pickles and ice cream

I missed 2 days of posts. Damn it! I never think about posting til night, and then I can't get to our computer where we have all of our photos because our office is currently serving as a makeshift nursery. The girls will be sharing a room, but until Mimi is sleeping through the night we have her set ip in our office so as not to mess with Delly's sleep at night. And our house has been topsy-turvy for several days while we had work being done in our family room. Gah. I've also been forgetting to pump breastmilk at night, so my little schedule is just all whacked out. Josh and I got our family room pretty much put back together today, so now I'm feeling more settled and back to normal.

Tonight we visited our good friends Greg and Adrienne and brought them pickles and ice cream to celebrate the news that they are newly pregnant. So fun and exciting. Their sone Fletcher is just a smidge younger than Delly, and they're cute little friends. I'm very happy for them, and it makes me miss all that fun of getting pregnant... Josh and I are such planners, we always were very intentional with getting pregnant, using the ovulation kits and testing as soon as possible, it was like a really fun project. I loved it every time and I miss that.

But, that's not enough to make us want to do it again. We love our daughters, we love our little Mimi, but honestly we don't love having an infant again. It's sweet and it's joyful, but it's also exhausting and frustrating and is very hard for us to re-adjust to now that Delly is so far away from those baby days. Caring for Mimi takes so much time and energy away from what we can give to and do with Delma. Now that Delly is old enough to be able to really communicate and develop personal interests, I am so excited about fostering those interests and it's tough to be distracted by Mimi and her immediate and insistant needs. Both Josh and I are very much looking forward to getting past the baby days and having fun adventures with our girls.

Though I hate to make permanant family decisions based on current finances, the fact is that Josh and I are not wealthy, and we want to be able to take our children on fun vacations, see a bit of the world, and that stuff ain't cheap. We'd have to wait til Delly is in kindergarten three years from now to have a third baby, since we can't afford to have three kids in fulltime daycare, and I can't see us wanting to go back to square one with an infant at that point.

I'm not going to run out and get my tubes tied, but I really do think we're done now and that our family is complete. There's something very comforting in knowing that. When Delma was a wee baby, as hard as it ever got, we always knew we'd at some point be doing it all over again with a second child. Now we can actually say, when we get past this phase, we won't ever have to deal with this again. It feels good. I'm very pleased with our little family, I love that we have two girls, and I love that Josh is such a good daddy to those girls -- I think it's going to be a very fun dynamic, with him as the only guy in the house. He's so great at hanging with the girls, playing dress-up and tea party and all that good stuff.

We have some really good times ahead of us. But I'm not just banking on our future, I am enjoying our family in the here and now. I am excited about how much better and better it will get, too. Oh, the paper dolls and dance lessons and camping trips and more to look forward to... Good times.