A Cat Peed On This

This is a post that approximately three of you have been waiting for. Wherein, my baby does absolutely nothing cute, and I keep it real. I do not keep it short, so just be warned.

This is really for a few of my work girls, who accosted me in an isolation room informed me nicely me that my blog is bringing everyone down due to the excessive positive content. Apparently there is way too much chunky baby sentimental sweetness in my posts and people are starting to think our lives are all precious moments and butterfly kisses and bedtime stories.


I can see how I've led you astray.

I told Joshua about this workplace harrassment friendly reminder the next night, and he stared at me for a second to see how serious I was and then I think he busted a gut laughing. Literally, we looked around at the dirty dishes and unfolded laundry and mournful, underappreciated animals and whiny Matilda with carrots in her hair and we just laughed for a solid minute because people! Our lives are a hot mess.

Before we scampered off to the lake every day last weekend, we had a long string of incredibly crappy days. As I was leaving for work on last Tuesday, Joshua told me that it was going to be eighty degrees and sunny on Friday and I burst into tears. To clarify: I started crying because the weather was going to be gorgeous on my day off. That is a place you arrive at when you are wretchedly sleep deprived and overwhelmed, and I was both of those things.

During that stretch of crappy days, I had to take a cab home from work at 12:30am because Joshua left his phone on silent during my evening shift and slept right through the whole part where he was supposed to come pick me up. So I fumed all the way home while sending him passive aggressive texts with the cab number and the driver's description just in case I was murdered instead of driven to my destination (have I watched too many crime dramas? I think yes).

That was Thursday. Then I only slept roughly 13 hours from Friday morning to Monday morning. I will go ahead and do the math for you - the recommended amount of sleep an adult should be getting between a Friday and a Monday is about 24 hours. It's all fine and good to have a baby who sleeps through the night when you are a parent who sleeps through the night but what if you are the odd night-shift working, breastfeeding mother who has to sleep in the day? You. are. screwed.

And you are even more screwed if during your work weekend your typically sweet-as-pie daughter is wanting to eat more frequently than usual due to The Teething. Matilda's first tooth actually broke through her gums a day or two later, and while I feel absolutely terrible for the little munchkin's misery, can I just ask what is the deal with teething? Was there a reason those chompers could not be part of prenatal development? Like when you are busy growing your bones and organs painlessly? I realize a baby with a full grill would be a little terrifying, but we'd all get used to it. Right?

Anyways, there was a lot of woe from Matilda's end, and a lot of frustration from Joshua who was the sole caregiver except for when she briefly stopped whining to eat, and a lot of desperation from me and by Monday afternoon, with only 4 more hours of sleep added to that 13 from the weekend, I was a complete wreck. There was this hour right before Joshua got home where Matilda just groaned and rubbed her hands on her gums and I sat on the couch holding her while she tried to throw herself and all her teether items onto the floor repeatedly. I would like to say that we were both crying, but I honestly can't remember if I had enough energy for that outpouring of emotion. I may have just stared at the wall and thought about crying.

Tuesday I had to work overnight again (this is when I ruined my makeup over the weather forecast) and when my poor baby woke up from her afternoon nap on Wednesday she promptly lost her little tooth-cutting mind. So being the calm and rational working mother that I am, I went ahead and lost my mind as well.

I had been in Matilda's room organizing some laundry while she napped and trying to pick up the disaster that is our house after I've worked five out of six nights in a row (not Joshua's fault! Hi, Joshua! You are a wonderful dad!) Maybe I could have kept it together were it not for this stench that had been wafting around in her room. It's a very long story but basically her room had not smelled good for a few weeks, and since our building needs new tuckpointing we were convinced there was mold and must from water damage in the brickwork.

