The Insanity of ME

First off, many, many thanks to all the folks who have expressed excitement about Baby Ellery Krahl and reading about our pregnancy. Kris and I are very lucky to have such a great group of friends and family and we plan on abusing your kindness to no end once the baby arrives and we need babysitters, cleaners, cooks and general shoulders to cry/vent/freak out on.

Also, I need to share the fact that we call Baby Ellery Krahl "Tickey." This stems back to the early days of our pregnancy when I told Kris that the baby was the size of a tic tak (thank you google). Despite the fact that our baby grew out of that stage in a week and moved on to fruits and veggies (currently it's the size of an eggplant....so much better than the week it was prune), Kris continued to call the baby Tickey after the tic tak and it just grew on us. I strongly hope that we drop the habit once the baby arrives and has a real name, but this is coming from the couple who call their cat Munchie, Muchachi, Munchkin, Munch, Bubbie, Bub, Buble (his actual name is Beckham and neither of us can recall the last time we said that name out loud without referring to David or Posh..err, Victoria). We also call Kris's brother Kyle, Karl. Apparently names mean very little to us.

With that out of the way, I thought I would share with you how preparing for Tickey has cast a glaring spotlight on the total insanity of my personality. Last weekend Kris and I were lounging around and I commented how bizarre it was that I went through 6 years of school without having a concrete idea of "what I wanted to be when I grew up." I knew my strengths, but never really drew a concrete line between them and a profession. Now that I'm a social planner, I can't believe that I didn't figure it out. I've always been a planner. If I wake up in the morning and don't have plans, I literally get a headache by the early afternoon. I HAVE to have plans. My mind does not stop planning. At work, I plan the work of others - that's my actual job. At home, I make meal plans, weekend plans, budget plans, etc. I just don't stop planning.

After I got over the 18 weeks of morning sickness, I realized that we had a lot of planning to do. We had to make a birth plan, a budget plan, a plan to get a new car, a plan to decorate a nursery, a plan to buy an enourmous amoung of "stuff." It's the part where "plan" and "buy" come together in the same sentence that makes my life extra tricky. See, not only am I a compulsive planner, but I'm also a shopoholic. If I didn't come up with a PLAN for buying things, our house would quickly turn into a giant nursery filled with every baby product I found. So I made a plan.

I researched every "list of stuff you need for a newborn" I could find (and there are a lot). I started to panic about the number of different opinions we were hearing. A trip to the local baby store to learn about strollers suddenly made us feel as though we were in the market for buying a Land Rover when we'd never even ridden a bike. This is when the researcher in me came out. I researched every stroller, I watched every youtube stroller video, I read stroller blogs, stroller reviews, and compared stroller heights, weights, baskets, brakes and more. I finally settled on a stroller that cost nearly as much as our rent. The same thing happened with the crib. I suddenly realized that I would need to quit my job and set up permanent residency in front of the laptop if I was going to invest this much research in every baby product. This is when I found the Baby Bible, aka the Baby Bargains book. It told me everything. EVERYTHING. Now I have a spreadsheet with the product, price and where to get it. Yes, that's how insane I am.

People say that if you're laid back, you'll have a laid back kid. As much as I try, being laid back is just not in me. Kris IS laid back, so lets hope the baby ends up somewhere in between. I'm not sure he can handle living with two of me. Then again, the baby is due dangerously close to my birthday, making us both Taurus. Honestly, Kris knows this, and I think it terrifies him.