Week 21: Piece by piece

This pregnancy is becoming a lot more real. I finally have a bump that’s basically impossible to ignore. We have boxes and boxes of baby stuff arriving on our doorstep on the regular. And—to make room for all this stuff—Lee and I spent last weekend clearing out closets and the to-be nursery. He even started painting! Yeesh!
So I guess we’re in “prep mode,” and that will probably be the case until the baby comes … or until I’m too exhausted to waddle around anymore. All this “getting ready” has sparked plenty of conversations about what our life will look like in five short months and—more specifically—how different things will be. Some of it’s logistics and budgets and boring (but important!) things, but a lot of it’s just life stuff. It will no longer be just the two of us, well, and our dog. There will be this tiny person tagging along on all of our adventures, a tiny person who requires a bit more planning and coordination to make sure we don’t find ourselves at Shake Shack without any spare diapers.
Honestly, Lee and I are so aware of how fortunate we are to have found a partner who’s a best friend, jobs that we love going to every day, a pup that’s always so happy to see us she has to jump and spin in circles, and a house that we’ve made our cozy little home. What I’m saying is, we are happy. And I think we could go right on living our lives, paying our mortgage, taking a vacation or two and being happy with the way things are. We could have done that, but we decided we wanted to have a baby.
… And as wonderful and amazing as that is, it also changes EVERYTHING. We’ll have less time with each other, with our dog, for house projects, for sleeping. (I’m honestly very concerned about that last one.) We’ll have less money for traveling and eating out and saving and splurging. We’ll have more laundry, more dirty dishes, more demands. It reminds me of something Aziz Ansari said in one of his standup routines:
“You’re married, you’ve found a mate, that’s huge. You have a job and a home, that’s very difficult to lock down. It’s like you finally put together this very large, complicated puzzle … and then you’re just like, ‘F#*@ this puzzle—let’s have a kid!’ And then the kid just sh!ts all over the puzzle—the puzzle is ruined. You are never putting it back together again. It’s destroyed.”
Lee and I have been piecing together this puzzle since we got engaged, heck, since we first started talking about our future as a couple. It wasn’t easy. There were definitely tight months and rough patches, but we did it! And because things are going so well, we’ve decided to take on this huge forever-long commitment. But, honestly, how boring would life be if we had it all figured out by our mid-20s? I don’t think we’re “destroying” our puzzle. Maybe we’re complicating the rest of our puzzle building. Maybe it will take longer to finish. Maybe we’ll be missing a few pieces or we’ll have to force some to fit. Maybe it won’t look EXACTLY like the picture on the box. But I’m OK with that because we’re making our own picture, and I know it will be beautiful, even if it is a little messy.