The Honeymoon

It happens to everyone. You get back from your honeymoon full of excitement and that giddy, all -consuming love for your husband. You think that marriage is so easy! What was everyone else talking about?!? What hard work?! What in the world could be hard about living with the love of your life? It is about that time that you sit down on the toilet and fall in because the seat was left up. Or, you walk into the kitchen you just painstakingly scrubbed to see his muddy, grassy footprints across the lineoleum.

Welcome to reality.

It happens again when you have a baby. You spend nine blissful months cradling that tiny life in your womb. You dream of names, of baby grins and that wonderful, beautiful baby smell. You picture rocking and singing, long walks with the stroller on fall days, and laughter...lots and lots of baby laughter. Then, about four weeks post partum you are sitting in the rocking chair, covered in spit up and breastmilk, holding a screaming baby, and realizing that owe your poor parents an apology!

I have realized that any major change in your life can be compared to marriage and having babies. Like homeschooling for instance. You spend months planning curriculum. You daydream about building log cabins and taking nature walks. You think about Thanksgiving units complete with Pilgrim costumes... The all inclusive you by the way means...um...me.

And, like all honeymoon periods, the honeymoon ends and reality comes crashing in. Reality in the form of an insect eating baby, an almost seven year old throwing her pencil and screaming that she hates school, and your four year old dumping apple juice all over his train table and offering the explanation that "A is for apple juice".

Hello, reality.

Thankfully, like the ending of a honeymoon and the glow that only pain medication and nurses that wait on you hand and foot can bring, comes work that can be frustrating but at the same time so rewarding you wake up each day thankful for it. The marriage with the muddy footprints is still the most precious relationship in your life. That crying, screaming baby does eventually laugh and may sit still in a stroller long enough for a quick jog on a fall day. That is where I am at now. I am at that tenuous phase where the honeymoon has ended and I am realizing what I am getting myself into. I am not sure how to handle that pencil throwing almost seven year old or the baby bent on self-destruction. But, I have learned to keep the four year old busy at my side and to give lots of kisses to all three of them. I figure that is enough to build on.