My husband and I had a plan for the next few years. It was a good plan. It had us paying off all of our debts (including my student loans), aggressively saving for retirement, and setting aside enough cash for a 20% down payment on the home of our dreams, AND it left room for a few dream vacations–New Year’s in Argentina, a trip to the Dominican Republic with my best friend, and a cruise to Alaska.

God, I loved that plan.

And then…

Then…

Something unexpected happened* (something wonderful, but earth-shattering) that has totally shifted our priorities, rendering our perfect, amazing plan irrelevant given our new circumstances.

My husband is an logical, by the book, actually-reads-and-follows-the-instructions-on-the-George-Foreman-grill engineer. He lives and dies by the PLAN. I am a somewhat neurotic, tightly wound Type A who hates nothing more than uncertainty and not having a PLAN. I can say with complete certainty that the demise of our plan has rocked us to our very foundations, far more (and this sounds strange, but it’s true) than the prospect of our impending parenthood.

The question in our house over the past few weeks has been what do we do now?

Yeah, it’s a doozy.

We sat down and talked about it yesterday and came up with a series of steps we’ll need to take in order to develop a new plan.

• Throw out the old plan. Acknowledge that it’s not going to work anymore. Make peace with the fact that it no longer fits our lives. Accept that life is not going to unfold in a series of orderly steps in accordance with our Excel spreadsheet. Put simply, let it go. This won’t happen instantly (at least, not for us–we were pretty damn attached to our plan), and that’s OK. The important thing is that we recognize that it needs to happen and we’re getting there.
• Take a fresh look at your circumstances. What has changed or will change? Are there new boundaries or limitations? Have concerns arisen that weren’t previously a factor? Do a mental survey and figure out the lay of the land, ’cause it’s a whole new ball game.
• Identify new priorities. Before this bombshell, our biggest priority was… well, it was ourselves. We were focused on paving the way for what WE wanted, what WE needed, what WE thought was important. We wanted to be totally debt-free before we bought a house. We wanted to contribute the full amount to both of our 401k plans. Now that our “we” is expanding from two to three, all that’s going to have to change. We have to think about things like whether I’ll work or stay home, starting a college fund, and buying a house a year ahead of (our old) schedule.
• Determine the steps you need to take in order to reach your new goals. This is the actual “making a new plan” phase. (We’re so not there yet–we’re still stuck on “throw out the old plan”, but that’s OK. We have time.) We need to figure out what we need to do in order to support our new priorities and achieve the goals we’ve set for our expanding family.

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to toss a beloved life plan? How did you handle it? Any advice for two still-newlyweds trying to make sense of all this?

* I don’t want my website to turn into a detailed chronicle of my pregnancy (which would bore everyone except my mom and my mother-in-law) so I’m going to do my best to maintain my focus on life purpose, goals, body image, and personal development. If, however, you’d enjoy staying updated on this whole baby thing, leave a comment or email me and I’ll send you the link to the blog my husband and I started for our family and friends.

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