Week 18 – Bonus Baby

I know that isn't a very creative title – especially compared to my titles for pregnancy posts with Joey.  I'm just happy to be posting at all.  It looks like for the forseeable future my blogs are going to be blah and boring LOOKING.  Not because of my diminished capacity as a blog post author but because I can't get online to manage my blog and make it look pretty.  So if you can get past the look of each post hopefully you'll still find the content somewhat entertaining.

I guess in a way writing about pregnancy is really just writing about what's happening to me during this time period…and trying to tie it in to the pregnancy somehow.  Lately it's felt like there is just so much going on and it's hard to keep track of everything, enjoy life and your children's lives the way you're supposed to AND capture it in writing.  I really love reading back in my blog and reminiscing about things that happened just six months ago.  Most of the milestones we hit then I barely remember now.  That's why it's important to me to write about them so that I can go back and re-live it from time to time.  And so that when my kids are adults they can look at this and say "Mom wrote more about being pregnant with Joey than she did about Jimmy or Bonus Baby.  He must be her favorite".  When really truly Jimmy is my favorite.  Not really.  *for real kids, I don't have a favorite.  Hush!*

Being pregnant with no kids at home is a unique experience, being pregnant with one kid at home is unique and being pregnant with a toddler AND a baby at home is by far the most unique experience of all.  Jimmy is making huge, gigantic strides in his development and all of it is uncharted territory for the both of us. I want to be present and in the moment and capture all of it.  Joey is still such a baby and is starting to hit his own milestones and while I've seen these milestones before he's hitting them in his own time and his own little Joey way and I want to soak that in too.  And in the midst of it all I'm pregnant with an unexpected blessing and I want to capture these moments too.    

I've found it hard to balance it out.  I'm exhausted a lot of times and I feel like I'm failing to really acknowledge and even comprehend what I'm seeing Jimmy and Joey do and learn much less keep the blog of their shenanigans updated.  Blogging about all of this at home feels like I'm stealing even more time away from them…as if I could anyway since we don't bother to have internet at home in this age of smart phones.  So I'd save up my stories and pictures and write about them at work when I had some free time.  Now I can't even do that….for several reasons.  None of which are even good reasons in my estimation.

Finding a consistent balance would be nice but toddlers/babies/pregnancy are the antithesis of consistent in my experience.  Finding a balance would be nice, maintaining it is a joke.  I fall off that tightrope 12 times a day and then just take a nap. 

So for the tie in.  I have a lot on my plate and I can't and don't want to scrape any of it off.  This baby is getting bigger and stronger slowly but surely. S/He's already having such a different start from Jimmy and Joey.  Different pregnancy, different birth place, I have acne... Makes me wonder how different S/He'll be in person.  But if I have to pick and choose the moments I memorialize in the next 4.5 months I think I'll go with last 4 months of Joey's babyhood – learning to use his hands better, crawling, walking hopefully, turning 1!  Or with how fast Jimmy is learning things, how smart he is, how sweet yet onery he is.  The rest will have to be remembered with my, almost non-existent at this point, brain cells.