Still firsts, after all this time.

40 years old used to sound SO OLD to me. Like, in my 20s, the idea of 40s and beyond seemed unfathomable. Yet, here we are. It's so weird. How did I get this old? With kids who are walking and talking...my oldest gearing up for Kindergarten. It's really wild.

In my mind, I feel the same. The same quirky young person I've always been. But then as the generational gap increasingly widens between me and my students, my oldness becomes more stark. My students revealed to me that a rapper named D Smoke came out with a song named after the leader of a slave uprising in colonial Mexico that I was teaching them about and that this rapper used to be a Spanish teacher. Like, what? On so many levels, what? The deficiency of my current pop culture knowledge laid bare. And that's how we ended up listening to gangsta rap in my upper level Spanish class.

But I digress. 

What I'm saying is that even at this incomprehensible age that I currently exist in, firsts still occur. I roasted my first turkey and hosted Thanksgiving for the first time:

We put up our first Christmas tree:

I baked gingerbread cookies from scratch for the first time and decorated them with my kids (they weren't fans of the taste of gingerbread):

I guess it's nice that there are still firsts out there, waiting to be experienced, even at the ripe old age of 40.

Another Postscript

 I really don't want to commit myself to blogging again. But sometimes I want to express something that I don't necessarily want all of my social media connections to be able to access.

What I want to express is that I miss being pregnant.

I will never experience pregnancy again unless something really insane and/or medically impossible happens. (Okay, how about extremely medically improbable?) We are 100% done having babies. We are 100% so done. We are 100% happy with our rambunctious boys and do not want to have anymore. Just the thought of going through the newborn phase again is exhausting.

But. 

There is this teeny tiny, barely perceptible jingle bell that rings in the recesses of my mind when I hear that such and such is expecting or I see a pregnant woman or see an infant. There are times that I find myself daydreaming about what it felt like, trying to remember the wonder of little baby kicks on the inside that felt like a miracle every single time. 

I am very thankful that I was able to bear children and that I was able to have relatively uncomplicated pregnancies. I truly am. When it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, I learned enough to know that nothing's a guarantee. But at the same time, I do mourn a chapter of my life that is over. 

Maybe it would be different if I were menopausal and knew that my body had closed up shop for good. But right now, I know that the potential is still (technically) there. I did enough research and experienced enough to know what the signs are that I'm ovulating and within my "fertile window." There are times where I feel like, "I could technically still get pregnant" but I know that I never will again. 

I will be honest and say that I have even allowed my mind to go to some really macabre and outlandish places, like, what if (God forbid) something happened to my husband and I met someone else who wanted to have a baby immediately (and at this point in 40ish time, let's be honest, it would have to be immediately)? I DO NOT WANT THIS TO HAPPEN. I'm just saying, my brain thinks of dumb and insane things when the baby jingle bell starts to ring.

Our doula got a video of the moment after I gave birth to our second child and they laid him on me. It's embarrassing to watch, because I was out of my mind. What I mean is that there is this intoxicating, euphoric, relieving, jumbled up flood of emotions in that moment. Everything is incomprehensible and inexplicable. I was moving my head from side to side and making a ton of wailing noises and saying, "Oh, my baby!" Like, it's hilarious and just crazy. In moments like these, you are stripped down (literally) to your most vulnerable, raw self. I will never experience that moment of wild bliss ever again.

I'm not having any more babies. But sometimes I think I want to.

What Would Happen If I Snuck Back On the Scene?

I'm done with this.

I was.

But sometimes I'm not. 

Every once in a while, I want to say a thing. 

Just a thought that comes to me that I want to put out into the ether.

Last night, lying next to my husband, enveloped by his freckled arm, I thought: I'm so glad all those other possibilities didn't work out.