People warn you about all the ways your life will change when you bring a baby home from the hospital.  They forecast sleepless nights, missing out on happy hour and having spit up on your suit jacket.  They joke about toddlers coming into your room because they’re scared at 4AM and pacing the floor when your teenager is five minutes past curfew. What they don’t tell you is that all of a sudden your television habits will change as well. 

“Oh, Krista,” you’re thinking.  “Are you watching Mickey Mouse Club already?”  Well, yes.  But that’s not the point.  I’m talking about the entertainment I used to watch – crime and drama during prime time, daytime soap operas, news and suspense movies.  All of these former mindless escapes from reality are now a glimpse into someone else’s reality.  Instead of being situations that would never happen to me, they become something else to fear. 

Whether it’s a toddler being taken from her parents, a father in the middle of an international custody battle, a gunman on a yacht shooting into a crowd of elite snobs or an out of control subway car, I can’t stop thinking “what if that was happening to my child, or my husband, or me.” And then my throat gets tight, the hair on the back of my neck raises and I get up to make sure all of our doors are locked, keeping the imaginary bad guys out and my family safe and sound. 

I asked Craig the other night after a particularly disturbing episode of Criminal Minds how he could watch those kinds of TV shows.  He chuckled and said that he’s a grown up who is able to separate what’s real and what’s not.  I guess when I gave birth I lost my ability to distinguish reality from something written by creative types with messed up imaginations and too much internet access.  So while he is enjoying a suspenseful plot line I’m planning my course of action for the next time I’m at a swanky party on a yacht that gets hijacked by drug dealers with a bug up their ass.  What? It could happen. 

And in the meantime I’ve gained a further appreciation for sit-coms, HGTV and the Disney Channel.

Confession…  I might like the baby pears more than she does.

Oh, come on.  Admit it.  You taste test your kid’s food too.

…this one-month birthday celebration ( letter coming later today, I hope) to bring you this confession…

Sometimes, when I’m taking a bath with Baby Girl on the floor, securely belted into the bouncy seat and she starts to get fussy… I take a few extra moments rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, keeping my ears under water to muffle the sound.

I’m going to Mommy Hell.

I’m a lists person…. I like to make to-do lists. They keep me organized, they keep me focused and most important I feel like I’ve accomplished something when I get to cross something off. However the current looming list of things that need to be accomplished before the baby arrives has me feeling a bit… um…. choked. Actually it’s the same feeling I get at work when there is SO much to do that I just don’t know where to start.

So, let’s look at the list, shall we?

- Pick up baby furniture
- Set up the nursery – including putting together the crib
- Repaint the nursery
- Pick out a new color of paint for the nursery (clearly this list is in no particular order)
- Buy a boat load of stuff – car seats, stroller, bottles, clothes, blankets, toys, teething rings, diapers….
- Buy a new car (my lease is up in July)
- Buy Craig a new car (soft-top, two-door Jeep Wranglers are not exactly baby friendly)
- Make a final breast feeding vs. bottle feeding decision
- Finish up all the ‘house’ projects that are still unfinished – including but not limited to the basement, the sidewalks, the pool, the patio, the driveway.
- Figure out a plan of action for my maternity leave – much more on this subject later, but I need to figure out how to not be at work for 6 weeks and yet not be forgotten or left out of important meetings and decisions.
- Figure out how to balance the working mom thing

So, maybe the list isn’t that overwhelming and in theory, I do still have four months. But in reality, I have until the beginning of August before I lose my husband to football season. Which means that other than the work stuff, most of that jazz has to be done in the next 2 months.

BUT there’s so much of it that I can’t do yet. I can’t do anything with the furniture until it comes in. I don’t want to buy a lot of stuff until I see what we get at a baby shower. The house project stuff is all underway but the contractors move about as fast as grass grows. I need to meet with my boss to talk about maternity leave but I refuse to do that until after he rewrites my job description and reanalyzes my salary. So, maybe it’s time to break out the Sherwin Williams color wheel again…

Working at the restaurant Saturday night (yes, Valentine’s Day – curtains for the dining room trump dinner with my husband!) I was waiting on two of my favorite customers… they are just really sweet, nice, people who first came in the day after Craig proposed and since then if I’m working, I wait on them. We just really click… Anyway, when the husband asked if I was still married, I asked if they could keep a secret and told them about the baby. They were super excited for us and then left me a FAT tip with a congratulations note on the back of their receipt!
This goes down as the first time that I shamelessly used my child to get money. Sadly, it won’t be the last!!