This weekend was fantastic.
I was out of state, with my friends, sans husband and kiddo.
It was fun, it was so nice to reminisce, I genuinely had a great time. But I was so excited to get back home and back to reality on Sunday evening.
Getting away is getting easier now. She's almost 6, she can tell me in explicit, dramatic detail everything that happened when I was gone. She can remind daddy about her own schedule, her own needs. Not that daddy is incompetent or anything like that, he's an amazing dad, but as a completely type A individual, it's great to know that you have a teeny dictator at home, making sure everything goes to plan.
This weekend was great, but it made me a little sad too.
Everyone in my group is getting married/is married. Next comes kids, yay! I won't be the only mom in the group.
But there was more than one time where the words "I think you're going to be the first to have a kid" came up.
First?
Um....
Pretty sure I won that title almost 6 years ago.
It seems so petty and small...but it really pointed out the divide between myself and my friends. I'm old, I'm done, I'm completely over that entire part of my life. But they're all going into that adventure together.
You know the baby section in Target? Not the clothes, but the actual section of crap you need to raise a kid? The wipes, diapers, pacifiers, bottle warmers, 1200 different kinds of nipples because kids are picky. That section is always there. It's there before you have kids, as a kind of reminder, this will be your life someday!
Then you get pregnant, and that section becomes a little overwhelming, wipes with or without aloe? what formula is best if you don't breast feed? do I really need a bumbo seat? Why are there so many nipple creams!? But you have the baby, and you are thankful for that area. You send your husband to target and just say "it's in the same aisle as the wipes!" and he comes home a winner.
But as your baby turns to a toddler, you need it less and less. You buy the potty seat, you buy the ergonomic spoons and forks, and you buy wipes.
The biggest lesson in parenting, is that you will ALWAYS buy baby wipes. I'm pretty sure she's going to move into her ivy league dorm room, and I'll still have wipes in the bathroom. They clean up every.single.mess.in.the.house
But toddlerhood moves to preschool...and preschool ends in a blink of an eye. And suddenly, it's spring break of your kid's kindergarten year, and you realize, you don't use the baby section anymore (exception, wipes)
It was always there, always a reminder of things to come, of daily necessities, until one day, it's not.
You don't need that anymore. She's old enough to sit on a toilet, use a normal spoon, we don't own a single sippy cup.
It's over.
I am an entire section of Target away from my best friends. I am over an entire life period, that they have not even begun. That's hard. I'm so far away, that when they discuss their future pregnancies, I'm not even part of the equation of who would be first.
I'm happy for all of them, and I love where my life is, but those teeny little instances, remind me that we'll always have our past, and in 30 years when all of their kids are in college, we'll be back on the same page, but for the next few decades. I'm just the outlier, the bad data point that screws up your statistics homework.
