Thoughts on the pending family:

We recently got together with K's cousin and her husband. They have a little one, about three years old, I think. K's aunt and uncle were in town visiting this family, who live about twenty minutes away. And I realized that we hadn't seen them since the last time the aunt and uncle visited, maybe eight or ten months ago. Before that it had been more than a year.

And I'm worried about the implications of this distance. K and I are not big visitors, big phoners, big emailers. We schedule ourselves and work ourselves in such a way that these tasks, the fundamentals of human contact, seem like work once we're done with everything else we've agreed to do. We come home in the evenings, and we relish the very idea of not sitting on the phone for an hour with people. My sister has lived in two houses in a city three and a half hours away over the last two years; I haven't seen a either of them.

We don't self-motivate, and this is terrible. But we're exhausted, we say, and it's true. We've got this obligation and that, this mandatory trip to my mom's house and then this mandatory visit from another parent. This past weekend, we didn't do anything to write home about. We grabbed dinner with a friend (though I admit to holding out for them to come to our neck of the woods instead of vice versa), ran around buying and returning baby loot and then stayed in our pajamas all day working on the baby's room and the house in general on Sunday. It's Monday night and I've said more than once in response to a question about my weekend, "it was the best weekend we've had in a long time." I guess all that will end when the kid comes, right?

I'm sure it won't. It won't end, but it will change. The endless obligations will continue, but they will revolve around this little, helpless creature. This wonderful, odd-smelling little bundle of joy will enter our lives and reset the priorities on a massive scale. A new sun will enter our universe and we'll begin the orbit that will dominate our lives.