Becoming A New Mommy For 2nd Time

Over this past week I have really been thinking about a lot, particularly about this new baby that is on the way. My husband and I have happily reached this point where our son sleeps soundly throughout the night; he eats well and sort of communicates with us. Therefore, we often find ourselves asking the question “Do we really want to do this again?” The biggest trigger for this line of thinking occurred on a Sunday night review of pictures we had taken following our son’s birth. There were two pictures in particular that really stood out for us.
One is a picture of my husband sprawled across the bed with bottles, clothes and other random paraphernalia in the background.

He was dead to the world and exhaustion was the message sent loud and clear by this image. That picture adequately describes months 1-3 with ONE baby.

The other picture was a picture of me, sitting on the couch.

Baby "1" , Mom "0"

This picture actually brought tears to my eyes. The details of this picture is what is most important and they include; a newborn baby in a carrier off to right of the sofa, myself in the center with a breast pump in place, two pillows covering my upper body and providing support. I am slumped forward over the pillows with my arms reaching towards the floor and my head and hair hanging forward; sound asleep to the soothing hum of the breast pump. The picture says it all. I can almost laugh at the comedic nature of the picture but the laughter is replaced by tears because I realize that this exact scene is not too far away, only this will be part II, the extended unedited version with no scenes omitted! Am I really ready for feedings every two hours, more extreme sleep deprivation and non-stop crying (because when one baby isn’t crying, the other one will probably chime in)? I am not so sure. Not to mention that I will now be the only woman in a household full of men! (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that we found out we are having another boy) Toilet seats will no longer rest in the down position and research shows that as the number of men increase in a household, the aim of these men while using the toilet gets worse. I will be surrounded by boxers and burping for the next 20 years. God help me!

We celebrated our third wedding anniversary this past Wednesday and decided to bring in the new year of wedded bliss in Galveston, Texas with a romantic get-away at the beach (our real reasoning had a lot to do with how long our son can sit still in a car seat-but my first explanation sounds better). We have a long history of celebrating Labor Day weekend on different exotic beaches. This tradition began in 2001 when we first met. Our travels have included the Cayman Islands, Kauai Hawaii, Destin Florida, Puerto Rico, St Thomas, Newport Rhode Island, Cozumel and Miami Florida to mention a few. Well, I must say, although I had a great time with the 2 men in my life and wouldn’t trade it for anything else; the experience has definitely changed drastically. We drove by the beach multiple times, but never stepped foot on the sand (however, we did enjoy the hotel pool on the morning that we were leaving at about 7 am and that has to account for something). We had lunch at a nice Deli where our son had his first kiddie meal and we rounded out the day with a ferry ride to the Bolivar peninsula where we actually saw dolphins. We followed up the evening with a nice romantic dinner at Landry’s. This meal was full of excitement beginning with the magic trick where my son proceeded to pull the table cloth off the table (spilling my drink), I received a nice arm full of spit-out baby food (prunes and apples to be exact) and I topped it off by feeding most of my food to my son-only managing to get about 2-3 bites in of food for myself. We topped the evening off by watching a riveting episode of “The Backyardigans” at the hotel while drinking non-alcoholic sparkling pomegranate juice and managed to all fall asleep by 930 pm. Romance at its finest!

So, I must repeat to myself and really ponder this question-Do we really want to do this again?
Of course we do!