How We Knew We Were Ready to Have a Baby

 

I’ll never forget sitting around my kitchen table with a good friend several years ago and having a conversation about when is the best time to start a family. It may sound silly, but I remember feeling a little overwhelmed because the planner in me really wanted to have an idea for when to try and have a baby, but it seemed there was never going to be a good time.

Whether it was a new job, graduate school plans, a deployment, or an upcoming move, it seemed like every time Jamie and I talked about future family planning we mutually found reasons to push off having a baby. When would we ever be ready?

Because we weren’t sure when we would be ready to have a baby, we decided to come up with a short list of things we wanted to do together before we added a child to the mix. Our list consisted of big and small things, like travel abroad, find a church and join a life group, attend another Alabama football game, have a big night out in Nashville with our friends, host a few barbecues, and run another marathon (for Jamie) and half marathon (for me). We lost a lot of time together doing long distance for four years, so we wanted to make a few more memories together before we’d be “tied down” with a kid.

Fast forward a few months, and we’d accomplished everything on our list and more.

And we still didn’t feel quite ready to have a baby. Biting the bullet and actually trying made us very nervous, so we didn’t. We decided we’d reassess when to start a family after he returned from his upcoming deployment.

A few weeks later I took a positive pregnancy test, and I called Jamie (who’d just arrived in Afghanistan four days prior) to tell him the news.

“You’re going to be a Dad.”

“What? Did you just say I’m going to be a dad?”

“Yes.”

Looking back, that was the moment that Jamie & I both clearly identify where we felt we were 100% ready to start a family, and not a moment prior! Something about seeing that positive test changed every “perfect plan” we thought we had mapped out. We just wanted our baby. We were immediately captivated by the idea that there was a little mashup of the two of us growing inside me.

So when a few of my girlfriends who have been trying to decide when to get pregnant have asked me about when we knew we were ready, I always just smile and and tell them that I wish I had better advice for them; I can empathize with the “stress” of trying to make this decision. It’s a super tough one to make for a few reasons:

1.) The “right” age and stage of life varies for everyone. What’s right for one family may not be right for the next.

2.) When is there ever going to be the perfect time to make this kind of huge life transition? Life can change so fast that it’s hard to predict the ideal time.

3.) We don’t hold all of the power anyway; God is the ultimate planner and already knows about every single little life and when he or she will be born. There’s so much comfort in knowing that someone else already has the most perfect plan.

At the end of the day, we weren’t 100% ready until four pregnancy tests said positive. Everything we thought we wanted totally changed, and we both realized that starting a family is something we’d both wanted for a long time; We’d just been anxious to make it happen.