the postpartum files: Kids

I'm going to be processing this life change for awhile and since its my blog and you can go elsewhere, I'm feeling free to do my processing here. You see, its been said that I might not be the most flexible person on the planet and having a newborn again after 6 years is kind of the definition of needing to be flexible.

I should mention at this point that I'm really doing fine but realizations have been sweeping over me quite a lot lately. Not bad ones, just things I hadn't thought of.

Kids. The word "kids" got me the other day. "Children" too. I have kids. Plural. I have children. Again, plural. We've long been a family of 3. I had one kid. "My son is 6." "You just have the one child?" "Yes." Now I have kids. And so that changes. A few weeks ago we went around to the Children's Muesuem here in Indianapolis. We decided to buy a family membership figuring that it would pay for itself if we went as a family 3 times. Then we remembered that soon we would need to add a child because we would have kids. And that was strange to me.

I put in the new car seat late last week. We have car seats in the car for our kids. We talked about the best location for the each kid's car seat. See before it didn't matter, @ could sit anywhere. We put him on the side with the automatic sliding door. He's going to stay there because he can take care of getting himself in and out. Its nice having a kid that doesn't need car seat help. Baby ! goes behind the driver because there will be times when no one else is in the passenger seat and the driver doesn't want to walk around the far side of the car to get ! out. This isn't a big deal thing, just something we thought through that intrigued me. It was one of the things we didn't think about the 9 months we were waiting for her. We'll make lots of decisions like this in the days and weeks ahead. They aren't big deal things but they are the little things that remind me that our lives have changed.