Details Schmetails

24 Weeks

Greg has been saving airline miles for years now. He travels frequently for work and he's Rainman about keeping track of the point programs. I'm so grateful one of us cares about things like taking advantage of extra curricular perks. I barely retain street signs in the neighborhood where I live. Greg can tell you his Amtrak member number by heart. Don't get me wrong, you can count on me to whip a project together to completion—I'm a capital-D-Doer—but I may have some extra screws left over when the thing is built. This is what hot glue is for. 

Within minutes, I will head to bed and wake up to get on an early train to Montreal. Like our honeymoon—our last excursion which consisted of five locations in two weeks and two European countries—Greg has planned everything as well as cleverly used his point programs for our travel and hotel. He is truly a person that is filled with a life of skills that have 'led him to this moment'. He is a natural student, pouring over research and information on all things he finds interesting and I, lucky wife, get to benefit from his hard work on home work.

I'm fundamentally different in this way. I was once a part of a potluck Thanksgiving dinner where my foodie friends knew better than to leave me to my own devices so they charged me with making simple cheese corn muffins. There are recipes for this. Lots of them. But instead, I bought a box of popular muffin mix the day-of and threw shredded cheese on top before I stuck it in the oven. The amazing thing is that I actually brought this horror to the dinner. I can still see the scene through the sepia filtered, fish-eye lens in my mind's eye. I pull back the aluminum foil and look up to see my closest friends howling and pointing at me in slow motion. These are the moments for which less emotionally stable Americans need more strict gun laws. What was I thinking? I wasn't. I knew it and I laughed right along with them. I guess I was just doing the doing. That doesn't always work when it comes to sex or good food. Or buying shoes. "What? Yellow galoshes for a job interview? Bad?" 

When we found out our lives were taking a path we didn't even know existed, Greg and I woke from our comas enough to realize things like using the airline miles we were saving for a trip to rival our honeymoon was no longer an option. We decided to attempt another version. And I'm grateful my husband has given me the gift of taking a vacation from planning our vacation. At this point in my pregnancy, I'm so exhausted from toggling between the planning and studying for our near future that it will be nice to be my old, viscerally focused self again.

I still haven't packed.