Three Kids, check. Husband, check. Mortgage, check. Graduating college, check check... I think I did it backwards.

I asked Husband Face how many other graduates he thought were thrown up on before the ceremony. It is SDSU, hangovers are not uncommon.

In September 2008 I was walking the proverbial halls of SDSU with two babies in my uterus. As a sat down for my first class of the semester I thought to myself, "I have been sitting in classes for nearly 6 years and have never failed one, why am I still here?" The class was "Writing for TV" and as the Professor spoke I realized that I already knew this information. When the class dismissed I made a beeline for my counselors office. After literally 45 emails between five different counselors/teachers/academia big wigs the remaining three classes I needed to graduate were suddenly "found" in my lengthy college history. While a normal student would be mad that she/he was graduating with 160 units, compared to the normal 120 (nearly a year and a half of additional education), I truly did not mind. Honestly the only reason I even went to the counselors office that day was because it was bloody hot outside and I knew she would have a nice cool beverage (a little water cup and drinking fountain) waiting. Also I had been to FIVE different colleges and was just asking for the powers at be to royally screw up. Did I mention that I genuinely enjoy school? Not only is it a day out of the house and away from children throwing up or throwing tantrums, I was among adults, well future adults. Without a doubt I was always amongst the most well spoken and studious students, which quite frankly isn't a huge accomplishment at an institution that periodically has syphilis outbreaks. But hell I like feeling smart amongst my peers and not just around small children. Me at SDSU is like being the tallest midget.

Long story short, I have been done with college courses for a year now but just "walked" this past weekend. I showed up to SDSU surprised at how weird it felt to be there. It was like running into an old friend that you hadn't seen in awhile. Unfortunately I had zero human friends there. Being away for a year did not bode well for my popularity. I ran into one person I took a class with a few years back with and was ecstatic to see someone I recognized which in turned scared the person away. The ceremony was fairly long which was fine by me. I sat alone in peace and quiet listening to the soothing sound of professors gripping over budget cuts (I think CA needs my tax guy, he can fix anything) and hundreds of names being called. When it was finally my turn to walk it was a genuine bittersweet moment. The lady reading my name was my favorite professor (which made me long to sit in one of her classes) and she read it with extra enthusiasm. I realize that furthering my education is not in my immediate future, and that saddens my soul. I am trying to be normal and not do 1,000 things with my life. School was difficult enough with just K-Dog and Husband Face to look after, the twins would experience significant neglect if I went back for my Masters. I would like if they did not have severe mental issues directly caused by me.

My 5 seconds of recognition.

Husband Face and I enjoying the kid free moments.

"Kiss me dammit, and make it look cute."

My "little" brother came with flowers. A few minutes after giving my the flowers he asked for them back and wanted to take several pictures of him giving me the flowers, to document his kindness. It looks like we are going to some type of strange prom.

After the ceremony we had family and friends over to "our" pool complex. I dressed the children in matching SDSU apparel, it was precious. Overall, a good day. However, after staying out to late with my girlfriends that night I got sick, as usual. If I do not treat my sleep deprived body very gently I immediately get sick. I had to work all day (the second day of a new job I don't really have the clout to call in sick yet) and then we had my sister-in-laws graduation party immediately after my shift. We march into the party (anywhere we go looks like an effin' parade) and after about a half hour of me infecting the masses with my germs I crash in her bed, for two hours. Awesome. Happy Graduation Steffers, we of course forgot to get you a present but I am going to go sleep in your bed, leaving my screaming children to fend for themselves. Enjoy.

Now all of the kids are varying from grouchy sick to deathly ill and Husband Face is in quite the mood after being stuck with the kids while I was working and dying of baby/sleep deprived flu all weekend. I told him I am "stuck" with children all the time and it is a wonder I am as personable and great as I am.

That would be my son playing by the pool unattended.

What? This isn't a bathing suit?

In the beginning...

K-Dog 2006, then K-Puppy

That title could be misleading. And while I have strong opinions about Genesis, let's save that for another day.
As I was looking through my college work, I stumbled across a paper I wrote while I was prego with K-Dog in 2006. I wrote it for a Journalism class I was taking, to my surprise I recieved an A. I figured why not post the paper on this medium, so I don't have to rewrite history? I was literally a month away from having K-Dog when I finished this paper and so unsure about what I was doing. Reading it now is surreal. First of all, my writing abilities have vastly improved. I am not sure if I was reading a draft, but apparently 2006 Rachel did not know how to punctuate. Also, my storytelling abilities lack a certain sarcasm that I thought was always present. Apparently 2009 Rachel is much more cynical than 2006 Rachel, not a huge surprise. It is jolty and needs a severe edit job, but I resisted. Aside from a few grammar issues and changing names, I left the article intact. I wish I could tell her (Rachel 2006) what life is like now. I would say,"In 2009 you have three kids, a college degree, a job, a yappy dog, a mortgage, a husband and no cable." She wouldn't believe me, Rachel 2006 loved TV. Hopefully this will entertain you.

