Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.
I got an email from Australia the other day. My cousin lives there (she's the cool one in the family, btw)and frequently shares pictures of her adorable daughter. Before she became a mom, though, she and her husband did a lot of traveling. Not like the, "Hi! We're in Hawaii eating at a chain restaurant!" kind, but the "Here are the elephants we rode" kind.
The whole time I was pregnant with Ironflower, I lived vicariously through their emails as they lived in Nepal, then traveled the world before getting married. I would daydream about visiting Africa or Chile myself, before driving to Dairy Queen for the chocolate ice cream cones that Ironflower demanded at regular intervals. Sometimes I even researched the latest place they'd been, just to try to wrap my head around the pictures they'd emailed.
It was great entertainment as I transitioned from a frequent partier/community theater participant/art festival volunteer/road tripper to a woman who spent Saturday night organizing her book shelves and watching a House Hunters marathon. Much as I wanted children, I was shocked when I got pregnant with Ironflower. I had been sure I would have fertility issues and that it would take me years to start a family. Instead it happened so quickly that I had a rough time adjusting. It didn't help that I hardly knew anyone with kids and that Hot Guy was working out of town for a long stretch of the pregnancy. I was pretty lonely, actually. So the emails helped me feel connected as well as still part of the larger world.
Now I'm looking forward to the email that tells me about the birth of their second child. Although I wouldn't mind some more pictures with elephants. I dig the elephants. But I pretty much like all the pictures I get in my email, which is why I chose the video below:
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