The Mister and I have played tennis nine times in the last month. He leads the series 5-4.
By the time you read this, we will have gone away to a cabin for two nights. Hopefully we'll have done some leaf peeping, hiking, and maybe even champagne drinking. We may have taken Dianthus to his first Mexican restaurant and to see native mammals at the State Game Preserve. I've been swimming twice a week and baked the Mister a great birthday cake.
I'm living my life. Enjoying my life. And I'm proud of it.
My desire to tell you this stems from several sources. At first, "I've been playing tennis" was part of an unsaid sarcastic retort to a colleague asking me, "So, what have you been doing?" when I stopped by the office.
She asked this during the time I was still bleeding, still crying every day and feeding Dianthus was an all consuming endeavor.* To me, the question (from a mother of two who should have known better) sounded as if there were an expectation of productivity, as if washing a load of clothes and dreaming about a nap sometime in the future was not "doing" enough. At that moment, "I've been playing tennis" would have sounded to me as fanciful as "I've been sitting on the beach sipping mai tais while my minions massage my toes and accept all the requests for publications and major grants I've been receiving."
The long and eloquent explanation as to why I am so proud of playing tennis, which includes the tragic recent death of my boss's husband in a farm accident, my father doing karaoke in China, a prosective lab mate in grad school asking me how often I actually stayed in bed reading novels**, phyics tests and obligation to those who aren't as lucky, will have to wait. I've twice fed and changed Dianthus and done the laundry and tried to pack since I started this post, and now the Mister is home and I need to go enjoy living my life rather than telling you about it.
But the punch line remains the same: The future is always uncertain. I'm proud to be enjoying and living my life now. I highly recommend that you do the same.
*Now we're down to feeding and changing Dianthus being the time equivalent of a full time job with incredibly split shifts.
**Thank you Erin for transforming my life.
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You're amazing! I'm pretty sure I wasn't doing nearly so many nifty things when Annika was 2 months old (though that might be in part because that's when I went back to work).
I'm a firm believer that life is there to be lived and enjoyed. I should probably put that belief into practice more, though!
In some ways, babies can be remarkably flexible and easy to take on adventures during the 2 month to 6 month period - they'll sleep wherever, they only eat milk and can do that (more or less) anywhere, they don't yet crawl so they're content to just be held or be in a car seat, stroller, or carrier. And they don't really have separation anxiety yet. It sounds like you're taking good advantage of that!
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