I'm feeling tied down

Sometimes K gets the 'Now that we're having a baby, there are many things we can't do' blues. I don't get these. There are things we can't do, but also many things we can do now that we've never cared about before - they are just more fun with children. Like the Cherry Blossom Festival going on for the next few weeks in DC. We've never gone before. But I think I want to take our children. And K wants to do a corn maze, which we've never done before, not even when we lived in corn country in IA, but she wants to take the kids. So a whole new world is opening up to us.

But the thing that's been getting me down lately is that I want to travel. We've been really lucky to be able to travel a lot since college. I wouldn't even call it lucky - we worked hard and saved our money very strictly so that we could afford to travel a lot. We've been to 4 countries, we've been all over the US, we have a yearly college friends reunion somewhere in the country. We're always planning to go somewhere. But now we're not planning to go anywhere anytime soon. It's not that we don't think you can travel with children - you totally can. My parents took a family vacation every year and that's how I saw much of the US growing up. I'm excited to travel with our children. It's the money.

We were thinking we might go on an Alaskan cruise before the baby turns 2, since the baby would be essentially free. But now we're thinking an Alaskan cruise costs about as much as it might cost us to get pregnant again - or maybe getting pregnant will cost even more since I'll be older this time. We had also talked about going back to our honeymoon location, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, for our fifth wedding anniversary in March next year. Without knowing how much it will cost to get pregnant, we can't really justify spending money on a big vacation. Even if we vacation in our typical cheap fashion, it's still thousands of dollars that we really shouldn't spend.

There just won't be as much money to save as there was - with child care and added insurance costs and whatever expenses that we don't even know about yet along with reduced paychecks during the 5-6 months of maternity leave between us.

We'd really like to go down to FL to introduce the baby to our grandparents that don't travel, but that's not exactly a vacation so I don't count it. Visiting family is a duty, an obligation, and sometimes work, it's not a vacation. We'll hopefully get together with our college friends for Labor Day, but it would be nice for one of them to plan it since we'll be busy with the baby, but that's unlikely. And strangely, getting our friends to commit in advance is next to impossible even though they all say they want to go, so planning it really is a lot of work.

I've latched onto our anniversary next year, almost a year away. We didn't do anything for our anniversary this year, trying to save money, and we always go away for our annivesary. I've said many times that we must get away next year, even if only for one night. So the thing getting me through is that I know in a year we will get to go somewhere for just one night. That's not a lot to hold onto.