A Moment of Peace

...Which I ruin, of course, with all this thinking.

A day of constant setbacks and interruptions has ultimately led me to where I am now: in my bed at 5:06pm next to a (finally) sleeping toddler and feeling the strong kicks and somersaults of a very awake bump-baby. I have a load of dishes to do, and clean laundry covers the living room furniture, but I'm not jumping up to go anywhere just yet.

I'll get up soon and be mamamaid (which is kinda like a mermaid but not nearly as gorgeous or glamorous or graceful), but I was taken out of my zone by a sudden moment of peacefulness. Peace is rare these days. (Or is it? I don't know. I haven't had much time to stop and think about it.) I don't want to miss a valuable moment, even if it risks me falling asleep and accomplishing nothing. (Because I'm so tired, guys. I think prego-bod is starting to get to me. My brain is all crazy, my body hurts, my abs are borderline useless now. I need bath bombs and delicious food and to sleep in just once.)

1000 parentheses later & I eventually get back to my point. (Which was...?)

Those who know her best would argue that there is no such thing as peace when Maya is around, and I wouldn't disagree. But baby boy is around, too. Maya is a little too young to know he's here, but he still has his own energy, already. I've started to realize that calm isn't the absence of energy, it's a force all its own.

...Thank God, amirite? Between Maya and me, we have an imbalance in our house. Justin and I balance each other out; Maya tipped the scales. OBVIOUSLY the logical thing to do is bring in another kid and pray to the Good Lord that he's like Justin. So far, observation of the guests at Hotel Reghan would indicate that he is nothing like Maya at all. She explored every inch of this uterus and slept only when absolutely necessary. He tends to chill at the top and stretches and plays, eh, whenever he feels like it. I just knew Maya was gonna be an energetic ball of sunshine. Not to get all hippie on you, but I'm feeling more of a moon vibe from this guy.

Regardless, he'll be his own person just as Maya is her own. I'll do the mom thing like I'm supposed to. I'll hold up my end of the deal and feed him and love him and stuff. However, this time around, I have a few demands in return. I didn't make any demands with Maya at all prior to her birth, and that seems to have been a huge mistake. I may have been naïve then, but I'm no dummy now. Baby #2 is unfortunate in that way, but he actually has it better, I'd say. He restores a balance in energy in our house, and I provide him with a higher level of expertise in caring for babies. Easy peasy.

At the very least, I just need him to distract her. I'm tired of having to undo Maya's rearrangement of the fridge every time I do the dishes, and I already really hate doing the dishes.

But I'll settle for a moment like this every now and then, when it's just me, my two babies, and a little bit of peace.

I Thought Motherhood Was My Calling

This article was originally posted in April 2016 on TheBLT, where I'm a guest columnist.

I didn't know what motherhood would be like before I became a mom. I had ideas, sure. I had dreams and images, which were enough to make me want to have babies. (That, and, you know... biology.) You hear so many things about being a parent before becoming one. For the most part, everything I heard was true for me. I truly felt like I'd never sleep more than three hours at a time for the rest of my life. At times, I felt much more like a milk machine than a mom. My life is completely different from the way it was before I brought home a baby. The list of things I heard about parenthood that are true only gets longer as time goes on.

And yet, at one point, I was the chick with only pets for kids, hearing these things and believing them. I knew they made sense, and, if so many people say all these same things, there must be truth to them. I just don't know how to explain it now, when a statement can be true and still have basically no meaning until I experienced it. Knowing isn't really knowing when I had been a mom for all of three weeks and I'm thinking, "I'm just a milk machine," like I'm hearing it for the first time.

I say all that to say this: I knew lots about being a mom before becoming a mom, but I was still wrong. About all kinds of stuff. Even when I was right.

"The problem about being right about the fact that I knew I was made to be a mother is that I was subconsciously believing that motherhood is my calling.

It is not."

I knew that motherhood would be this amazing experience, and that I would never feel like I was fully myself until I added "mom" to my resumé. And I knew that life goes on after having kids. I'm still me and still a person with needs and desires. Even if being a mom was all I needed in life, I'd still eventually end up with an empty nest... and I'd fill my days with something other than diapers and feeding kids and teaching words.

"Only after becoming a mother did I realize that this isn't it. This isn't my thing. I can be a good or even great mom, and it can be one of the most fulfilling parts of my life; but that's not the same as having a driving passion to provide something good to people, even if I don't really know what that is yet."

I realized shortly after that I was so lost before I had a baby. I have a lot more confidence now, even if I don't know what my "calling" is, I am not lost. In fact, I've never been so close to where I want to be. It's just that these babies keep needing things and it's easy to forget that everything is a phase. It's easy to forget that I can feel like I have so many distractions AND still be exactly where I need to be right now, doing what I need to be doing. I mean, kids grow up. They don't live with you forever, right?

