One Week (Points to Consider)

I hate those stick figure collections people splash all over their rear windows, but yesterday they served a valid purpose. Prof and I went out for a coffee and pulled up behind one of these on our way home. Prof sighed and said, "I think about the kid thing all the time". Which got the conversation started. By the time we got home, we had acknowledged that we BOTH think about the kid thing pretty much constantly. To distraction. I knew he thought about it too, but somehow I didn't realize he thought about it as much as I do.

To recap, we have established that we are NOT afraid of:

• Using Donor Eggs to conceive
• Losing our relationship to Parenthood

And lo and behold, our thoughts and fears are still running along the same lines:

• Kids are expensive and we're just making ends meet as it is.
• DEIVF kids are even more expensive. Where does that money come from?
• This world is an ugly, scary place in which to launch a tiny little loved one.
• Our lifestyle would have to change dramatically (like you have NO idea how dramatically).
• How do parents get it all done?
• What if we hate being parents?

I think that last one is the real question here. The thing we're really afraid of discovering about ourselves after it's too late.

There's a piece of this puzzle that we can't see yet. I've seen a million and three comments about how everything changes once that baby arrives... specifically how new parents' attitudes toward their own offspring took them by surprise. Without any offspring of our own, we can't see the shape of that puzzle piece to know how it's going to fit into our existing picture.

So standing in the kitchen and tossing all of that out there, we came to two conclusions:

• If we don't do this because we're afraid of A/B/C, then we let the fear win and that's not our style.
• We're not getting any younger and this isn't going to get any easier by postponing it. We need to make a decision and move forward one way or another.

So Prof has proposed an idea. We will have a brief discussion about our thoughts on the subject every evening this week. Next Sunday, we will make a Plan. We even shook on it.