There are always wishes

They call her the baby whisperer

Dench can be screaming bloody murder and then Nana C picks her up, and all is right with the world.

Back to work

Minihammer and Dench,

I have read that these feelings are universal: the pain, no matter how much you like your job, of returning to work after maternity leave. The conflict over being a working professional or a stay at home parent, or something in between. For me, the angst starts early in the day, as I slog through the traffic on the way to work and roll my mind over the memory of a sweet, smooth skinned baby, content in my lap just an hour before.

My main goal for this week was simple: do not cry at work. I would allow myself to cry in the car on the way there or way home, but no crying in the bathrooms or behind my office door or – oh please no – in front of someone. I managed it, and actually only cried once – on the way to my car at the end of the first day. It was more a release of tension than anything else – though unfortunately I got totally busted by a colleague who was leaving at the same time. Still -  I claim success!

I’ve had some experience, now, with the return to work after leave. I think it was harder to start work and send Minihammer to daycare the first time around, last April – mostly because that series of months had a difficult convergence of events. We were in the process of buying (and fixing) a house, and as a result I went from wanting a new job to needing one. Unlike my prior tenure at a company where I had been for almost a decade, I didn’t know a soul at my new job.  I was filling a newly created role, which meant in many ways that no one, including me, knew exactly what I would be doing. I was several months pregnant, but not everyone knew it. I’d been working from home for a few years and had no recent experience with things as seemingly simple as dressing for the workplace. As fate would have it, that first week, I was also sick with one of the worst sinus infections I’ve ever had, and Minihammer got croup, making the trek out the door each morning even more guilt-inducing.

During that time, I had to get up to speed quickly on a lot of complex technical concepts as well as getting to know the ins and outs of the organization I’d be a part of. I felt a fair amount of stress and guilt surrounding the fact that my immediate colleagues were overwhelmed with work and I couldn’t help, not directly, anyway. I felt powerless and somewhat useless, and at the same time, I would sit in meetings listening to jargon fly by and yell at myself in my head, steaming, “Really? This is why you’re not at home with your sweet baby? REALLY?”

Things improved over time, but I remained torn on some levels. When it got to be too much and I would feel despair taking over, I would go to lunch away from the office, and pull out my Blackberry and just flip through pictures and videos of Minihammer, and fight tears. The guy who clears tables at Panera and I had a ritual of him asking how my meal was, while politely (if awkwardly) pretending not to notice as I wept at my table.

Then gradually work life got better. I found my place on the team and got entrenched in a project. I got to a point where I understood two thirds of the acronyms I heard on a daily basis. I got to have conversations with adults and work my mind over difficult problems. The commute was awful, and still is, but at least I got to listen to a lot of audiobooks and keep tabs on the news through the magic we call radio. And home time was precious and far more enjoyable than it had been at times leading up to my return to work.

And still – there remain larger questions in all of this. Early last summer, as I got used to my new role and the logistics of working and having a child at home and being pregnant and commuting and whatnot, I got a phone call from your Grandpa letting me know that my grandmother had died. It was not entirely unexpected, but it stung nonetheless – “it’s always sudden”. I recall about a week later, sitting in a huge auditorium in a pretty typical corporate all-hands meeting. I was surrounded by gray walls, gray chairs, gray ceilings, listening to gray words. Business words. I thought about my grandmother in her garden. I pictured a room with her in it, knitting – a room with curtains and colors and sunlight. I thought about myself at that age – assuming I am lucky enough to get to that age – and wondered if I would just rage at myself for spending so much time being a corporate stooge when life had so, so much more to offer.

But now, as I come to the end of the first week back (again), I have a different perspective on things. The reason this is a choice in the first place, and a conflict, is because neither option is all good or all bad. It’s not as though I am choosing corporate stoogery alone over sheer homey bliss and sunshine and happiness alone. For one thing, there are lots of things I enjoy about working. I’ve asked myself if I would work if I had the means to never work again – and while there are things I would change about my career path, the overall answer is yes – I would still want a career. Aside from the fact that I take a great deal of pleasure from work, there are also many downsides to staying at home all the time, for me (need I say that everyone is different?). Being home with young kids is incredibly demanding work, and can leave me feeling desperate and low. There’s a mental discipline required of it that I have never encountered in my career. The patience required when dealing, round the clock, with someone who can’t be reasoned with, can’t be bargained with, and whose needs are immediate, always… it stirred in me frustrations that I would rather like to think were not there in the first place. I feel much, much healthier and calmer doing both.

While I am confident (mostly) in the overall decision to keep working full time, the first week back is notoriously difficult, and I understand why: there’s the merging back of your two worlds, the change to the daily routine for everyone, the loneliness and isolation of mentally being somewhere else at most times, and the horrible, horrible missing of lovely children. I miss you two, every minute that I am not with you. But I also think I am a better person and mom with the current balance we are striking – or trying to strike.