...RIGHT?!

Read the article in its entirety here.

20 Weeks

I started drinking coffee again. I've always like the taste, but you never would've found me drinking it near-black a few years ago. I say "near black" because, well, I guess it's technically just as black as "black", but I add sugar. I used to add a little milk, but last week I kinda went milk crazy (unrelated to coffee) and maxed out the milk budget. Justin is one of those people who's more likely to be a psychopath since he drinks his coffee true black, so we don't have creamer of any kind. So, you could say what I've been drinking is like strong, dark tea. Sweet tea. Not as good as cold, sweet, actual tea, but that's not the point.

I'm drinking coffee again because I need it. Well, what I actually need is a minimum of 12 solid hours of sleep every night, but LOL, amirite? It's not just that I need coffee; obviously, I crave it. You know what this baby in me wants? Near-black coffee, fat rare steak, sharp cheddar, and chocolate.

...which means it's OBVIOUSLY a boy.

For real! A real, living, ultrasound-confirmed boy.

So far, both of my pregnancies have been healthy and generally uneventful (which is great). In nearly every other way, my current could not be more different from my previous. With Maya, I think I had exactly one week of nausea and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I threw up the entire 40 weeks. This time, almost the entire first half was all-day sickness. I don't generally suffer from allergies, but with Maya, allergy season had me feeling dead and wishing I actually was. With this baby, nothin'.

There have been some other differences that are probably normal for second vs. first. I felt baby boy moving much sooner than I felt Maya, and this pregnancy has gone by significantly faster than hers. Duh. When I was pregnant with her, I didn't have a crazy kid running around, dancing, climbing, breaking all my stuff. I still wonder what I did before I had kids. There was so much time for activities! Why don't I have my own business? Why haven't I traveled the world already? Why am I not a plastic surgeon or something? I remember being busy... with stuff? I worked. I... showered regularly?

I've decided that parenting is for Type A people. We should just leave the procreating to the responsible adults who can handle it.

On that note, here's a sonogram of the baby I'm about to have! ...which is not at all contradictory to my previous statement. I refuse to admit that it is, and you can't make me.

I'm officially halfway through this pregnancy, and I've only started to panic a tiny bit. On the one hand, I know having two kids is totally possible and people do it all the time. On the other hand, how does anyone have two kids at once?! I'll figure it out, probably. Plus, I'm totally used to being awake at night now. It's like my brain learned which lights to keep on up there. You gain a new state - awake, asleep, and now, zombie. "Mombie", if you will. I'd say it's different than your traditional zombie in that you don't want brains, but that would be a lie. I need brains more than ever. There's that saying about how having kids is like letting pieces of your heart go walking around outside your body. Well, that's not all. They take some of your brain, too.

I'll leave it to more experienced moms to tell you if you ever get any of it back.

How My Daughter is Like Me & Not Like Me

This article was originally posted in November 2015 on TheBLT, where I'm a guest columnist.

Last fall, shortly after Maya's first birthday, I wrote an article about the ways she is similar to me but still very much her own person.

"She's like Stitch," my sister says, referring to the rambunctious cartoon alien who causes much chaos with little effort. (Stitch has four arms but Maya only needs two.) She is quite the whirlwind and always has been. She was the most active baby ever in utero, and I remember the days when she was still very new and would kick her legs all around as if it were impossible for her to stop moving. I would spend so much time just looking at her, staring at her face, memorizing it. It's a good thing, too, because getting a good look these days is hard with all the moving, talking, screaming, laughing, and running."

We initially thought she was leaning more like Justin in personality. While she is very much like him, she's not a perfect fit for either of us. Obviously, since she isn't either of us - she's both. A mixture of us and the ones before us, she is not a copy of anyone else.

Maybe I'll end up with a daughter who's just like me, but better. Better, obviously, because isn't that what kids are for? We make brand new versions of ourselves, a Reghan 2.0, so we can hopefully be saved in their perfection. We give up our whole selves so they can be the best they can be. 

I'm bringing up this post again because it is still so true. Sometimes, the similarities between Maya and me or Justin (or a grandparent) are uncanny. But, with every day that passes, it gets harder and harder to see others in her because she is so much like... well, herself. Every parent wants their kids to be better than we are; not to share our struggles, but to give them tools to help others struggle less.

Read the article in its entirety here.

Hey there.

I'M BACK!

This would be a lot better if I had announced my leaving. I mean, I didn't leave... I just went off the blogging grid for a while. Accidentally.