So here I am, literally days behind on sleep, clutching an angry, thrashing child as I run around from corner to corner in her room attempting to finally pin down where the smell was the strongest. I had to stop my desperate quest in order to pick up Joshua from a meeting, and I will say that our ride home was not my finest hour. It was a lot of ranting and whining and words that will have to be edited out of our conversations once Matilda is about ten minutes older than she is now, and at one point I hollered, "I cannot live somewhere that smells! I hate our condo! We are going to lose all our money because it's molding and we are going to have to live there forever because no one will ever buy it!" (see, I edited the swearing) at which point I began crying. Again. AGAIN.

We got home and Joshua wisely took Matilda away from me (naturally, she was all sweetness upon being reunited with the sane parent) while I resumed my wild-animal-style sniffing around her room. I managed to get to this one corner that smelled the slightest bit stronger than anywhere else and when I made Joshua check it for me, he moved her curtain the slightest bit and then said,

"Oh. Oh my god. A cat peed on this."

A CAT PEED ON THIS.

I had written multiple huffy emails to our condo association about the unacceptable 'mold' smell in my daughter's room, demanding quicker action on the brickwork and after weeks of going crazy over this 'undefinable' musty smell, as it turns out A CAT PEED ON THIS.

Do I even have to tell you that I cried again?

So yes. Our most recent weekend was filled with trips to the lake and mimosas at brunch (which a certain nameless six month old may have dumped right into my lap, thanks) and playing on the rug in the middle of a sweet-smelling baby girl's room. But if you start thinking that we are all fun, all the time, please just picture me shaking with the overtired caffeine jitters weeping into a pack'n'play while my lovely daughter refuses to nap and I have to work again. And I love my job and my life and my family but it was a little painful to realize I have been walking around in a fog for weeks, composing nasty emails about mold in our walls and sobbing about losing our life savings over it when really, oh hell it was actually the stench of cat pee that nearly pushed me over the edge.

A CAT PEED ON THIS.

Father's Day. What Do You Mean, It's Over...

My laptop charger bit the dust (more accurately, our dog bit it. It got caught up in one of Helo's chew toys and he happily chomped the cable right in half), which is why The Blogging halted to an abrupt stop at the beginning of June. This is Joshua's busiest time of the year at work, making his computer unavailable for the casual documentation of our domestic adventures (rude!), and I am pretty lazy when it comes to the ordering of the electronic things. Honestly, the lack of a computer at home was just giving us more time to devote to Words with Friends so we really didn't pull it together to order a new charger until this past week.

I didn't post on Father's Day, which wasn't meant as an affront to Joshua on his first Father's Day or to my dad on his 28th. I worked overnight Saturday, stayed up until late afternoon Sunday trying to make Father's Day great for Joshua, then turned into a weepy mess when the exhaustion caught up with me and my attitude started swinging from nearly hysterical to catatonic and back. Both Mother's and Father's Day were a little shaky for us this year - what can I say? Life was messy and tiring before we became a part of all the extra parental (long-anticipated, well-appreciated) holidays.

Even though I crashed and burned spectacularly on Father's Day, and couldn't pull it together to finish making dinner, let alone type this on my phone, I want everyone to know how proud I am of Joshua. And I also want to celebrate that I've been blessed with a dad who is strong, principled, and yet unafraid to show emotion and sentimentality. I was never spoiled and I am not a 'daddy's girl'. I was expected to face the consequences of my actions, and I certainly couldn't go running to my dad to get out of being disciplined. I wasn't punished mindlessly - I remember sitting on the kitchen counter, talking about what I'd done and why it was wrong and how my actions had disappointed my parents. Then my dad would make us all english muffins at midnight and tell me he loved me despite my bad attitude/lying/sneaking around/everything else I was doing and we'd all go off to bed only to repeat this delightful routine a few days later. I was always told I was loved. Always, even when I hurt my parents deeply, and there were a few years when that was what I did best.

No one parents perfectly, but I'm pretty sure books have been written to teach fathers how to raise their girls the way my dad intuitively parented me. So here's the best Father's Day gift ever - I'd like to say thank you to my dad for being strict. For having high expectations. For grounding me, both in the metaphorical sense and in the no phone privileges sense. Most of all, for just talking. Oh, so much talking - it made me crazy then and there's nothing I appreciate more now.

