's lounging in the sunshine now, but I think he knew I was talking about him. I'm sure I'll come back in a few months and write a blog about how parenting a newborn is NOTHING like owning a cat, but for right now, I'm going to let the comparison stand.

Here's to living well, living passionately, and being a cat person. :)

Living with Passion

And naming a blog. How do people do this whole blog-naming thing? I am 99.9% sure that many before me have made a decision to "live with passion" and thus name their fledgling blog, but I have no idea how the more original folks find that originality. I digress.

Let's back up. As you can see, I branched out into the blogging world several years ago. I wrote a few entries, got a new cat, and promptly left this world in the dust. Fast forward three years, I am sitting in our shiny, new, two-bedroom apartment, typing away in what will be our baby girl's bedroom. Yes, folks, Adam and I are having a baby. If you already know us, you already know this, since I'm about seven-and-a-half months along!

So here we are: my last post was in January of 2008. We had just adopted a cat named Smokey, and my world was subsequently changed by his silly-kitty antics. We went from being a quiet home of two newlyweds, to a home with a big, friendly, attention-loving feline with mega-meowing powers. Now that I'm mostly used to Smokey's Smokey-ness, we'll be adding another disturbance to the force. Perhaps a good topic for a blog post: How Adopting a Pet Prepares for Parenthood.

Let's get back on track: living with passion. I was trying to find an appropriate, but not too cheesy, title for the newer posts of this blog, and "living with passion" came to my mind. These days, I work forty hours a week at the front desk of a medical office, doing generally the same thing day after day, and I typically don't feel too passionately about anything (usually because I'm worn out). Think about it, though: isn't this one of the [many] things blogging is? Following the life of a regular person as s/he proceeds through daily life, hurtling toward the unknown. I may not be feeling too passionate lately, but why not make an effort to live more passionately, and then document it blog-style for the world to see (along with everyone else, doing the exact same thing).

So there's your title, folks. In the coming months, I hope to live more passionately as a woman, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, an employee, etc. You lucky duck, you'll get to witness that journey right in this here blog!

Are you ready?


(The ever-gray Smokey, three years later)