Just for kicks

I recall discussions with family and friends about having kids, getting prepared to have kids, when’s the best time to have kids, all sorts of ‘what if’ types of talks. And what I remember from those discussions is one main underlying point; you can never be fully prepared. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of steps that we feel are appropriate to take prior to making such a big commitment, but the truth is, even after you have all those loose ends all tied up, you’re still not totally prepared.

It occurred to me yesterday, as in, really started to resonate, that we will now be responsible for another human being. Fully responsible…for the rest of our lives…there’s no turning back. We don’t get to feed it buckets of sugar and send it back home with its parents after a weekend at Chuck E Cheeses. We cant send it outside when we’re tired of hearing it whine like we do the pets. Well…we could, but that’s probably not a wise choice until its at least 5 years old… What Im getting at is although we waited until we were “ready” to start a family, and although we knew what we were getting into, nothing could really prepare us for the reality of it when it finally hits home.

Same goes for the whole pregnancy experience. Every day I look at my body, part in awe and part…what the heck happened there?! You just cant quite prepare yourself for what you don’t know is physically possible of happening. Prior to being pregnant, I didn’t know that you could feel the baby move at such an early stage. I always assumed it didn’t happen until later, when the baby was much more developed. At 18 weeks people are just now starting to notice that Im pregnant and yet, I felt its first kicks! Now that I know what it is, I anxiously wait for the little flutter that only I can feel at this point. All of the reading about feeling the baby move, all the ways that people have described it, didn’t really prepare me for what I was about to feel. The feeling of joy!