You?re pregnant. Holy f*ck.
You exit the bathroom, tell your partner the happy news and enjoy a private celebration. That night, you lie in bed, hand on belly, staring up at the ceiling, experiencing a full-blown existential and financial crisis. The next day, you enter research mode.
But the initial glimmer of financial curiosity is often fleeting, because sometime during a woman?s second trimester, she enters mama-bear mode: a state of being wherein thoughts go from pragmatic to primitive. Steam-cleaning the curtains seems more urgent than looking into Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs), and spending your life?s savings on a Restoration Hardware nursery set and a $2,000 stroller sounds like a practical allocation of funds. Yup. Been there, bought that. Blame the hormones. Blame the algorithms. Blame the ads. But as your belly expands, your inner dialogue starts to chatter and all it says is, Focus on the baby. Nothing matters but the baby. Just keep doing things and acquiring things for the baby.
Then you have the baby. During the early days of new motherhood, it?s legitimately impossible to give a shit about anything other than figuring out what exactly goes into keeping an infant alive. You learn to swaddle, master different shushing techniques and attempt new modes of feeding. You become a human mattress and vomit receptacle. You change diapers full of mustard-yellow shit (theirs) and diapers full of crimson-red blood (yours). You align your rhythm with your ba...