Now that I have a child, every time I see an ad for a restaurant I never made it to, or an event that sounds like fun (but I know I wouldn’t have gone to), I think that if I had just known what life would be like post-baby, I would have been a little more carpe diem.<\/p>\n
That’s not to say that I live in a fortress of solitude.I do go out without a baby strapped to me, and I have a great support group who babysit (also paid babysitters, which are fine but OH MY GOD $15 an hour is so much more than I made as a babysitter) so I can do things like go out for dinner (like we did last week for a very belated birthday) or kayaking.<\/p>\n
Just now, as I quietly opened a beer in the kitchen (80’s room is next door), I had a realization. I was pondering why I hadn’t been more adventurous in going out to events pre-baby. The realization is that the impending baby feeling didn’t hit us until I was well into pregnancy. I’m sure this serves an important procreative purpose, since thinking about diapers and colic too much would probably put usall off having a babies everl.<\/p>\n
The downside is that I only realize in retrospect how much more fun I could have been having. If you would have asked me two years ago if I wanted to go across the city on a school night to see an author speak at a bookshop, I would have probably passed. Now, I’d say “OH MY GOD YES, AND ARE YOU WILLING TO BABYSIT TOO?”, because getting a break from family life is a Real Big Treat now.<\/p>\n
So, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone<\/em>, to quote Joni Mitchell* in the original, ungrammatically correct line from “Big Yellow Taxi”. You don’t want to scare yourself out of having a family, so don’t think too hard about this (unless you have children, in which case, I’d really like to hear your thoughts en-comment).<\/p>\n If I could turn back time**, I’d let not-yet-mama Sonya know that taking weekend trips outta town, or going to skillshares are easy and a treat, that they will be missed in the future.<\/p>\n For now, I do get to say that I THOROUGHLY enjoy any outing I get, and I’m sure there are aspects about life right now that I’ll wish I could freeze. Hmm. Like, perhaps, the fact that my child has never yet intentionally defied me.<\/p>\n *It’s been said more than once that Mitchell’s my celebrity doppelganger. Now that I have a child, every time I see an ad for a restaurant I never made it to, or an event that sounds like fun (but I know I wouldn’t have gone to), I think that if I had just known what life would be like post-baby, I would have been a little […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[288,206,289],"class_list":["post-1368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-after-school-special","tag-mamatime","tag-parenting","tag-staying-sane"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1368"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1371,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368\/revisions\/1371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n**I’m not going to bother quoting Cher, since it’s a lot less poignant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"