Another Trip Around The Sun

Last week was my birthday – O Holy Night, I made it to 27! Trust me when I tell you that nobody is more surprised than I am. Seriously. I thought life ended at 23. And by “ended” I mean I thought I’d stop caring because I was too close to 30 be relevant… because 30 was the kiss of cultural death in my mind. But low and behold, after 23 came 24, which progressed a few years later into 27, which is dangerously close to 30. And the closer I get, the more relevant I seem to find 30-somethings. Go figure. I mean really, who knew that people in their 30′s could still have lives to lead? That they weren’t automatically lumped into slavish existences of work/eat/sleep/family, repeat with no dreams or plans or excitement? I’m going to assume that it’s a cultural phenomenon and that it wasn’t just the blissful arrogance of my early 20′s that made the 30 and up crowd boring, listless creatures of horribly repetitive habits.

I will say this though: having plans and dreams and a bucket list at (almost) 30 is a lot different than the plans and dreams and bucket list of a closer-to-20 year old. I jumped on the having-kids-bandwagon a lot earlier than most of my contemporaries. Robert and I had been married for about 20 minutes before I got pregnant with Judah. But having kids was

What do you mean I won't look like Victoria Beckham after I have my baby?

“the thing” I wanted. Some people want to travel to exotic locations, jump out of airplanes, have a career where they make more than $12 an hour before they even think of having kids. But not me. I wanted to get to the “hot mom pushing her expensively clad baby around in a stroller that could double as a life-raft in the event of flood” stage as fast as possible. Unfortunately, I had no idea that it was actually going to be the “exhausted and frumpy mom pushing her baby covered in more food and puke than clothing in her hand-me-down stroller that had all 4 wheels as an upgrade” stage. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t change it. Not for the world, or even for a state of the art stroller. But there were days, and still are days, when I look at some of my friends that have yet to start their families and I envy their ability to eat at restaurants other than McDonalds, or their ability to still form complete sentences when they speak to other adults, or the fact that they still speak to (instead of shout at over the screaming children) other adults. But I do take solace in the fact that at 27, I’ve been able to get rid of all of my maternity clothes, and that I’ll never buy diapers smaller than a size 5 ever again. I look at ladies I know that are just getting started thinking about maybe starting a family one day, and you couldn’t pay me enough to start over. Besides, I can now scratch having two outrageously adorable children off my bucket list. Done and done. The question now is, what next?

To answer this question, I had to do a bit of comparing what my bucket list used to look like vs. what it looks like now:

You get the general idea of things. Doing the “having kids thing” before I got to the rest of the list at best, put temporary hold on some of those other things. But to be fair, there are plenty

My accommodations had I visited Rome in my 20's

of benefits of having kids early. The big one is obviously that my kids will be able to babysit for all of my friends that are waiting until they are in their 30′s to have kids. How that benefits me, I don’t really know. But I feel like it’s probably an upside. And, assuming that there’s no huge catastrophe and that Robert and I manage to not be complete and total idiots, we’ll actually have the money to be able to do all of the things we wanted to do in our 20′s

My accommodations when I visit Rome in my 40's... right, Robert?

when we have the time to do them in our 40′s. I’ll probably be able to appreciate my trip to Rome more when I’m in my 40′s and can afford to stay in a hotel rather than in my 20′s and sleeping in a tent.

In all seriousness though, at the age of 27, I’m starting to look at my “life’s ambitions” list and I feel like I’m just now able to determine what’s actually worth pursuing. As great of a story it probably would’ve made to beat the trash out of some stranger in a drunken brawl at my favorite Irish pub, it would’ve been tough to look at my kids and teach them about being responsible. And although I still sometimes want to do investigative journalism covering the social injustices in the world, I wouldn’t be able to say cuss words and draw pictures of Jabba The Hutt in a pink bathing suit if I worked for a highly respected news agency. And that, my friends, would’ve been a tremendous loss to the blogging world, am I right?