My journey begins!!!

So here I am!!!!!!!!  This is the first entry of my blog documenting my road to motherhood!  I decided to start now because 3 months from now we will be officially trying (aka doing baby dances) to get pregnant!  

Some facts about me/us:

We (Edmund and I) got married on July 11, 2009 after dating for 2.5 years (engaged for 10 months)

We just bought our first house in August 2010

We expanded our family the day after we got possession of our house with Tobey our puppy (born June 23, 2010).  He's a pure bred Yorkshire Terrier. 

I work as an Educational Assistant working with kids with special needs and got a permanent continuing contract in October 2010 (this means I'm guaranteed a job every September and I'll never go on-call again unless I choose to!)

I'm really excited about this blog and even more about this new chapter in my life.  My goal for this blog is not only to preserve my journey but also to share all the ups and downs and in-betweens with anyone who is willing to read.  We haven't event started TRYING to make a baby yet and I've already experienced so many different emotions.  I can't even begin to fathom what this journey has in store for me and I really just love sharing my life. Those of you who know me well know that I'm an open book!!  

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So let's start with how we got to where we are now; the pre-pre-conception stage.  There were many factors that we had to think about.  Can we afford it? Are we ready mentally/emotionally? How many kids do we want altogether and how far apart do we plan on having them? Do we even WANT kids???!! Yes we've discussed in great detail each and every one of the above questions...and more of course but those were the big questions that we kind of struggled with.  Obviously the short answers to those questions are...yes we're ready...well, almost ready that is!  

We didn't just wake up one day and randomly decide to start a family.  Of course, the idea of having a baby had been on our minds since the day we got married.  I mean, how could it not when not a single day has gone by without someone asking us the question, 'So when are you having kids?'.  

We knew that we had to get our careers/incomes stabilized before we made any big commitments such as buying our own home and of course having a baby.  When we got married Ed was still an apprentice in his trade (2nd year out of 4) and I had only been working on-call with the school district for a year.  He wasn't making top dollars in his line of work and I was getting paid only whenever I got called into work.  We rented a basement suit and lived in it for a year and 3 months after we got married and this place only had 1 bedroom/1 bathroom.  There was NO way I was bringing a baby into the picture with the amount of living space we had!  

Next there's the issue of 'are we even ready mentally/emotionally?'.  We knew when we got married that we didn't want kids RIGHT away.  We wanted to enjoy being married and get some travelling done before we got 'tied down' with a baby.  Well we're ready than ever now but when we first got married all I wanted to do was go travel to a list of places and do this and that with my husband!  Our 2 year anniversary is this summer (July 2011) and so far we've gone to Hawaii (honeymoon), Las Vegas (spring break last year), California...yes ALL of Cali...Disneyland, San Diego, Universal Studios, LA, San Francisco and even Portland and Seattle on the way home cuz we road tripped, Victoria (mini weekend get-away over Christmas break 2010) and we are planning a trip up to Whistler sometime this summer.  In the 1.8 years we've been married I've never travelled so much in my life!!!!!  So definitely we had a travel bug to itch.  We basically went from getting our first jobs, to being engaged, to being married with tons of freedom and money.  We wanted time to enjoy this newfound freedom, parental AND financial!  We both lived at home with our parents/siblings until we got married and moved in together so there was some adjustment.  Honestly the transition was super easy but I think we both really had to learn time management and meal planning (something we have NOT mastered yet).  We just needed some time to grow/mature together because really we were still children (even though we were 26/27 years old!).  We were so spoiled by our parents and pampered we had to learn to stand on our own feet in a place we would call our own home. 

Once we had the financial and emotional/mental issues somewhat dealt with we then had to decide how many kids we wanted (and the timeline of their arrivals).  This quickly led to the question of whether or not we even wanted kids!!! We seriously LOVE our life right now!  We have a beautiful brand new house, money to spend and a puppy to love.  Life is BLISS!  We started talking about all the things we can do if we never had kids.  Thinking about it was like thinking about what I'd do if I won the lottery!  O the places we'd go!!!!!!!  But we quickly realized that although not having kids now (and probably in our 30's and 40's) would be awesome because we can do any and everything we wanted to, we'd totally regret it in our 50+'s when all our siblings' and friends' kids start graduating from high school and getting married and having kids.  We also had to take into account my dreadful internal clock (I turned 28 in January and Ed will be 29 in July) and my parents.  As much as I love my life right now and don't really want anything to change, I would much rather have my kids at a younger age rather than later on in life.  This is just a personal preference.  My parents have been insanely cute with Tobey ever since we got him (these are people who do NOT like the idea of pets).  Seeing them with Tobey makes me want to give them a grandchild.  My grandparents passed away when I was really young so I really want my parents to have as much time with my kids as possible and having kids sooner than later will help in this department. So, yes...we want kids for sure (silly us for even thinking we didn't!!!).  How many do we want?  We decided there's no point in thinking about that now.  We'll just see how we do with the first one!

So there you have it.  Simply put, we had to go through all those things to get to where we are today.  There were tons of moments of self doubt and fickleness but we've decided to start trying in mid-June because we want a SPRING 2012 BABY(please please please)!

We're T-minus 3 months until we officially start trying to make baby Go and I'm soooo excited!!!!