schemes o' mice an' men (with bonus baby photos at the end)

Maybe other people naturally slide into a two-kid routine. We have not. Ten weeks in, our schedules still require robust tactical planning. Every day, in the late afternoon, I send an email to myself and David with the childcare assignments for the next day, accounting for work responsibilities, school, childcare, specific kid needs (aka, is it hair weekend?), and other appointments. For example, yesterday, I was on baby F duty overnight, had time alone from 6:30-8:30 am, took over F for an hour, and then we went on a family walk at 9:30 (on which, it’s worth noting, we saw tiny baby foxes in their den). I will spare you the other twelve hours of the day. 

Without these hourly agendas, we found ourselves totally overwhelmed. Trying to talk over crying kids about who should do what and what needs to happen and when did so and so last eat and have they had their medicine etc etc etc. 

But also, about half of the time, I have to alter the proposed agenda radically. K was sick last week, and instead of passing kids back and forth between ourselves and our nanny, David and K retreated to the finished basement, and I hung out upstairs with F. I pared down my work responsibilities because I have limited energy and needed to funnel it all into keeping the upstairs household running. 

All this tedium to say, I have been thinking a lot about plans. Planning for F’s arrival was a logistical marathon — we relocated to North Carolina for months, instated multiple new health insurance plans, had our basement finished while we were gone, and drove from North Carolina to Canada with a new baby, his big sister, our nanny, my wheelchair trailer, etc etc etc. 

And, not surprisingly, many parts did not go according to plan. And most of the time that something went awry, it was because of a body. These bodies sure are fragile. We get sick, tired, and just, in general, things go wrong. Even when things go right, our bodies are just so needy. We need the bathroom, food, sleep, alone time, to move, etc etc etc. 

During these newborn days of constantly evolving plans, I’ve noticed that my thinking has started to shift. I have found myself just totally in awe that anything ever goes the way we want it to. We seriously decided we wanted to have a baby via surrogacy and then DID SO?! We were like, ok we want this egg and this sperm to come together and make a zygote and then an embryo and then a fetus and THAT HAPPENED. And then another body ejected that baby from her body. And now that person is back to her regularly scheduled life and we are a family of four all because we thought two kids “made sense for us.”

When K gets out the door to school, and the school is open, with teachers there, and other students too, and the traffic lights work, and our instacart shopper brings our groceries, I’m a little shocked. So many things going right!

Where am I going with this? I guess just that it’s been useful for me to shift from a “why is life always so complicated” perspective to one of, “Wow, I can’t believe that sometimes we plan a trip and then go on a trip.” I find myself looking at hiccups (like, when K wakes up sick or F spits up on the very last clean outfit or my arm has shooting nerve pain or our nanny leaves early with a migraine or the dogs barf on the new rug) with a bit more amusement. Because of course that stuff happened. We are completely deluded if we think we can shoehorn these messy bodies into an orderly life. 

And so, when we arrived home to Canada, after an 18 hour drive complete with MANY hours of traffic and all sorts of body fluid related complications, my primary feeling managed to be gratitude. 

We made it. We drove to another country, had a baby, and drove home, all in one piece. 

What are the odds?