Ever since March 2007, I have felt like my life was a little bit on hold. I had reached the point at which I had originally intended to leave London, but which really only marked about a quarter of the time I would end up spending as a Londoner. And despite changing jobs and getting married between then and my eventual departure in May 2012, it really felt like my life did not change that much during those five years, and that I was constantly waiting for the move back to Vancouver to trigger that next phase. True, the job change was "big" but I was still a professional working in the same field with my career progressing as I mostly intended. The wedding was a "big" thing to plan but it really did not change our relationship in the slightest. Cheesy as it sounds we had been committed to each other since about week 3 and always knew this was where we would end up.
So, for the longest time, Keith and I lived in a nice little insulated bubble consisting of doing whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. If someone suggested a drink after work, we were game. If we were invited to a wedding in South Africa, we were game, and could turn it into a big holiday complete with game drives and luxury tented cabins. If I wanted a spa weekend with girlfriends, I booked it. If Keith wanted to go to an ale festival on a Wednesday and drink a measly 5 or 6 pints, he did so. And this lifestyle went unchanged for all those years. We were the yuppy young professionals on Northcote Road outnumbered only by the yuppy yummy mummies whose strollers were always blocking our front door.
Now, less than two years later, we seem to be constantly making lifestyle adjustments. First, we moved to Vancouver, and while I had a good support network here, I definitely missed the friends that I was used to seeing once every week rather than once every year. Go figure - people have a tendency to move on with their lives if you live a continent and an ocean apart from them for seven years. And for Keith, it was an entire blank slate to start from - job, friends, hobbies. It wasn't easy, but we did find a groove, and soon Keith's biggest complaint was that he couldn't find any place where he could get bar service (quick and efficient and more condusive to binge drinking) rather than table service (slow and much more likely to result in eating food, which really slows down the inebriation). But as soon as we found that groove, we (ok mostly I) threw another wrench in there and decided to get pregnant. 11 months later, we have a beautiful baby who is almost two months old, and are going through the biggest lifestyle change of our lives. It's a good time to restart the blogging, to document this period for my own memories, because even the reactions I had in the first week or so after Lucas arrived are quickly fading as I move on to the challenges of each next phase.
There's still plenty of whoa vomit, just no longer coming from me, and of the milk rather than the white wine variety.
