Looking for the silver lining

One of my clients had a beautiful baby yesterday and sent me a gorgeous photo of the two of them curled up in bed. It is so lovely to get this little window into my clients' blissful experiences and I do feel very blessed to have that bond with them. One of my friends sent me the photo of her 12 week scan which was exciting too. A day of babies - and all them other peoples' - always throws up interesting and challenging emotions for me. I've noticed that recently as we creep towards three years of trying, the intensity of my feelings has lessened and I feel much more at peace with things. But we're only human and sometimes it gets exhausting to listen to a group of friends talking about their second, third or fourth pregnancies or, worse still, complaining and moaning about pregnancy or their babies. I've learnt to be much more careful with myself on this one and just smile and either mentally disengage (basically stop listening!!), change the subject or if it's real grizzling, walk away in the politest way possible! I try to avoid situations where there are big groups of new mums or pregnant women meeting socially whereas I used to walk headlong into them and suffer the heartache.

Most of all, I have learnt to treat every day that I have with R just the two of us as a blessing (it seems to me we have a choice - we can either angst that it's another day without a baby or feel blessed it's a day we get to spend together). Yes, we want to have a baby with all our hearts but we also know that life will change completely when a baby does put in an appearance. So we enjoy our Sunday lie-ins, our leisurely evenings cooking and chatting, our freedom to go out of a night (not that we make use of this freedom much at all - being relatively boring old farts) and the long stretches of time spent relishing each other's company. I think we'll take to the whole parenting thing pretty easily having had lots of training with siblings, neices, godchildren and...pets...and having done loads of reading about attachment parenting and witnessing the incredible benefits in our family circle.

But nonetheless, if the cloud has a silver lining, it's that we got to work all this stuff out beforehand, rather than found out the hard way that we had differences in opinion. Which as far as I can tell, we don't...but I guess we'll have to wait to know for sure!