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Family life

Wills and savings and insurance, oh my!

After getting all of this administrative stuff in order, Katie isn’t sure if she’s happy or sad about being a grown-up on paper.

By Katie Dupuis
Wills and savings and insurance, oh my!

Photo: kaisphoto/iStockphoto

I admit, I’ve been a bad blogger. Cardinal rules #1 and #2 of blogging are to blog often and be consistent — something I’ve preached a million times myself — and yet I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for almost three weeks. (August has been completely nuts, between bridal showers, baby showers, weddings and work!). Mea culpa, mea culpa. If you’re still here, I promise to make up for it in the coming weeks.

Here’s the lowdown on Soph: She’s crawling (commando-style) and babbling a mile a minute (if she’s anything like her mother, when the words start coming, they’ll never stop). She’s into EVERYTHING, with a penchant for computer cords and all things electronic, and will make a dash for the stairs whenever possible. She is quickly outgrowing her little baby tub (we don’t have a bathtub, us apartment-dwellers) and we are considering wearing raincoats to give her a bath for all the splashing. She’s still mad about books and will sit through everything from the soft, fabric Big Rex and Friends touch-and-feel book to On the Night You Were Born, our new family favourite.  

Phew. There. Now you’re all caught up. And finally, so am I, but in a completely different way. It’s hard to admit — deep breath, here goes — but over the past month, I have come to a very important realization: I am a grown-up. You’d think my first “big girl job,” as my mom called it, would have made me feel like an adult. Or maybe my first apartment, or getting engaged, or my wedding, or perhaps, I don’t know, having a baby. But no. I didn’t feel like a grown up until Blaine and I sat with our finance/insurance guy a few weeks ago to sign for life insurance, our retirement plan and Soph’s education savings (approximately 18,000 pieces of paper, in case you were wondering). Maybe it has to do with literally being an adult on paper, I don’t know. Until now it has always been about paying off and saving — school loans, wedding expenses, etc. — and now I feel a shift from paying for what we’ve already done, or what we’re doing right now, to working on the big picture for the future. Of course Sophie was the catalyst for all of this, but it was something we needed to do and I’m happy to have it checked off the master to-do list in my brain. (Okay, who are we kidding? It exists in multiple written forms, too.)

I can’t tell whether the “I’m a grown-up” declaration makes me happy or sad. I’ve never been one to get caught up on numbers — birthdays are occasions to get a pedicure and have a party, not melt down about the number of years I’ve been on the earth — so it strikes me as strange that I’m even questioning my feelings about this. The more I think about it, the more I think it has to do with Soph: Planning for my future means planning for hers, which means she’s going to grow up someday, too. Every time I pack away another set of clothes she’s outgrown, I get a glimmer of the day when I’ll pack her off to school or help her move into her first apartment or watch her walk down the aisle. Yeesh. It’s enough to make a grown girl cry.

This article was originally published on Aug 22, 2012

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