Irish Daisy

Sometimes dramatically changing your life changes who you are. Sometimes you get to the point where you hardly recognize yourself on the other side. I’d always imagined myself from a young age as a career woman who would set the corporate world on fire and accomplish remarkable things. I always planned for children, but I was going to stop at two, and make both halves of my life function in tandem – working and momming with equal fervor. The thought of deviating from this plan – having more kids, jumping off the career track, staying at home – was entirely alien. Dare I say, inconceivable. And I did it for a long time. I started work in corporate America right out of school. Climbing my way up, steadily advancing my career – not as rapidly as planned due to the constraints of marrying and procreating with someone who’s chosen vocation created rigid, inconvenient schedules – and generally making it work just like I’d mapped out decades ago. For 12 years, I was as passionate ...

My neighbor stopped by to chat about the surprise third baby she will be having in early December, and the addition they will be building on their two-bedroom house to accommodate their soon-to-be five-person family. We laughed and congratulated and reminisced about having Badger. We commiserated about the challenge of going back to diapers and highchairs. We joked about birthdays and kid spacing (both Athena and Badger were born in September...apparently the holidays are really joyous around here), and we offered help if they ever need it because three can be challenging. Hanging with baby Badger I really wanted to say so much more, and maybe even scream a few warnings, but why scare the poor woman while she’s six months pregnant? Badger was very on-purpose (we worked to have that kid, if you call working having lots of sex at the right time of the month), but we had no idea at all what we were getting ourselves into - not a clue about how much more difficult it would be to ma...

My baby turned 10. My first baby – the very first tiny human that made me a mama for real is a whole decade old. This birthday was a much more earthshaking event than any “milestone” birthday I've ever celebrated for myself. When that baby was born, we were living in a second-floor condo with two dogs that needed to be walked on a leash several times a day and we only had one car with a back seat. Our other car was a pickup truck with sideways-facing jump seats – not really something you can strap a baby into. So we sold it and traded up to Big Bertha. Big Bertha was a behemoth of a truck – V8 with a crew cab that could comfortably seat five adult men and a full-length bed. The baby fit just fine in the backseat, and we could still use Bertha to have adventures camping, hauling mountain bikes, and four-wheeling through ice to snowboard. Bertha was wonderful, but really, really big. A year ago, the cost of driving and maintaining Bertha motivated us to buy a small commuter car...