Meet Rachel circa 2006:
Sitting on the bathroom floor on a hot summer night I studied the directions on the back of the pregnancy test. A horizontal line was good, a vertical line was bad. But, which way do you hold the stick? Obviously this test was wrong. After spending $105 on various pregnancy tests, convinced that my original Target brand test was “cheap,” I was at the end of my excuses, I was pregnant.

This is a story about love. Not a love story between a hormonal boy and girl. A clash in expectations and reality. A struggle between moral obligations and missing opportunities. It is a story about a father loving his daughter in spite of her fall from grace. An unlikely tale of two different people who end up with one another. Unexpectedly falling in love with an unborn baby, who has been kicking my ribs for the past 8 months. A story about family support, friends’ encouragement and learning life lessons by persevering through trials.

I didn’t know his middle name. I think he may have told me once, but I apparently didn’t find it interesting enough to file in long-term memory. This was the man, no let’s face it we are both kids, whom I would be, no matter what happened between us, attached to the rest of my life and I couldn’t remember his full name. My biggest fears had been realized. There was the very real possibility that I could end up one of those people in the trashy mall, with a baby on her hip, looking at tube tops, while yelling at her baby’s daddy to get a job.

I am not going to lie. I did not catch Boyfriend Face’s eye across a crowded room and the stars did not align the first time we spoke. There was nothing special about the way I met Boyfriend Face from any other guy I had dated. Boyfriend Face recalls the evening as “Ray talking about the importance of seeing ‘The Godfather’ and me trying to shut her up long enough to get another beer.” We met through a mutual friend over spring break. Our first kiss occurred in a cheap motel in the Arizona desert. His eyes were bloodshot from drinking and I had sunburn. Not exactly a Romeo and Juliet story. Which later on worked in our favor, no flame burned out. I always liked Boyfriend Face for himself, not because of some butterfly in my stomach, my butterfly (which is a nice way to say morning sickness) would come three months after that first magical meeting.

I was raised in an upper middle class family. My dad had sent me to a private Christian school since kindergarten. He wanted me to be taught good morals and proper behavior, along with all of the religious tenants a child could take in. And it worked. Throughout high school I never drank, smoke, had sex. I worked at a movie theatre and did well in classes. I respected my elders and never questioned what I was being taught. An ideal student and daughter.

The night I told Boyfriend Face, the soon to be father with the missing middle name, was the same night I made my little Target trip and sat for several hours in the tiny corner in my bathroom. I waited until 3 a.m. to tell him. Partially because I wanted him to sober up before I “rocked his world,” in the least sexual sense, but also in part because I was scared to death. As I sat him down, I thought how strange it was that a college boys’ room smells like dirty socks and stale air, while my room was like walking into Bath and Body Works. While I fought the urge to steer the impromptu meeting towards any other subject, I quietly said, “I’m pregnant.” Much to my surprise and fury he started laughing. Suspecting that he was still a bit tipsy, I asked him how much he had to drink, but he assured me that this was a conversation that he would not forget come sunrise. After his laughter subsided I told him that I had every intention of keeping the baby. He had no objections and assured me that he would never ask me to have an abortion. As we sat in silence for a few minutes, which dragged like hours, he broke the tension by suggesting we become more serious about our “us.” Boyfriend Face told me, with a slight grin, “Rachel Louise we are going to stay up all night and chat.” All I could think was, “Damn, we did exchange middle names.”

Abortion was never an option. The reason of my anti-abortion stance had little to do with the years of half dead babies I had been shown in church/school. I was not trying to make some statement by carrying my child full term. My pregnancy was not meant to be a slap in the face to anyone I had known. Honestly, I was way too scared to have an abortion. The thought made me queasy. I knew I would not be able to go through with it. I am not a big fan of hospitals or procedures. I was a chicken. A baby was not necessarily the problem, it was everything else about the situation.

Easing our way into the world of pregnancy, we told our friends first. Boyfriend Face’s friends slowly realized that he was not going to be around every other night to get high and drink a 30 pack with them. My old friends from Christian High School immediately suggested I should go through an adoption agency which was creepier to me than an abortion. I just disappear for 9 months and then come back with no child, a little too retro for my taste. Neither side was supportive, both parties had different ideas of what my life should look like. Eventually they would come to understand and be happy for me. But at that point it was hard to get excited about a baby when you feel that alone.

The next few weeks went by quickly. Knowing that telling our parents was going to be a difficult and delicate task, we made the executive decision to wait until we each had been introduced and acclimated with each others families before we shattered their dreams of their flawless first-born children.

In the coming months Boyfriend Face and I grew closer than I had imagined possible. Luckily we got along swimmingly and rarely argued, in spite of my constant bickering about the temperature or my jeans shrinking in the wash. Our first doctor appointment with the OBGYN was a very intrusive and uncomfortable process full of inappropriate probing. But as we looked to the screen and saw our baby and heard a heartbeat for the first time we knew that we had done the right thing for us. Now we just had to figure out the rest of our lives.

