Thinking About the Pre-Baby Days

I’ve been working in the house over the past few days…moving furniture, cleaning out drawers, organizing closets…doing some things I have neglected over the past four-and-a-half years.  It’s gotten me thinking about the pre-baby days.

When our girls started to become mobile, around 8 months or so, we started tinkering with the furniture arrangement in our den.  The craziest setup was when we had the couch and love seat facing the walls, as we were afraid the girls would climb on them and fall off the seat…or worse, the back. 

For the past couple of years, we’ve had all the seating lining the walls, to create the largest play space for the girls.  Every night, after they went to bed, Hubby would move the big chair to a normal position in front of the TV.  Thank goodness the chair has sturdy legs, and we have good carpet…I’m pretty sure he’s logged at least a mile back and forth across the den.

This weekend, we moved the furniture almost back to pre-baby days.  We still have the girls’ kitchen and a couple of toy shelves in the den, so things aren’t quite on-center, but the couch, the love seat, and the big chair are more or less where they belong.

For the first couple of days, I kept looking over there, thinking how “grown-up” it felt.  Sophistication is relative!  And it makes me think of watching ballgames on lazy Saturdays, and evenings spent on the couch with my laptop when I was pregnant, researching baby gear and picking out the bedding for the nursery.

After we worked in the den, one of the things I did was clean out the bread box in the kitchen.  No, I haven’t been growing a science project for the past four years...the bread box has been home to all my chargers for my phone and cameras, along with a stack of vacation pictures from roughly 2005 to 2008.

Of course I had to flip through the pictures, and what a trip it was down Memory Lane!  There were pictures of Hubby and me in San Francisco.  That is our favorite vacation to date.  Although the pictures don’t begin to do justice to the beauty of the Napa Valley landscape, I was reminded what an amazing place it is. 

There were pictures of Hubby and me two of our favorite places in NYC…the northernmost areas in Central Park, and walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.  There were pictures of my dad and me in Las Vegas.  And there were pictures of the last trip Hubby and I took before I got pregnant, to New Orleans.

How I long to hop aboard a jet plane, eat a mix of fine meals and hole-in-the-wall discoveries, walk and shop and stop and nap as we pleased.

But I’ve been reminded over the past few days…each phase, each stage­ is a gift.  We enjoy it as best we can in the present, and then we have the gift of fond memories in the future.

And then we look forward to future adventures, which will be made even sweeter by who we are – and what we have – in the present.