What Would The Talking Heads Say?

Probably exactly what I'm thinking to myself right now: How did I get here?

A little over a year ago my husband and I were living in a small Chicago condo with our energetic black lab/pitbull mix.  Life was pretty simple.  We both worked downtown all day and spent our evenings together watching TV, whipping up dinner and keeping the dog entertained.  We usually went out for dinner on the weekends and caught up with friends.  No muss.  No fuss.

But there was a quiet hum in the background of our life as we discussed our future with increasing frequency.  We wanted to start a family.  Oh sure, you can be a family with two people and a dog; but we wanted the whole kit and caboodle including a house, a yard and kids.

So we began "making plays" as my husband, who is prone to sports analogies, said at the time.  We wanted to get out of Chicago and escape to someplace slower-paced with a lower cost of living and  with room for us to stretch our legs.  But we also didn't want to be too far from family and friends.  Milwaukee was the obvious solution.  Moving to Milwaukee would put us closer to his family (though a bit further from mine) and we would be just a short hour and a half drive to Chicago.  He began looking for jobs.  I began lobbying for a transfer to my company's Milwaukee office.

Things didn't go exactly according to our obsessively-thought-out plan, but we did move to Milwaukee on our designated timeframe (both of us with jobs).  We moved into a rented house - a garage! a yard! a basement! - and found tenants for our Chicago condo.  A week later, we found out I was pregnant.  And a few short weeks later at the doctor's office we found out it was twins.  Major curveball.

The seven months of my pregnancy flew by, despite being on doctor-imposed "house arrest" for over two months and another two weeks of full-blown bed rest before our little girls arrived.  They were seven weeks early and spent the first five weeks of their tiny lives in the hospital's NICU.  Luckily, they were healthy and began to thrive almost immediately.  In the meantime, we ran out of room in our little rental house and went looking for a more permanent solution.  We bought a classic colonial in the Milwaukee suburbs - an attached garage! a big yard! a semi-finished basement! - and moved in a week before I went back to work.  Upon my return to the workforce I began working from home and we hired a nanny.  And then we breathed a collective sigh of relief.

We put the tumult of the previous year behind us and prepared to gratefully settle in to our new life.  My new life isn't as sexy as my old city life in Chicago.  We rarely go out to eat.  I don't remember the last time I went to a yoga class.  There was a three week stretch right after we moved in when I didn't unpack my shoes; I didn't leave the house and only wore my slippers.  

There's little doubt that I'm still settling in to this new life and learning what it means to be a mom.  But I love it.  It's totally different from anything I've done before and I have a lot to learn about being happy in my new situation, but I smile every day and I'm so grateful that our big plans have worked out to this point.