Where Does the Time Go?

I just got an email with a subject line of Can you believe it's been 2 years, Lydia A with a link to the proofs of when I graduated from BYU.  Well really when I walked.  I finished classes December of 2010 and walked April 2011.  Has it really been 2 years since I graduated college?  Where has the time gone?  It doesn't seem very long ago, but at the same time feels like a different life.  After I finished in December, I started working at an elementary school as an aide, back when I was planning to go to grad school for Speech Pathology.  I was just taking a year off to get experience and work for a bit before going back to school.  After the school year ended, I started working as a summer camp director at a daycare, which wasn't bad.  I enjoyed taking the kids on field trips and just playing all day.  When school started in the fall is another story.  They had me teaching kindergarten with no experience and or resources.  But that's a rant for another time.  I quickly learned that I did not want to be a teacher and be responsible for these kids education.  Maybe it would have been different if I had gotten a degree in Elementary Ed.  And that feeling of inadequacy started to extend to Speech Pathology as well.  Would I be a good Speech Pathologist?  Did I have what it took?  Could I help these kids?  Or would it just stress me out since there wasn't a guaranteed outcome.  Each child and case is different and requires something different.  Looking back on my time as a speech aide and watching the SLP work, I could be an SLP with the training and experience from grad school.  But is that what I wanted?  I wasn't sure anymore.  After thinking about it and talking to friends and roommates I decided that Sign Language was what I wanted to do.  Speech Pathology just didn't have that same appeal to me anymore.  I absolutely LOVED my sign language classes at BYU.  I've always liked sign language since they had us take it in middle school.  It was something that was fun, and that felt I was good at (when I was actually practicing, I've lost a lot of my sign language now).  I decided that I wanted to go back to school to study ASL and become an interpreter.  I looked into UVU and their program (since BYU doesn't have more than a few ASL classes) and their prices for tuition and was starting to look into loans to go back to school.  My roommate was going to go back for Special Ed and we were going to go to UVU together.  But then I started dating my husband and that got put on the back burner, especially when things started getting more serious.  And that roommate that was going to go back to school with me is now on a mission.  Funny how things don't work out as we plan.  After we got engaged, I decided that I didn't need the experience of working at the daycare anymore since I wasn't going back to school anytime soon and not for Speech.  So I found a new job, the same job I have now at Ingram Medical.  Its been good to me.  I'm able to work full time and make decent money, especially compared to what I was getting at the daycare, with a lot less stress and outside preparation.  This last weekend all of my dad's family got together for my grandpa's 80th birthday party.  My aunt who got me interested in Speech Pathology was asking me if I was going to go back to school.  She and everyone else was saying to go back while you're still young and its less likely you'll go back when you're older.  I don't want to go back to school.  I don't have that desire anymore.  Would it be fun to study sign language?  Sure.  But I can do that on my own.  I still have all my old books and am way below the level I was at.  I can do that on my own time.  I don't need to go back to school for that.  The main reason I was going to go back for an advanced degree is so I would be able to support myself and live on my own and be a grown up outside the Provo bubble.  Getting married has changed that.  Josh just graduated with his Bachelor's and is starting his Master's in the fall.  I've always wanted to be a mom.  That's part of the reason I didn't want to go to grad school.  I had always expected and was told by everyone else that I would get married young.  I don't think anyone expected me to graduate from BYU single.  I'm saying that to sound conceited or anything, that's just how it was and its what the expectation was.  In my parents generation, not many women graduated from BYU, and not as many as do now.  I think that's due to society and culture expectations.  Not as many women were in the workforce as there are now.  And that's another tangent for another time.  Where was I going with this?  Being a mom.  That was always the plan.  That's just it, it was always the plan for the future.  It was always off in the distance.  But its not so far in the distance anymore.  Especially now that we know we are going to stay here for the next 2 years, and that Josh got in with funding for his master's degree.  And its terrifying.  And exhilarating.  The terrifying part is that I like to plan and control things.  You can't really do that with having a baby.  It happens when it happens in the Lord's time.  I don't really like things that are out of my control.  And I have a feeling that when the time comes and we decide we want to start trying to get pregnant, that it is going to be one of those things that will be out of my control.  And that's going to be the hardest part, is to let go of that control I like to hold onto.