And for the most part, only one of us is crying and/or attempting to gouge our own eyes out at a time! Score!

Two and three months

Oh Dench,

I’m so sorry that you are getting the second child shaft so early on. Already I am behind on your monthly reports! That in no way means I haven’t been paying attention to you. In fact, when I’m home, I can barely tear myself away from you long enough to shower, much less write about all that we do during the day.

The main thing I have found is that the second baby is easier. Our lives, overall, are a little more challenging as we try to keep two children happy, perform somewhat admirably at work (or in my case, at least show up without spit-up all over my shirt) and maintain some semblance of our adult identities – but in terms of taking care of and being with a baby, the second seems much easier and less stressful than the first time around. There was a line on the show Sex and the City, when Steve is supposed to take care of his son for a weekend and admits to Miranda, the baby’s mom, “I’m afraid I’m going to kill him.” She snaps, “Look, we’re both afraid we’re going to kill the baby, that’s a given. But we made an agreement this week: Monday to Friday, I try not to kill him, Saturday and Sunday, you try not to kill him.” That’s exactly how early life with Minihammer felt: just trying to get through the day with everyone surviving. With you, we also worry about whether or not we got dinner on the table. It’s small progress, but it’s progress nonetheless.

I enjoy beyond measure being around you, I enjoy smelling your hair and gazing into your eyes and making you smile.

Oh wait, that’s not smiling. Let’s try again:

Nope, but glad I still have your attention…third time’s a charm:

Your brother loves to show you all the colors in his toys, and he loves to hold and hug you. I have yet to capture a picture of this that looks like anything other than a hostage situation, but I keep trying. You do love to watch him as he plays, and you often do so with a curious smile.

He’s not the only one who likes to hold you.

Oh! I forgot to tell you about your two month checkup. You were 10 pounds, 4 ounces, 22 inches long, and I’ve forgotten your head circumference — but all three numbers were roughly in the 25th percentile. Way to go! Before I took you in we all guessed at your weight – I won by Price is Right rules but wasn’t very close – I think I guessed 9 pounds 6 ounces. You checked out healthy and despite (or perhaps because of) your baby rage, you managed to hold your head up when the doctor put you down on the table for strength testing.

Your eyes are still baby blues at this point. You clench your fists most of the time (gee, I wonder where you get that from? ). You coo and gurgle a lot and really seem to respond to carrying on a conversation of those noises when someone answers back. I think you’ll do fine at cocktail parties later in life.

Other happenings! You had your first Thanksgiving and Christmas. I will post reports on Christmas sometime around Easter, I imagine, but the basic idea is: we had a lovely time. You got some ridiculously cute clothes. The week leading up to Christmas we had an absolute baby frenzy at your Nana’s house with you, your cousin J, and my cousin Michael and Ralene’s baby L (I get a headache trying to figure out your relation to my cousin’s children. Second cousin? Something something removed? Argh.) It was baby MADNESS and unfortunately we did not have a camera with us since someone you know who’s about three feet tall made off with our lens cap right before the holidays started. Someday I will find it stashed away with various power cords, half-empty sippy cups of milk and toddler socks. Until then, I ordered a new one, but it didn’t arrive until last week. So – just visualize a lot of babies and imagine a lot of really loud, fun noise and that was Christmas!

You met some new people, including your dad’s Aunt Vanessa and Uncle Dave (we did not get a picture of you and Dave, unfortunately, but you two were great pals). Here you are napping on Vanessa:

You also met your grandpa, Luchia and your uncles (again I don’t have a picture of everyone in one shot):

And you swapped secrets with your cousin J:

On that note, you two seem to spend a lot of time in side-by-side carseats. This is one of my favorite images of it, with neither of you terribly thrilled about a flash going off in your face:

Sorry about the deer-in-headlights thing. Hehehehe.

To sum up – it’s been such a fun few months. Every day you give me reasons to smile. You really have completed our family, little one.

Love,
Mom

Two years, two months

Minihammer,

Do you remember when you were a year old, and I explained my delight in seeing you discover something like a leaf, and the wonder that would break out on your face? Now that you are all two years old and more sophisticated, it tends to take a tad more than a leaf – but not always. We were recently in the basement browsing through some of your dad’s old toys and you found a plastic leaf looking thing, and you cried out “leaf! leaf!” and it was like we went back in time a year to that day you first said the word, on the lawn. It made me smile.

They say that two is hard age to be, and that introducing a baby into the family is hard on a toddler, and all of this is true. This month has had its share of sapping-of-will-to-live moments. You’re discovering how to really push my buttons, and I’m trying to maintain my cool about this.

