We'll Think About It

The afternoon of our wedding reception is a blur.  I don't know if I blame the champagne or the stress and excitement of watching a wedding we'd spent months planning flash by in what seemed like minutes!  One thing I do remember was when my brand new husband came to me toward the end of the evening and asked me if I wanted to adopt a baby!  I thought it was a strange time to talk about adoption, but I listened to his story.

During the mother/son dance, his mom (who has a tendency to exaggerate) told him that one of their family members was pregnant and wasn't able to care for the baby.  She said she had already told her that Chris and I wanted to adopt.  What?!?  While Chris and I had discussed our desire to adopt, we weren't planning on pursuing it for several years.  Chris wanted to finish his degree and save some money and we wanted to spend some time as newlyweds before we started talking about babies!  He told me that his mom was probably exaggerating but he told her we would think about it.  We didn't think it was something that we needed to discuss any further.  The rest of our wedding day flew by and early the next morning, we were off to Jamaica!

For the week of our honeymoon, we relaxed.  We swam, we ate too much, we drank, we danced, and had an amazing time.  But we also had several serious conversations.  Neither of us could stop thinking about what his mom had told him.  We wondered if what she had said was true.  We discussed what we would do if this scenario really did play out.  Would we take the baby?  Were we ready?  We were newlyweds.  We had only been married a few days and by the time the baby was born we would only have been married a couple months.  We finally decided that we needed to enjoy the rest of our honeymoon and talk about it when we got home.

 

After the honeymoon, we returned to real life.  We went back to work and resumed our daily routine as newlyweds.  Occasionally, the subject of this potential adoption would come up and we would talk for a while.  After a month, when we still hadn't heard anything from this family member, the conversations slowly came to an end.  We assumed that this was just another misunderstanding or exaggeration on his mom's part.

For the next month, I came down with a serious case of baby fever!  It seemed like everyone I saw, scanned, and talked to was pregnant!  I had never really been one of those girls who dreamed about marriage and babies, but my husband had changed my mind about the marriage part and I think the baby we had spent a month talking about had changed my mind about the baby part too.  I began to beg Chris to have a baby.  Every day I would bring it up in some way or another.  Whether it was a joke, a comment in passing, or a serious conversation, I was constantly talking about babies.  Finally, when Chris had had enough, he confronted me and told me that there was no way we were ready for a baby.  We needed more savings, we needed to do some things to our house, we needed a new car, he needed to finish school and find a new job, I needed to talk to my doctor and see how my Crohn's disease would be affected by pregnancy and he needed to talk to his to see if his pituitary issue could be hereditary.  So many practical things that he was thinking about and all I was thinking about was bows and nurseries.  I decided that he was probably right and eventually dropped the subject. 

I think I went a whole week without talking about babies before Tuesday, January 25.