Is starting medical school compatible with raising a family?
I am a twenty-seven-year-old who is applying to medical school next year. I would start in Fall of 2013. By the time I start medical school I will be twenty-nine and my partner will be thirty-seven. We will most likely be in a new city far from family and friends, and our main income will be from school loans and scholarships.
Here’s our problem: we really want to have children.
Standing at the brink of thirteen
There’s an endearing, exasperating naivete to this age. She wears eyeliner but doesn’t wash her hair without reminders. Sometimes she leaves the house looking like a million bucks. Other times I turn her around before she hits the breakfast table because I cannot stand to look at the same sloppy gym shorts for even one meal more.
Taking a trip out of the country without my kid rocked my world
I feel I’ve done a great job (or at least, one that I am very happy with) maintaining a sense of ME since becoming a mother, but it’s good to see that my son also has a sense of HIM that doesn’t depend on whether or not I’m there, physically guiding him through it. It’s a comforting thing to know that if you leave for a day or seven that your child will keep trucking on — and to know that he or she will also be over the moon when you get back.
An easy fix for slipping bra straps
Call me a prude, but I really can’t stand it when my bra strap starts to wander, letting the world know just what color and condition said bra is in. (Answer: generally not great.) In fact, it drives me nuts. I don’t want to have to constantly be adjusting and digging around. It’s just not… dignified.
The journey of trying to conceive with my wife has changed the way I identify as a mom
Even though Carly and I knew we would want to have children together, we never had serious how-to discussions until last summer. I had a dream that I was carrying Carly’s baby, and I wanted it so badly that I was crying about it as I shared my dream with her. This sparked our baby planning. Ideally, we would choose in vitro fertilization (IVF), pick a sperm donor, have Carly’s egg fertilized, and I would carry her baby.
How can I maintain ownership of my body while I’m pregnant?
I’m experiencing a bit of a problem — it seems like everyone wants to “own” my baby. What I mean by this is the off-hand, “Hey that’s my grandson in there, be careful,” when I walk down the stairs, or “My nephew should have an apple,” when I’m picking out my lunch. I know it is coming from a place of love but I’m struggling both with the immediate reaction of “What if I don’t want a freaking apple?” and the lingering feeling of flags getting staked on my belly from people claiming my child before he is even born?
Talk to me about your exciting pregnancy-friendly sports, and post-baby sport motivations
I recently had taken up breakdance, boxing, and roller derby in one go (sometimes all three consecutively on the same weekday evenings). I just found out I’m pregnant, and the downside to the pregnancy is that I’ll have to put some of my sporting activities on hold. How have other moms found the motivation after baby arrived to get back into sports again?
Our great adventure: traveling and starting a family
We left Seattle/Tacoma to try out Eastern Oregon rural living a few years ago, thinking that we would probably settle down and start a family shortly thereafter. We became small-town homebodies of a sort, and if there was ever a form of “adult nesting” out there, I think we were trying to practice it. We even rented a larger home expecting that the guest room would eventually turn into a nursery. All of this completely great because it was a future that we both truly wanted — a family life.