18 December 2009

Happy Holidays!

My favorite time of the year is here…. That time of the year when the holiday bug infects everyone. Despite the chill in the air, there’s cheer on everyone’s face. Brightly lit homes and some with curtains pulled back to let others catch a glimpse of that beautifully lit Christmas tree…. This is the best part of winter.

Enjoy the season.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Wonderful New Year.

03 December 2009

Ready or not

I am supposed to be “self evaluating” for the year-end performance process… Wonder if “Manage, monitor and maintain the development of a human being” qualifies as taking on additional responsibility!

Anyway, you were given sufficient warning in the previous post about how I was switching gears to write about pregnancy. If my pregnancy does not interest you, now is the time to close this blog and read something else… may I suggest highheelconfidential.com – go check it out, I won’t mind… promise :-) (psst.. I am hooked on to that website myself)

Ok… so where do I begin? Let’s see… What is the number one question folks have asked me after I shared the “news”? Was it planned? The thought that instantly comes to my mind is... Does it really matter? Now that I am in this situation it’s too late to back out even if it was unplanned.

Seriously, I don’t think I would ever have been 100% ready. I could not picture myself longing to start a family, be a mother and all that. Three years ago, one of our friends announced that they were expecting a baby… while I was genuinely happy and overjoyed for them… their news only reinforced my belief that I was not ready for that journey yet. Over the next few years, as I saw more friends and peers stepping in to parenthood…. I used to wonder, is a baby really necessary for me? Am I ready to shoulder the biggest responsibility in my life? Well, once you are married it’s not just “me”, “my decision” anymore. I posed the question to V… We had a lengthy discussion about that question, many others and something else that was nagging me…. Is it a selfish desire to want to have one’s own baby while there are so many abandoned children and babies out there?

At the end of that discussion, it was clear that V was more ready than me to start a family of our own. He was convinced and totally enthusiastic that I brought the topic up. “Don’t you want to see a part of yourself in a person, an opportunity to mould and shape a young mind, to be a positive influence in a person’s life…” he said all that with a lot of josh… It made me feel quite guilty, I had never thought about it that way… Am I the selfish one here who’d rather shirk responsibility and live a life according to me with no worries? So I took another stab at the question. Do I see myself not needing a family forever? May be I don’t see the need for a kid now, may be I don’t see the need when I am 40, but as I grow older, I am sure that I would miss the fact that I don’t have a family. As is the case with me always, I would long for something when it’s too late ;-) I realized that I was looking at the decision of starting a family from a short-term angle.

Was I ready then? No. Would I've been ready in two years, five years… may be ten? I don’t think I’d ever be fully ready. Having a baby, being responsible for shaping the life of a child, is a huge deal and I would always be apprehensive about the big change, no matter how old I was. If I knew something for certain it was that life couldn’t just be V & me always… Then, does it really matter if we decide to go ahead and take the plunge now or five years later? I decided to close my eyes, hold my breath and take the plunge…

There you go short question “Was this planned” and a very long answer. I don’t know about planned or not planned but I can definitely say that a lot of thought was put in to it :-)

To write or not to write...

... about my pregnancy that is the question.

I’ve been going back and forth on that for several months now….well, not more than seven months. I had mentioned in one of my earlier post that many blogs I read/lurk (yes yes I know it’s a shame, but I don’t mind lurkers on my blog at all... although I have to admit that its nice to get a comment or two from total strangers) are about new moms, veteran moms, to-be moms… so when I found out that I was pregnant I was thinking may be I should write about it…but then, a part of me wanted to just wait until the baby arrived and then share stories of baby and pregnancy. Now that due date is fast approaching, I notice that I am pre-occupied with just baby/delivery/pregnancy thoughts and that translates to nothing concrete to “capture” on the blog other than my baby/delivery/pregnancy thoughts. So, I decided not to wait and go ahead and jot down some random pregnancy related things while I am still pregnant… after all, it will lose its “sensational” effect after the baby, because I hear that babies take up all attention. :-)

Stay tuned for some pregnancy posts coming up…

PS: See how many times I used the word "Pregnant" in this post. I am telling ya, I've become very single dimensional.