I hated the fact that my dad was less interested in being my friend during my horrid teenage years and more interested in keeping me on the straight and narrow path. But now my highest hope for Joshua is that Matilda can't stand him the second she hits middle school. Years later, when she can look back and see that his protective actions sprang out of a deep, intense love for her, I hope that she will also be able to say thank you. Thank you for ruining my hormone-addled little teenage life so I would grow up to have character and values.

(I think this is the parenting jackpot, right? Your kids actually telling you that you did it right. However, Dad, I will add that you went a little crazy with the TV censoring when I was little - I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have stunted my moral development to watch Full House.)

Joshua was terrified to have a daughter, but really he already shares the elusive combo of emotional vulnerability and embarrassing toughness as my dad. He made me start sobbing -unexpectedly, messily - when he started singing Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely" to Matilda the night we came home from the hospital. It was the very first song she ever heard (that wasn't the sappy intentional decision it sounds like; we were just too busy making sure she was breathing to ever turn on the TV or radio before that), and now it's their song. Thankfully I didn't have to weep alone in my postpartum haze, Joshua even made himself cry with the sweetness of it all. And oh is Matilda lucky to have a dad that will cry over her, pray over her, and put in the hard work to develop her self worth and self respect.

I know, because I am that lucky myself.

So hopefully this post can partly make up for the fact that Father's Day ended with Joshua making us both dinner while I basically snoozed into a wine glass. And the fact that I only sent quick phone pictures of Matilda to my dad, and we were never able to actually talk on Sunday. I am blessed and my daughter is blessed because we have wonderful fathers.

Happy Father's Day, one week, one day, and one new laptop charger later. I love you guys.

The end is the beginning...

Howie Day was right when he sang, "The end is the beginning and every point in between."



I've had a lot of ends, and beginnings, and points in between in my life—graduations, new jobs, moves, my wedding—but none of those really compares to Matilda. When Kirsten and I left for the hospital I knew it was the end of "just us" and the start of something new. What I couldn't have known, however, was how beautiful the journey would be. What I witnessed over twelve hours was my wife, my hero, my baby momma deliver our daughter into our lives; what I experienced was art.

I was listening to NPR the other day and there was a feature on the photographer Sally Mann. I'm not familiar with her work, but the way that she described a photo shoot she did with her husband encapsulates how I felt as I labored with Kirsten: "It's almost dreamlike, the way we move. You know, each one of us knew what we had to do and we weren't talking, but there was something very quiet and very loving about the whole process." Of course, those that know us, have to know that we weren't perfectly quiet—we cracked jokes, we laughed, we cried—but we were quieter and more instinctual than I think we have ever been. In my mind's eye it's less chronological, less "memory" in the traditional sense. It's moments, it's feelings, it's snapshots, it's art. I am blessed to have been a part of it.

So that was the end.

And this is the beginning.



My heart is full.

Grateful

Thanksgiving has passed but before it's too far behind us I really wanted to take some time to mention what Joshua and I are so thankful for this year...

- The gift of each other. We are so blessed to have celebrated FIVE years of marriage this past May. I'm thankful every day that we met when we were so young and that we've been able to grow up together without growing apart. At our (granola crunch style) childbirth classes this past weekend, we were asked to share the story of how we met and fell in love. This was an unexpected detour in between graphic homebirth videos, and we were surprised by how much fun it was to talk about our wild little teenage romance. We've come so far from those first crazy months of long-distance phone calls, cross country plane trips, 2000 mile roadtrips and lugging our physical and emotional baggage all across America. Our life now might not seem as spontaneous and passionate as it did when we were 19 and 20 and writing (bad) poetry and running off to Chicago together, but it is so much richer and deeper and more fulfilling than I could have ever expected back then. Every day that we have together is a gift and I never want to lose sight of that!

