Show and Tell Tuesday: "When I Grow Up"

Linking-up with Andrea again for Show and Tell Tuesday.  Today's question is "what you wanted to be 'when I grow up.'" 

When this question was asked in grade school for various assignments I gave different answers.  In Kindergarten I said "singer."  Pssh, not sure where that came from.  At one point I said I wanted to be a teacher.  There was a period in middle school where I thought being a scientist would be cool (this was after I won first place at the Science fair).  In high school I was all about history and that stuck through college.  But no matter what "career" I picked to answer that question, from the bottom of my heart I knew I would be a mom first.  I assumed I would be a mom and then I could also be anything else.

Growing up, Mandy and I constantly played dolls, house, Barbies, doll house, dress-up (as mothers), etc.  We spent hours and hours in our make believe worlds pretending to be mommas.  We were regulars (known as the "Hailey Mills twins") at the local doll store and were ever expanding our doll accessory collection.  Ironically, my favorite doll was a Cabbage Patch Kid that I named Brooklyn.

Even in middle school when we were aging out of playing dolls we transitioned to drawing the floor plans of our future homes, picking kids names, and clipping the Sunday ads from the newspaper of the various items we wanted for our families.  We browsed Gymboree online just to dream about dressing our future babies.  We babysat constantly, volunteered in the nursery at church, and would sit in the park just to watch the kids play (not in a creepy way).  

Even when I was making my post-college plans and picking a program to attend for graduate school, I always considered my future career to be a transition period until I become mom.  I still feel that way.  The day I become a mom will be the first day of my real job.

Dan will be thirty in a month.  I will be 29 in August.  Relatively speaking, we are older in the sense that a lot of people our age have 1-3 kids by now.  But NYC is different.  We are different.  And although I would love to have a baby, our baby, in my arms right now, I'm okay that we still have that to look forward to.

When Dan was little he considered lots of options as well.  He said his earliest memory of what he wanted to be was a train conductor.  Adorable.