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“Just what the world needs: another mommy blog,” you are surely not thinking, since if you are reading this you are probably related to me and you are just happy I’m writing.   But in case you don’t know me, my name is Amy and I’m a reality television producer slash sometimes writer currently at home with my little girl, Viv.   The twist is that while I am raising my daughter, I am also planning my wedding to her father.   Carriage Before Marriage!  Welcome to the blog!

So how did we get here?

For me, prioritizing a baby ahead of a wedding was all about pushing the snooze button on my 39-year-old biological clock.  I knew I’d found the love of my life in Dave, but following the traditional path to the altar with its lengthy calendar of ring procurement, engagement, wedding planning, bridal showers, cake tastings and the like, while all along my fertility dove off a cliff, was way too stressful for me.   Sure, we could have sped things along by eloping, but a courthouse wedding would have denied me of my lifelong dream of registering for really good cookware.

So, I thought, why not switch up the order?   First comes love, then comes carriage.  Of course, I didn’t have the guts to pitch this plan to Dave until I got accidentally pregnant.

the scream

It was actually not that shocking, since our super scientific birth control plan boiled down to whether we felt like using any that day.   Still, Dave’s initial reaction to my news was, and I am not making this up, “What are our options?”   My brain said, “Jackass, you don’t ask a 39-year-old woman what her options are!”  But thankfully my mouth said, “Um…” and waited until Dave came to the right conclusion on his own, i.e. let’s take this gift and write the universe a nice thank you note.   We spent the weekend making plans.  We were nervous but excited.

To Dave’s credit (massive understatement), even after I lost that pregnancy, he still wanted to have a baby with me.   We never really considered getting married first.  Call us delusional, but a wedding sounded so much scarier than a baby.   Bring on the sleepless nights and poopie diapers, we thought, if it meant we could skip over the seating charts and invitations.   In hindsight, I realize how dumb that sounds.

Given that it was 2010 and we were grown-ups in our 30s, we didn’t expect any flack.  We were wrong.    Upon hearing I was pregnant, a friend asked, “Who’s the father?” despite that fact that I had a live-in boyfriend.    Dave’s parents and my mom were on board, though they rationalized to their friends, “That’s how they do it in California.”

hippies (in California?)

My father was another story.  I thought of my dad as a pretty hip sexagenarian who once took my 12-year-old brother to a Run DMC Concert.  But when presented with the news that I was pregnant while unmarried, he went catatonic for about a week.  I suppose pregnancy destroyed the illusion that I might still be a virgin.  Fathers.

I tried to put myself in his shoes.  In our parents’ day, a pregnancy usually led to a shotgun wedding.  Today, it leads to blogging.

Anyway, the nice thing about being pregnant is that in the end there is a very cute baby and then everyone is pretty psyched, whether you’re married or not.  And when Viv was born in January, 2011, our little family of three was so dreamy that I could have remained technically single for the rest of my life and never felt unfulfilled.  Which is why I didn’t even see it coming when Dave proposed on Valentine’s Day, while I held Viv in my arms.

baby and ring

So now we’re doing this thing.  And I’m thrilled.  But I’m not sure how we’re going to pull off all the planning while carting around a toddler.  And to make things a little more interesting, we’re also trying for baby #2 (same reason as before, just add two years).   I feel extremely lucky and a little crazy.  My knuckles are bruised from knocking on wood.

I think the blogging will help me keep it together, or laugh while trying.   Thanks for checking it out.  Maybe you’ll subscribe (it’s free!) and then you’ll receive the next post, which will be a link to my Williams Sonoma registry.   Kidding!    It will be about why, despite all my liberal posing, I frequently lie and call Dave my husband.  More to come…

 

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