-The gift of our baby. Joshua and I weren't one of those couples who have a few extra drinks, tumble home and fastforward a few weeks to a totally shocking positive pregnancy test. A baby was prayed for and planned for (and cried over, let's be serious) before this baby became a reality. It's hard to put into words how grateful we are that after that struggle, I've had an incredibly uneventful and healthy pregnancy and we are only 9 weeks away from welcoming our daughter into the world. I wake up every day thankful for her jabs and rolls and karate kicks, all of which take my breath away. Sometimes because a swift punch to the ribs hurts like hell, but always because it means she is real, and we are incredibly grateful for the intense experience and privilege of becoming parents.

-The gift of our jobs. We both love what we do. Not every day is a great day at the office or the hospital, and sometimes when things at work are stressful we forget to be thankful for our careers. (Last night when my patient's ostomy bag came off twice and she was screaming bloody murder, and my other patient decided to start hollering at that moment for a bottle, I would not say that I was particularly happy about my choice of poop-covered workplace). But when we step back and look at the people we work with, the experiences we get to have, and the fact that we do totally different things that are perfectly fitted to our personalities, we know we are blessed. We have job security, we have benefits, we have so many opportunities to be challenged by our work and make a difference in the lives of people around us.

-The gift of our families. We both have intact, supportive, loving and slightly crazy families who have been there for us every step of our lives. We're thankful for that every day, and especially at the holidays. This fall my cousin Cari moved from Massachusetts to live with us in Chicago (she sweetly shares her room here with our emotionally disturbed cat Hala, who would like to say that for Thanksgiving she is grateful we got her an extra human). Cari is hilarious and incredibly thoughtful and helpful and even sobbed at my last midwife's appointment when she heard the baby's heartbeat. Which of course made me cry because I can't overexaggerate how happy I am to have someone from my side of the family here after the six years I've spent 1000 miles away from everyone I grew up with. It's been one of the best seasons of my life so far.

The gift of our friends. We have great friendships that we've built over our almost six years in Chicago. Some of our friends here are actually my elementary school friends from Massachusetts that have migrated here over the years (yes I take lots of credit for this). Some of our friends are Joshua's college friends from the year when he lived in Colorado. Some of our friends are our college friends from here in the city. Some are our work friends, some have slipped in through roommates and friends and family of other friends, and all I can say is that they are all wonderful and our lives are so much better for knowing them. Joshua looked around the room at our baby shower last weekend and said to me, "I really really love everyone here." And we do.

-The gift of our home. We can say for certain that after almost a month of living in our condo (pictures are COMING SOON, I promise!) that this is exactly where we are supposed to be. It's both cozy and spacious, easy to keep clean, perfect for us and our animals and getting closer to being ready for baby girl. We have already made lots of wonderful memories here and I know there will be so many many more.

There are a hundred more things I could say (I'm thankful for my zoo! Joshua made me dinner tonight and just did the dishes! My fancy dream stroller is being delivered this week! I don't have any stretch marks yet! My mom is coming into town this weekend and I'm finally going to decorate for Christmas!) but I think the most important thing is to continue living our everyday lives thankful for all that we have been given. I know there will be years where things are much more difficult and don't fall into place as beautifully as they have in 2010. There will be times when we struggle in our marriage and struggle as parents and and as friends and just in general don't wake up as excited about life as we do these days.

So that's what this list is for - to look at on the crappy days when the baby is screaming and the cat throws up on the rug and the dog is chewing happily away on Joshua's favorite hat and the fridge is empty and I have the flu. We have been blessed with so much, and we are so thankful for it.

Yes, I will be posting here...

To all the doubters, re: Kirsten, my lovely wife, I hope this post makes it abundantly clear that I will be posting here.

The latest? We just got word that one more key step in our home-buying process has been completed and we can now move swiftly toward closing. So, I guess that's it for now--I just wanted to come in with some good stuff right away.