Just The Five of Us

We don't really go to church anymore. It's not because we've lost our faith or don't believe or hate Christianity. But we don't really go to church anymore. When we first married and everything was bright and shiny, it was fine to be childless. After the first year of marriage, people asked us when we would have kids. "Oh, we aren't ready yet." we'd say. Because we weren't. And then when we were ready, or as ready as you can be I suppose, it didn't happen. And for the first year or so, this was fine. We were still young; not everyone our age already had kids. But here we are, four years later. And everyone our age that wants kids seems to have them. And we do not. Church is the hardest place to be childless if you want to have kids. And maybe if you don't, but I can't speak to that perspective, so I won't try. When we first visited the last church that we were a part of, we were involved in a wonderful Sunday school clas...

I am a lover of lists. This is not news to anyone that knows me. I love lists and spreadsheets and schedules. I can tell you when I'm going to change the sheets this week down to the fifteen minute window and I know exactly when the litter boxes were last scooped and I can tell you my commute time down to the minute based on when I leave my house. I have a spreadsheet for all the meat and casseroles in my freezer; our pantry is cataloged, and I'm never late on a vet visit for all twelve paws in our house. When a few months turned into six months, I called my OB/GYN. (That's not entirely true. I bumrushed him at work because he worked at the same hospital I did; he bought me a coffee at the Starbucks on campus and listened to me whine for fifteen minutes. Nice guy.) He gave me some tips about timing and cervical mucous and body temperatures. (Yeah. I said "cervical" and "mucous." This is a blog post about family planning. You'll all be fine.) And ...

Stephen and I got married in 2011. We set up house in a duplex across the street from crack dealers. He traveled all the time for work and I worked in a nearby city and worked a lot. And on the weekends we went to the farmers' market and refinished furniture we got at thrift stores and bought and played with way too many cat toys and touched each other all the time because we were crammed into 700 square feet. A couple of months after we got married, the other half of our duplex got broken into and we asked our landlord for a deadbolt. His response was to get us a padlock for the front door that I could lock and then run around to the back and lock that door. When this idea was thrown out, we asked if he had any other properties in safer parts of town. He had a townhouse available for more money, but we managed to scrape enough together to make it work each month. That townhouse had a rotting air conditioner in the backyard, a hole in the shower patched with Wal-Mart sacks, and...