Ready or Not

Right after Jeff and I got married we bought a mini-farm in a small town. This is crazy because we are both city people. We inherited chickens and goats and later added the donkeys. Our house is what you call a work in progress. We decided to basically re-do everything. We were taking our time and paying for things as we went along. Jeff is really good with wood work so we got rid of all the doors and trim work and were replacing it with oak. The place was a complete mess!!! We had so much work to do that you just didn't know where to start.
I was 36 and we wanted to get started on a family. We thought it might take awhile for me to get pregnant but in less than a month we were expecting. I loved being pregnant!!! Yes I had nausea and vomiting and my back always seemed to hurt but I truly loved the entire pregnancy. The only thing that sent my stress level through the roof was I was having a c-section in 1 week and we had no carpet, there was still some dry wall to hang and finish and the nursery wasn't quite ready!!! I was an emotional wreck until the day a large white van pulled up to the house and about 10 mexicans jumped out with our carpet. As a first time mom I wanted everything to be just perfect. That sounds so funny now when I think about it - perfect?? What was perfect was our little girl. The first time I got to hold her I was so emotional and the feeling of pure love that only a mother can feel for their child just consumed me. I remember right before going home the nurse came into the room to go over discharge papers.. she talked about post partum depression and at the time I was like... lady you are nuts, I don't believe in that at all and just let me go home. I will admit, there was one time during my first week home that for about 2 hours I think maybe I was going through that a little... it didn't last long.
3 years later we were blessed again with another perfect little girl. So here we are... 2 older parents both working night shift trying to give our girls the best possible life. We are older than most of our girls friends parents and we are tired a lot from lack of sleep and it takes us a little while to pop out of bed in the morning with our little aches and pains but we make it work and our girls are very happy and loving and what else is really important. I will admit it is so much harder being a parent than what I thought, but I would not trade it for anything! Today I was putting the girls in the car to take them to the babysitters (which we have to do once a week) and I looked at my 5 year old and her nose was scratched up and her glasses were broken, "Abby, what happened! "Nothing Mommy, Caroline (2) just sat her butt down on my face" .... Priceless....