In the Meantime

When a couple is hoping to adopt a baby, life becomes an interminable, unbearable wait. Different couples deal with the wait differently, but many of them choose to do what they can to prepare now, so that they'll be that much more ready when they do finally become parents. The big thing to do is to decorate the nursery, painting the walls and buying furniture and bedding and accessories. I've tried to imagine what that's like, planning for a baby that may come in three months or thirteen years. I can't imagine it. I think it takes a little more faith than I've got right now.

I thought to myself, though, that there's got to be something I can do now to prepare for the husband and family I'll have someday. I've done quite a bit already. Since I planned on marrying younger, I took every opportunity I got to buy little household items here and there. I've got almost everything I could need for a kitchen already. I have, in fact, got quite the collection of things for the home I'll someday make.

But without an apartment or house of my own, I'm limited in how much of that I can do. There is, after all, only so much storage space in my mother's garage. So I've decided to approach things from a different angle - money. My first thought was to just save as much as I can for the future. But where's the fun in that? I'm still contributing to a more generic savings, but in a addition, I've started saving for a few specific, more fun little things. A regular savings doesn't end up being much fun. I saw in my parents' marriage how the few hundred dollars stashed away here and there ended up going toward a home repair or a new appliance or a car part.

In the words of Groucho Marx, pardon me while I have a strange interlude.

My mother was a hairstylist for most of my growing-up years. She had a shop in our home, which was nice. She brought in an income, but she was still home. I'm the youngest of four children, two of whom are male. Food never lasted long in our house, and we always bought the cheap stuff as a result. Pizza was usually out of the question because it was too expensive. But if my mom did a perm or two, there was extra money, and that frequently meant pizza. Because it was a home salon, when she did a perm, the entire downstairs would smell like perm solution. But to me, that meant pizza. I'm probably the only person on earth who craves Little Caesar's when they smell ammonium thioglycolate.

Back to my main point. I love pizza, but all too often, the money wasn't there. So I've started a little pizza fund. I figure, ten bucks here and there and before too long I'll have enough saved up to make sure that, for at least my first year of marriage, we can have pizza once a month. And wouldn't it be fun to rent a movie every week? $52 buys a year's worth of Redbox, so I'm saving for that as well. As I think of fun little indulgences, I start other mini savings.

It's not much, and it'll only end up being a couple hundred dollars. But it helps me feel like I'm doing something to work towards having a good, financially sound marriage. It gives me something to do, and it means that no matter what my future husband does for work, we can eat out every now and then. If we want to see a movie, we can see a movie. And when I'm pregnant with our first child, we'll be able to afford a 3D ultrasound.

For now, that's enough. Although, just because I haven't chosen paint colors, doesn't mean I'm not collecting color samples from the hardware store ...