Sooooooo I don’t really post any personal or family stuff up here on the blog because I feel this is a very public place for such things, and also, I try to just focus on my gorgeous clients in this space and keep my billion kid pics on FB and IG! But, this topic deserved a big, huge spread in my opinion.
In case you didn’t know, (and how would you, I don’t post personal news here!) I recently had our newest family member, our precious son Max, on 12.29.15. He’s everything you hope a new baby to be and more, and we’re all super smitten, but his arrival hasn’t come easy. For the first five months of this pregnancy I was horrifically sick, vomiting so many times a day at one point all the blood vessels in my eyes popped (giving me the household nickname of Darth Maul). It was truly terrible and I was completely incapacitated and bedridden….with a two-year-old. This was followed by an easier ten-ish weeks and then during the last six weeks of my pregnancy there were a few early labor scares which put me on modified bed rest, and then a debilitating discomfort and constant pain level that we later learned was because this baby of ours turned out to be NINE POUNDS FIVE OUNCES. That’s HUGE! I am a pretty small person, so lugging that around was killing me!!
Needless to say, I needed a lot of help, and herein lies my post subject: my husband. A little background on this man for you, his job has always been taking him away from us. He has never been in one country, let alone one city, for more than six months at a time, and he is used to being on the go, in physically and mentally demanding situations. Being home is so far from his comfort zone he often has no idea what to do with himself here, and his recent position change has had him home a LOT. While he’s happy for this, and asked for it to be with his little ones more, it’s not an easy adjustment for him. Add to this my sudden uselessness for about nine months, and his role quadrupled in responsibility for our daughter and home. Around the end of November, when I was placed on bed rest, he told his office he would need to be home pretty much until I delivered. This entered a new era in our house: THE AGE OF DADDY.
This wonderful, funny, sexy!, fabulous man, with the manliest most opposite career from being home possible, became a stay-at-home dad (not that stay-at-home dads aren’t super manly) these past 6+ weeks and he has been doing it ALL. Every meal, every midnight milk cry, every tooth brushing, every ponytail (he learned!), every preschool drop off and pickup, every park date, every story time, every foot rub, every hour of playing with puzzles and blocks, every grocery run, every single bath and wake up and you name it, it was ALL HIM. Now, none of this comes easy to him. He loses his patience with our daughter about 200 times a day, he had no idea how to do her hair, he had to learn which stuffed animal was needed at what time, and he had to master about ten new dishes to feed us, as he cooked us every single meal we have eaten. Every night he would collapse into bed and be discouraged that he wasn’t doing enough, and that he was too hard on our daughter. He’d recount every time he snapped at her or lost his patience. He was so hard on himself while doing so, so much, all brand-new to him skills, while also caring for me.
So. I started snapping some photos of a couple of his days with our girl. Little snippets so he could see what I was seeing. So he could see ALL he was doing (and this is 1/100 of what he’s been doing). Little glimpses into alllllllll the ways he loves us.
Could we be luckier?
Iphone Pic Below! Couldn’t resist the light!