Here’s the post you saw coming light years away. A post on the new year and all it’s incumbent resolutions. Now, I’m not normally one for making resolutions in the traditional sense but I do like to do the housekeeping and get myself in order for challenging another neatly packaged set of 365 days, granted this post is late and then technically we’re down to 362 days to get through this year. But, I digress. The point is that most everyone takes a few moments to reflect on what the past year has brought to their lives and what they want for the future and how exactly to set about attaining that future and I’m no different.

Benoit and I have had many conversations in the past few months about how nice it would be for Gianna to have a sibling some day and though those conversations typically ended three seconds after they began with me in hysteric fits of laughter, rolling on the ground that he could even suggest such a thing, they also started me wondering about what I’m going to do about my career. It’s not easy to get a degree, take a decade or so off to raise kids and then try to find a job as if you were straight out of college, no experience or connections and this weighs heavily on my mind as I enter 2009 and my thirtieth year of life.

I experience the clock ticking in both directions, seemingly a countdown on every level. The biological clock was set in motion years ago and my personal deadline for creating babies is approaching faster than I ever imagined even though I quietly push it back every once in awhile, arbitrarily redefining my parameters to stop the incessantly doomsday ticking. The clock to start my career, however, is another story. I don’t feel I have the power to reset that one. It’s been on the shelf for too long now. That ticking is threatening like a jury-rigged time bomb.

So, I rang in 2009 worried about accomplishing something for myself while I have the spirit and drive to see things through, and while Gianna is little enough to not notice a bit of absence and yet independent enough to handle the inevitable bumps in stride. The babymaking, as science is constantly proving, can happen later. My ability to forge a career is quite limited. Ah, the quintessential female dilemma. Work or family? Work and family? Balance. That is what I’m striving for in 2009. A resolution in one word. It looks deceptively easy when I put it like that.

Here’s wishing everyone a beautiful new year and a chance to make the most of what lies ahead! Happy 2009 everyone!

10 months into this gig as parents and you would think I would no longer be surprised at things gone missing from our lives. It started tragically with a disappearance of sleep, then time to myself, then time in general and it may have been because those first disappearances were so tremendous and frightening that I overlooked the seemingly minor things that also made a hastened exit out of our lives. I was simply too shell shocked from night feedings, day-night reversals, colic and myriad other newborn festivities to appreciate the earth-shattering speed of abandonment at which many other life-sustaining events were fleeing my routine.

Now that I think back on it, it must have started with the day I first realized a morning shower was a gift from God, spaced exactly 10 minutes into the baby’s morning nap and lasting no more than 5 minutes due to the baby’s inevitably ill-timed cough and wake-up sneeze requiring my attention. Only it has progressed into far darker territory now. The baby has moved on to that holiest of grails, the untouchable shrine to weekend mornings, the one thing that breaks up the routine of mid-morning weekdays and leaves me slobbering for more, the hope at the end of five days of rush-hour panic as Benoit races out the front door, that is breakfast. Ah, my golden waffles and scrambled cheesy eggs. My freshly juiced clementines with buttered bread and crispy bacon. I am a breakfast person! I could eat it all day long. Weekdays and Saturdays, my love of all things sweet and salty, fat and fried, I need never stray far from a poached egg to be content. So, when it went missing, when I found myself striding through weekend after weekend from August through December never once (or maybe just once) savoring the slip and slide of a banana in powdered sugar atop a glorious mound of french toast oozing in melted butter, I could literally do nothing but cry. It had disappeared like an unfortunate traveler of Latin America. Only, guerilla warfare was not to blame.

I will not muster on as I have with disappearances past. I refuse to mark one more day on the calendar unless I get my breakfast back. Take my sleep. Take my brain, my memory, my wit. But, leave me my respite, my delicious, dribbling fried potato hash!

Babies are usually worth the sacrifices but here’s where I draw the line. Breakfast will not die quietly in this house. Let the baby cry!

Tonight I realized my favorite part of our nighttime routine. It’s this tiny moment between the end of nursing and putting Gianna in her crib, when I gingerly pick her up in my arms and move across the room to her crib. I can see the light on her face from her nightlight, only illuminating the side closest to the crook of my arm. Her eyes are closed, eyelashes ever so lightly touching in the necessary force to keep them shut and ready for sleep and even in the palest glow of her room I can see her cheek, still rosy with warmth from being pressed to my skin for her last meal of the day. Her slumbering body is both weighted from slackened muscles and yet light and delicate with peacefulness. It occurs to me she never feels as fragile as she does in this moment every day.

So, I bring her in close to me one last time as I approach her crib, plant my lips on that well-padded cushion that is her cheek and give her one last, lingering kiss for sweet dreams. It’s a goodnight kiss packed with all the triumph, pride and soul-wrenching motherly love I have. Simply bliss. And I leave her room astounded that a heart can be so full it overflows.