Category: pre-pregnancy

dreams, pre-pregnancy

Only in my dreams…

Keeping up with the Hoffmans

For the past year or so, I have been having crazy baby dreams, and almost every dream involves me not being prepared for a baby. This is incredibly ironic considering we are still several months away from even trying and I’ve already secretly started what will eventually be our baby blog, have given baby names way more thought than a sane person should at this point, and have been secretly making mental notes at baby showers of what I want to register for. Suffice to say, I will probably be overly-prepared, because that’s just the sort of Type A person I am.

But in my dreams, it’s a whole different story. In terms of not being ready, I’ve seen three recurring themes:

  1. Alcohol. In these dreams, I am happily boozing it up with friends when someone points out I should probably not be drinking. Whoops. In my dream, I had either forgotten or didn’t even know I was pregnant, even though I was clearly far enough along for friends to point it out for me. That just sounds like a really bad Lifetime movie, doesn’t it?
  2. Work. In some dreams I haven’t yet told my employer that I’ll need to take leave, so I am forced to return to work the next day. Sometimes I’m so busy with work that I’m trying to finish up something on my laptop while I’m in the hospital trying to push a person out of my person. I’ve even had dreams where I just take the baby with me to work since I hadn’t planned far enough ahead to figure out daycare arrangements.
  3. Appearance. Sometimes I don’t have any maternity clothes and I’m busting out of my regular clothes. Or sometimes it’s just the opposite and I’m really far along in my pregnancy – or even actually having the baby – yet I’m not even showing AT ALL, and I feel cheated out of the whole pregnancy experience. In these dreams I’m also worried other people will think I’m abnormal or will never believe I was actually pregnant.

I should get one of those dream interpreter people to tell me what these really mean. Otherwise I’d swear I’m a lush workaholic with body image issues. Wait… okay, so maybe that’s not so far off.

Perhaps the freakiest part of my dreams is that in each and every single one of them, I’m having a baby girl. And it’s the same baby girl in every dream. I could tell you exactly what she looks like. I half-joke that I’ve already met my future hypothetical daughter in my dreams, and as a result have pretty much convinced myself I’ll have a girl. Deep down I know this is ridiculous. It’s probably just because we know more baby girls than baby boys right now, as most of our friends/family have had girls recently. Plus, D and I both come from older-sister/younger-brother sibsets, so it would only seem natural that’s the order I’d imagine for my future hypothetical kids. Statistically, I understand we have a 50/50 chance of having a boy or a girl, yet I still sometimes can’t shake the gut feeling that’s what we’ll have.

As a very wise woman once said: as real as it may seem, it was only in my dreams.

musings, pre-pregnancy

Baby, baby, baby, ohhh…

Keeping up with the Hoffmans

Ha ha… now you have Justin Bieber going around your head. Actually, now I do too. Dammit.

Welcome to the Hoffman family blog, currently in private beta. In other words, I’m talking to myself right now. Eventually this will be a place for family and friends to keep up with what’s happening in our lives – and by that time I’ll have a nice backlog of content for them to read through – but between now and then I’ll be using this as a means to vent some things we aren’t sharing with anyone yet.

Like the fact that we are talking about having a baby (gulp).

Wow, just writing that down, my hands got all clammy and my heart started to race. If I’ll be completely honest, the idea of having a baby scares the crap out of me. I worry about whether we have enough money. I worry about whether our house is big enough. I worry about balancing family and career. I worry about how our dogs will handle it. I worry about how it’ll affect our marriage. I worry about how it’ll affect our friendships/social life. I worry about passing along all my faults and flaws. I worry about BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR ANOTHER HUMAN LIFE. Therapists stay in business because of parents who eff up their kids. I don’t want to be responsible for my child ending up in therapy some day.

Looking at my previous paragraph, it appears having a kid is a terrible idea. But there’s still something in me that simply wants needs a baby. I suppose that’s the proverbial biological clock? But in all honesty, I think we’re almost ready. We’ve been married seven years. We own our own home. We both have good, stable careers and good health insurance.

So the tentative plan is to start trying later this year, but not before my brother’s wedding in September. I’m in the wedding, so I don’t want to try before and risk not fitting the dress that’s already been ordered. I also want to be able to kick back (read: booze it up) at the bachelorette party. I have another good friend getting married around that time as well, and the idea of going to a wedding and not drinking just doesn’t sound like much fun. Not to mention we don’t plan on telling anyone until we’re at least close to the second trimester and if you know me, you know that me without a drink in my hand at a social event = très suspicious. If we have any hope of keeping this thing a secret the first 2-3 months, we’ll need to make it past summer festivities and wedding season.

Oh, baby…

Image courtesy of Safe Baby Handling Tips (my new favorite baby shower gift). I though this was appropriate, considering I take credit for crate training my niece.