Deciding to have children
I have never been a baby person. It’s fairly well known among family and friends that I “don’t like babies,” as I mentioned in our announcement post. I’ll never be the one offering to hold your baby, and I don’t even think all babies are that cute. I even had a pact with a dear (baby loving) friend in high school that she would take any of my future babies from ages 0-2 and I would take hers from 14-16. Rather than a cold, cold heart, I think this stems from a general uncomfortableness with the littlest among us, since I was never much around babies growing up. I did babysit, but only for kids out of diapers! Babies just seemed very fragile, and they can’t use words to tell you what they need (and I like words). Perhaps because of this, even coming up on our third anniversary, John and I were never on the receiving end of the stereotypical pressure to have kids. I’m sure I probably would have hated it if we had been, but at some point, I actually started to get paranoid – do people think we aren’t fit to be parents?? This obvious (to me) conversational hole was especially ironic, because that very topic was in almost constant rotation between the two of us and our closest friends. 18 weeks! Thinking back, we began having serious conversations about the future of our family at the beginning of 2014. This was my starting point: I can’t really vocalize why, and I’m certainly not convinced that I’m going to love the baby stage, but when I picture my life, there are treasured children in it. For me, that was enough to move forward. I also knew I wanted to be a younger mom, having my first