Part I: Babyfever

When Shane and I were first dating, we took a trip to the Outer Banks, NC. It was a transformative time for me. My mother had just died, and I had her ashes with me to throw into the sea. Shane and I were just settling into a serious realationship, and the vacation seemed to deepen things between us. A conversation sticks out in my mind from that trip, when I told him I didn't really want kids. That conviction was softening, though. (While I was at the beach, my best friend was pregnant, and immediately after her baby boy was born, she up and had another one!)

Over the next couple of years, things were shifting in my life. Shane and I were talking about getting married, my friends' babies were growing beautifully, and I was in my mid-twenties. I was nearly finished with school, and assessing my life. Slowly, I developed a massive case of baby-fever. Shane had always teased me that he'd never have kids, and it suddenly started to make me burst into tears. He finally told me he was kidding and really did want a child with me.

We got ourselves used to the idea, and one of us talked about it a lot. I don't remember discussing it, but we knew our baby would be named Molly, after a sweet and wonderful woman who had taught art classes to both of us in college. A friend of mine called us parents-without-a-kid. She introduced me to someone as Molly's mom once when we were having a baby talk around the thrift store where we worked.

We got married, and my friends made bets with me during the showers and planning that I'd be pregnant before the wedding. I wasn't, and we were too unstable financially to really want that. We were going to have a very planned pregnancy and have no money worries. We'd wait until we could both work at home with our business. I graduated the following May, and started looking for a full-time job to work until we could support both of us with the photo and design business. We made a plan that summer that once I found a full-time job and had health insurance, we'd start trying to conceive. It was a lovely and responsible plan.

And then we immediately got pregnant.