Case in point: We still use a baby monitor in your room. When the listeners run out of battery, or if they lose reception, they beep. In a particular “is the building on fire?” kind of way. You’ve discovered that you can terminate the connection by turning off the broadcasting unit in your room. This came shortly after your discovery that there is not, in fact, an invisible barrier preventing you from leaving your bed.

Sigh.

The good news is, when you can get past the near-coronary incident aspects of the alarm going off, plus the interrupted sleep, it’s all a little bit fun to witness – your exuberance as you bound down the hall toward our room, high on your newfound independence. Now if I could only figure out how to get you to enjoy that independence by, say, playing quietly in your room until, I don’t know, DAYBREAK, that would be awesome.

Pretty much everything regarding your behavior has been unexpected, mostly due to my inexperience. It astounds me that you can stay focused on a single objective, no matter how I might try to distract or divert you, until you get your way or have thrown what seems like an endless tantrum which tests my will to continue to have, I don’t know, ears. It also astounds me how you seem to have a limitless supply of enthusiasm and wonder. You don’t just point things out and name them, you jump up and down, shout the name repeatedly, or guess if you don’t know what it is. In a year where I would describe my own mood simply as “tired”, you breathe life into even the smallest experiences. Part of me wants to cling tight to the little guy who is still learning words for things around him, and part of me can’t wait until you can better express what’s going on in your head.

Other miscellanea:

We are finally painting Dench’s nursery. I am hoping you will be okay with your new neighbor. And that’s all the thinking I am going to do on THAT matter for now.

This past month also involved a wonderful Thanksgiving with Nana C and Grandma Peggy. At one point, you were following Grandma Peggy around, and she pulled up a chair for you to help her at the counter. I didn’t realize this sort of thing happened outside of the movies and advertisements for spice companies, but here’s the proof:

You’re still adjusting to having Dench at home:

When it is just the three of us, you tend to get jealous, but luckily so far not in a mean way. You want to sit on my lap when I am holding or feeding her – which I understand completely. The other day, you sat on one leg while she sat on the other, and you showed her each of the dinosaurs on your PJs and told her what color they were. She watched you with keen interest and broke out in a huge smile. You can wake us up before daylight all you want if this is the tradeoff, as far as I’m concerned (your dad might feel differently) (as might I tomorrow at 5am) (but probably not).

You’re a great, cool kid, and I love you, infinite much.

Mom

Have it, HAAAAVE IT!

One of your favorite things to say is “funny”

Dench and Nana

Thanksgiving Eve

So, right now: it’s nine or so.  Minihammer is in bed and stopped shouting for Grandma, Nana, Daddy, and/or Mommy about 20 minutes ago. Dench is sleeping in her Grandma Peggy’s arms, while Peggy is watching Jason and Lori play Guitar Hero. And I’m in the study, fighting for office chair real estate with the cat (and losing), typing this, and waiting for my sweet potato pies to finish so I can take them out of the oven and go to bed.

It’s been one of those weeks – the baby won’t sleep at night, so I don’t. I’ve stubbed my toes or burned my fingers or dropped full glasses of water more times than I care to admit. Minihammer has been testing boundaries. Sometimes it is so draining and mundane it’s all I can do to get from one end of the day to the other – the parade of diapers and dirty dishes and naps and meals seeming endless and colorless. And then – I thought many times today how very lucky we are to be here, now, with our kids as babies and with family nearby and healthy. How we’ll cook a meal together tomorrow and laugh a lot.  How there are so many we love and think of daily, spread across the globe. How I can gaze into Dench’s face and see a whole life unfolding – she is open and alert and lovely. How last night Jason put Minihammer in the bed with me for a few minutes and Minihammer, delighted, announced “lying down! lying down!” and pressed his nose to mine, smiling and breathing his rapid fire toddler breaths, trying hard to stay still and then forgetting, bounding to his feet in his enthusiasm, and dropping back down to the pillow at any suggestion that it might be time for him to go to his own room to sleep.

I’m thankful to be at the beginning of the journey with our family. I know this time will slip, slip away – but I want to remember that I did enjoy it, I did cherish it, and for the most part I did not take it for granted. I spent a good portion of Dench’s babyhood trying to stuff her up my nose, that unbelievable baby scent of hers intoxicating me. I spent a good portion of Minihammer’s toddlerhood hearing him laugh wildly, and delighting in every single new thing he experienced. And I got to know my in-laws better, and even grew to understand my own family in a whole new way. So – if I come to regret the time gone by or wasted later on, there is this: I was here, and it was warm in this house, and our children were sweet and adored by all around them, and we breathed them in as best we could.

Happy  Thanksgiving.

She likes to look at the camera

And yes, we do take you out of your carseat every now and then.