Changes.

I got a job. It's the one I've been talking about, the perfect one (for right now) that will allow me to work from home most of the time. We're looking into part-time daycare. Just so I have maybe two or three days a week I know I can work uninterrupted. I start in July, after a three-day training in Atlanta. I'll be taking Adelyn (and my mom) with me.

Even though my life has changed in all of the biggest ways possible over the last year--pregnant, married, crazy full-time job then jobless, becoming a parent, having a new name, a new apartment, a new lifestyle--my life feels mostly the same as it always has. People keep asking me if I feel different, now that I'm married, and for some people I know marriage is a huge step. But for us it wasn't so much a step as a gradual thing that just happened. We were married, essentially, when we moved in together two years ago. Our bank accounts became one. When we found out about Adelyn there might as well have been a preacher standing over us while we we sat on the couch staring at the positive pregnancy test, making us say our "I do's." The wedding was just a celebration of all of these things (and it was also the best weekend of my life), and something we would have done a year ago had it not been for the planet orbiting my ever-growing belly.

One of my biggest problems over the past seven years has been a nagging desire to do more. See more, be more, experience more. Even when I know it's not feasible, and even when I know, deep down, I'm happiest where I am, a part of me always wonders what else is out there. I'm not talking about Jason. I'm talking about my self-worth and my career, my day-to-day life and the stories I will one day tell my grandchildren.

Because if you get rid of all of the expectations you have for your life, it really forces you to appreciate what you do have. And those expectations, for me, are plentiful. I spent a lot of time being sick growing up, and I think that forced me to constantly wish and hope for something else, to lie in bed and plot out my next adventure, to take a look around me and ask, "What else?"

Jason and I are both guilty of this. We spend a lot of time--especially after we've been drinking--sitting around dreaming up what's next. We know all about our dream house (in the country, with a writing desk overlooking a garden in a big, warm library with all of my favorites, and an expansive room above the garage with guitars lining the walls where Jason can turn up his amps as loud as his ear drums can stand it), our dream vacations, our dream life for Adelyn.

But this, this live I'm living now, is what a life is all about. I'm surrounded by love, and creation, compassion and inspiration. What more, aside from the physical, superfluous things, could one ask for? Our apartment is small but each wall is filled with pictures I love, each crevice, already, reminds me of a happy memory.

This is nothing original. Most people--especially us youngins', the ones who might have found their lives taking a sudden, drastic turn from what was expected--worry about what they'll think sixty years from now. I can't imagine what I'll think. Then again I couldn't imagine, ten years ago, being a mother.