Being the intelligent people we are we decided that telling all of the parents in one day was going to be the easiest, you know the faster you rip off the Band-Aid theory. When we told the parental units of our first-born child, we were received with looks of horror and disbelief. His parents looked at me like I was the whore of Babylon and my dad could not look at me in the eyes. I cried before I even had a chance to get the “P” word out of my mouth. I knew how much this was going to ruin my dad’s perfect image of me. I was no longer the flawless daughter who excelled in anything she tried to do. My dad kept on saying, “I don’t know what to say to you.” Then he said the “D” word. The absolute worst thing to hear from your dad is that he is disappointed in you.

After that, it was a whirlwind of life altering decisions and milestone moments. I had already decided to stay in school as long as I was physically able and transfer to San Diego State University the semester after the baby was born. Boyfriend Face and I decided to move in together. This caused quite the commotion from the families. My dad said that, “I was living in sin, and should wait until we were married.” I did not remind him that I was going to be an unwed mother, why pour salt in the wound? I assumed people would be happy for us, moving towards marriage, but not being too hasty, I was horribly wrong. Holidays were the worst. Trying to sift through the endless questions of what our plan was and when we were getting married, when all I wanted was some turkey and mashed potatoes. All I wanted to say to these people, who were just showing concern for me was, “I am 20, unwed and pregnant, do you think I have a plan? Obviously planning does not work for me.”

Marriage is not in the immediate future for Boyfriend Face and I. Yes we do want to get married and we are raising this child together, but I am a girl who wants a big fancy wedding, not some thrown together ceremony in a banquet hall after a high school prom. We rushed into the whole raising a kid thing, we figured we could wait a while on the marriage deal. Plus, wedding pictures while being pregnant are too white trash for us.

When we moved in together I should have been warned. I knew that boys were messy and smelled funny, but that I just the tip of the iceberg. Boys sweat, itch and fart, a lot. And they are really hairy. I called my boyfriend “Kong” for three days after we saw the movie. At first he thought I was complimenting other body parts, but then I started to pet his chest hair and he caught on. My advice to anyone living with a boy is the glade automatic puffy thing. It releases good smells every five minutes. This ingenious invention has saved my relationship.

Overall I have had an easy pregnancy. The first three months I took more naps than an old man on Sunday and was nauseous all of the time. Apparently whoever coined the term morning sickness was a man, because I was sick all day. I was not one of those ladies who was online all day looking at nurseries. I was not even excited about the baby until I found out it was a boy. Once I could stop referring to my child as “it” and transition to “baby boy” the whole experience became more real. My second trimester, months four, five and six, for the pregnancy impaired, were a self-induced hell. I did not want to stop working until I had to, but I was a waitress at a busy restaurant so I forced myself to leave the glamor of the business. At first I was excited to be able to put all of my energy into school, then I became extremely bored. Which brought on the compulsive cleaning. Every square inch of our new apartment was organized. I was a crazed pregnant lady with a label maker, nothing escaped my fury. My closet was color coordinated and my sink never had a dish in it. My neighbors think I am a nut job because I sweep my porch everyday. During the third trimester moving was not as brisk or simple as it was in previous months. This helped with the “nesting,” but it has not completely disappeared.

When I ask Boyfriend Face about my pregnancy, he usually responds politely. If I complain that my jeans don’t fit he says, “You fit in your jeans fine baby, it’s just you and Kaeden don’t fit.” Other times he looks at the scale when I am on it in the mornings and make remarks such as, “Wow you still have a month to go and you have gained 35 pounds!”

The first trial in our relationship came when we discovered that we were having a boy. We were both excited. The next thing to do is name the child. Giving two opinionated kids the responsibility of naming a person should be illegal. They should have professionals for this type of thing. I would have paid good money to avoid child name discussions. We fought for weeks about names. Our friends gave us lists and my grandma bought us a book. We searched the Internet but we could not agree. He liked names with “weird letters.” If you were not inside my boyfriend’s head you would not know that he considered X, Y, Z, Q, K and several other letters weird. This child is still nameless, but I will not have a son named Wolverine, so the debate continues.

Love is confusing. While I know my family and friends love me I think that sometime failed expectations and moral standards cloud that love. Boyfriend Face is horrified that my water may break in our bed, I think that may cloud his love. I know that this child will put me through a world of hurt in a few weeks and the coming years may be difficult for us, but I do not think my love will ever be clouded. But that could be the hormones talking.

First time holding K-Puppy after 24hours of labor, 4 hours of pushing, and a vacuum attached to my vajayjay.

I was 20 here, not 14. I look/sound/act like a child.

Husband Face (then Boyfriend Face) changing his first diaper ever. I wish this picture had sound. I am yelling at the nurse to take a picture, Boyfriend Face is traumatized from just seeing childbirth and does not want his picture taken, I told him to suck it we are capturing memories.

Ok, Rachel 2009 here, a few things:
-Childbirth was WAY worse than I could have expected, I do still love K-Dog though.
-Those freinds and family ended up being the best support. I would be unable to function without them.
-Boyfriend Face is now Husband Face, had a huge wedding and wish now we went to Vegas and saved the cash.
-I wish I only gained 35 pounds, total on that pregnancy was 65 pounds.