I won't go too deep into anything, but in the interest of full disclosure, life and depression got to happening. As it turns out, being pregnant and not fully over postpartum depression from the last baby is not the best mix. (Does a person ever get "cured" from depression of any kind? I don't think so.) Add in regular life stress and you've got a recipe for an absent blogger.

Currently, Maya is a year and a half old (19 months) and the little nugget is nearly halfway done cooking (19 weeks). All-day nausea is gone now and I think I really should be getting about 14 hours of sleep per night. I'm trying to make myself more ambitious because it hit me yesterday that I'm halfway to having two - TWO!!! - kids under my care. Maya is in the process of transitioning to her own bed, to my disappointment, but they've gotta grow up eventually, right? She's also in the stage of pre-potty training, which basically just means she's much more aware of what is going on, and we're familiarizing her with the potty. I doubt she'll be out of diapers when the baby is born, but that's okay, developmentally. I'm not really in the business of rushing things, am I?

Obviously, this pregnancy has flown by. Maya is what they would call a spirited child, which I'm sure I'll dive into later on here, and that has kept me quite... distracted? Busy? On the brink of insanity?

Easter was very fun this year. With a few exceptions, I've spent nearly every Easter of my life at my grandparents' house. They've got a lot going on this year, so thankfully, all of us were able to put it together. We colored eggs, made some delicious deviled eggs, hid some plastic ones for Maya to find, and had a great lunch. I also became aware that I've transitioned from pudge to bump, which was equally exciting and scary.

Justin's Frankeggstein

Four.

​The problem with blogging is that you get pregnant and don't know what to write about when your days are full of the very information you're sitting on.

Yes, you read that right: WE'RE GONNA HAVE A BABY!

Another baby, that is. Maya Blue is gonna be a big sister! That's weird. It's right but it's surreal. My first, beautiful, tiny little infant is now a toddler and no longer the youngest or smallest member of our family. I'm old. Am I old? I think I'm old now.

I don't even have to say that we're happy. If you've read ANYTHING I've ever written before now, you're probably glad it's finally happening and we can all move onto the next thing in life. Waiting to post this news on the internet is the worst. What am I supposed to say? "Hey guys, today was totally normal and nothing different or new is going on, EXCEPT THAT WE'RE A FAMILY OF FOUR NOW."

Hi.

I am so bad at blogging regularly. I have got to work on that. Seriously.

SO MUCH CRAZINESS lately. The last couple of months have easily been the busiest of the whole year. Maybe the most stressful, maybe the most enlightening... I don't know. The year is almost over and I am so done with it. This year was good for Adele, and that's basically it. All the celebrity couples broke up, we had exactly one summer anthem song, and I am still not rich. I'm not bitter about 2015, but I'm not gonna sit here and dwell on it. (Well, yeah, I will, but later.)

If you're here through social media, then you probably already know my biggest news of all - I'M OFFICIALLY FREELANCE!!! I am a guest columnist on TheBLT. I still can't believe that people are paying for my writing. I'm basically writing the same things I write here, just with deadlines and, you know... consistency. I've had three articles published so far. I initially intended to post them here as they were published, but then life happened. So, I'll start doing that on the next article. No big deal.

Here's some photos of life while I've been away. Luckily, I have such a minuscule following that I can drop off for two months and not take any crap for it. Maya is cuter and smarter and older than ever, by the way.

September in Moments

Lemons, Mood

Maya has been falling asleep SUPER late the past week or two. Like, 12-1am late. And it's totally thrown me off. Then, tonight, at the perfect bed time for her, she falls asleep in the car on the way home, and I'm all YEAH!!! And I successfully transfer her from the car to the bed, which is awesome, but then I try to get up ohsocarefully and it's like we're suddenly tangled. Her arm is in my shirt and my shirt is under her body and her head is somehow supported by the arm I just moved to help myself get up. I kinda just freeze so I can figure out a game plan, and my stomach starts growling so loudly that I'm sure it'll wake up the whole street before it stops. I debate even getting up at all. I kinda wanna sleep but I have stuff to do. Cut to 12:45am and I find myself slow-cooking in the bathtub, drinking cold sweet strawberry hibiscus tea, practically falling asleep.

I start to wonder what's wrong with me, but then I realize it's just been one of those weeks - the kind that make you take wish-it-were-hotter bubbleless baths after midnight. The kind where you wear only mascara to church even though you know your directory picture will be taken. The dirty hair don't care kind. The kind that make you just take your wins where you can get 'em and forget the rest. (...the metaphorical rest and the literal.)

Because sometimes, you gotta get out the tools, build a stand, and sell whatever lemons life is giving you.

Or sleep.

Sleep, and sell lemons tomorrow.