If all goes to plan, we’re having a baby this week.

It’s a week that- for yeeeears- I’ve been alternately avoiding and panicking about and anticipating joyfully and lately… Googling endlessly (“WHAT DOES LABOR ACTUALLY FEEL LIKE, THOUGH???”). And here it is. Like literally, I’m having contractions as I write this.

We delayed even remotely discussing babies until we were married for half a decade. Things were just too damn good to mess with: we were holding hands and running around the world and starting businesses and living a life I’d only ever dreamed of before. And even though I’ve always wanted kids, actually taking the leap felt like the scariest idea. So we kept living in our two-person dream world.

Until two years ago, when I got a lump in my breast and went through months of biopsies and finally a surgery and even though it was benign, it put a little fire under my butt to do the things I wanted to do- faster- because no days are promised us. For me this meant getting my butt to work — Shooting one or two weddings a week. Traveling to a new state twice a month or more (sometimes three in one weekend- what is wrong with us?). Ramping up Moveable Feast and popup dinners and seeking the next location. Spending a month working nonstop in Thailand developing our next product (and hearing people say “oh how nice you get a vacation!” hahahaa wait what is a vacation?). SO MUCH WORK– except it didn’t feel like work, because it made my soul so happy.

But then I remembered: BEBES. I have always wanted bebes. A whole other side to life that we’d been putting off because this side was so damn nice– but what was work really FOR, anyway? The shine of the hustle started to fade a bit when I thought about the other things that were getting pushed aside.

So now we’re about to leap off a cliff into parenthood. The party of two is morphing into a party of three. And while most of my fear has given way to a deep peace about what lies ahead, and we’re buoyed by the endless waves of encouragement and wisdom from our community (seriously… where did you guys all come from? Why are you so good to us?)… I’m still wondering:

How does this work?
How do you have a kid and run a business and keep your marriage together and the pets alive and your sanity intact?

Are you running a business and raising kiddos? Will you share your biggest pieces of wisdom with us as we head into the fray? But like seriously, we wanna hear… Our whole life philosophy is to run TOWARDS things and not AWAY from them– so the wisdom of everyone who has gone before us is especially valuable right now. I’ll be coming back to them time and again as we forge new paths for ourselves in the upcoming months and years.

To taking leaps: may they ever scare us, and may we ever catch each other.

photos by Kendra K. The best.