Let's hear it for the boy...

Happy Father's Day.
Remember when I had to work on Mother's Day?  Yeah.  Me too.
As sucky as it was for me to have to work on my "special day" - my husband is having an even suckier Father's Day.

It's sucky because today we're driving to Ohio to attend the funeral of his beloved grandmother.

So, on a day where he should be barbequeing, playing golf, or doing basically whatever he wants to do, he's doing something that no one ever really wants to do.



Yesterday morning (a Saturday), I realized I had forgotten to unset my alarm, but was reminded at a blaring 5:00 am.  I shut it off, secretly happy that I didn't have to get up, and snuggled back into my bed.

At 5:01 am - tornado alarms sounded.

We take these things pretty seriously, especially since the tragedy in Joplin, but I have to admit, I was not looking forward to dragging myself, the baby, and our blankets and pillows into the basement.  We tried desperately to be quiet and give the baby a chance to stay asleep - but our cat had other plans and knocked over something big and noisy.  With that.  The baby was up.

At 5:52 am, they called the tornado warning up, at which point my husband looked at my exhausted face and told me to go back to sleep.

But, it's Father's Day weekend, I tried to protest.
Still, he waved me off.

So I went back to sleep.  And I slept until well after 8:00 am.
You guys, the last time I slept until after 8:00 am was before I was pregnant.  I'm sure of it.  I needed that rest and he was happy to give it to me.  Even if it meant he had to stay up with the baby.

This is just a small example of why I have the best husband in the whole world.   Really, the list of his attributes is innumerable (and far too much to post), but here are some of my favorite reasons I am married to and raising a child with the man I love.



The Top Reasons Why My Husband is AWESOME

He is an awesome cook.  This bodes well for us because I am...not an awesome cook.  Well, really, I just don't I have the time or energy to devote to cooking on most days.  In truth, I'm like Wolfgang Freaking Puck, but no one needs to know that.  So trust me when I say - our family would surely go hungry if it wasn't for him.

He is amazingly patient.  This is a plus when you're dealing with children.  It's a HUGE PLUS when you're dealing with me.

He takes the time to learn about our kid.  I cannot tell you the number of things my husband knows about our child that most dads don't even bother with.  He understands our food introduction schedule and can recite it to other people.  He asks questions about things he doesn't understand.  He looks up things on the Internets and in the billions of dog-eared baby info books in our house.

He woke up and came into the baby's room with me for every night feeding for the first month of TIH's life.  YEP.  HE. IS. AMAZING.

He's pretty damn cute.  Or, at least I think so :)

More than once he has said, "So, I was talking to someone about breast feeding today..." AND, the man knows what he's talking about, too!  Is there a men's chapter of La Leche League?  I've got a president for them.  (Kidding.)

He values my career.  Let's face it, as a music therapist, I'm not now, nor will I ever be the breadwinner of the family, but he makes certain that I know that I am a breadwinner for the family - and reminds me all the time about how much we depend on my income for so many things.  Plus, he knows that I'm happier when I can balance out my family life with my work life - and he's glad for it.

He's pretty good at balance himself.  He's awesome at making time for both work and his family.  And even better at making time for our marriage by the way of date nights, lunches out during the week, foot rubs, etc.

He rocks.  Hard.  No, really.  He is the only person in the world that can rock TIH to sleep no matter where they are and what is going wrong - a crowded restaurant, 3 am when mommy can't take it any more, a noisy family get together - the kid is out in a fraction of the time it takes me to do the same.

He doesn't mind that the kid looks exactly like me.  Well...kind of.   He likes it way more when people say TIH looks like him.

The first time TIH smiled for real, it was at my husband.  That boy knows who his daddy is.

He is an expert baby feeder.  As one of 10 (YES, TEN) children, my husband knows a thing or two about feeding a kid food.  The very first time I fed the baby solids, both of us walked away covered in rice.  The first time the husband did it?  Both of them were clean as clean can be.  And - he didn't even use a bib.
He's a magician.

He makes up songs.  I'll be honest, my classically trained musician self knows that these songs don't really have a tonal center, the lyrics don't rhyme (and frequently have a "scooby dooby doo" thrown in there for no reason), and when they involve counting, they often don't match up with any time signature I'm familiar with.  But you know what?  It doesn't matter.  If they sold it in a CD, I'd still buy it because TIH loves daddy's "Bath Time Song."

He's better than me at playtime.  Generally, I'm lost when my 80th rendition of "Me and Baby McGee" no longer illicits a smile.  But my husband can make TIH laugh uproariously for hours.  Sometimes he just laughs because my husband walks into the room.  I'll hear them playing when I'm upstairs trying to get laundry folded and I'll want to drop everything I'm doing and join them because it sounds so. damn. fun.

He gives great foot rubs. The man should open a spa.  I'd pay him.

He was the best birth coach in the whole history of ever.  When I post my birth story later this month, you'll see why, but seriously - I cannot imagine that experience without my husband.  He was amazing.

You cannot say no to him.  It's like a running joke in our family, but his job is in sales and this is really true.  He is not afraid of the word "no."  Probably because he never hears it.  He gets free stuff all of the time just because he'll half-jokingly/half-seriously ask for free stuff all of the time.  My husband once negotiated our bill at a Mexican restaurant.  No.  Seriously.  And they gave him what he asked.

He's one of my top "followers."  My favorite text message from him of all time was, "Blog post sometime soon?  Please?"  He's always interested in what I've been working on and he takes time after every post to read my blog.  He inspired me to write this post after I ranted to him about that very subject.

He takes control.  I am a control freak.  This will never change.  There are times where I will tell my husband we are not to do something (like call the doctor's office for the eightieth time) and then I'll talk to him an hour later and not only has he spoken to the doctor's office - he has the doctor's personal cell number and the doctor is meeting us after hours to open the hospital clinic to check out TIH. Thank God he takes control sometimes.  It's when he's in charge that things actually get done.

He is a great dad.  I mean, I know that everyone says that and everyone thinks that (okay, not everyone, but you know what I mean) and I know that I have basically already listed a ton of the reasons why he's a great dad, but it really is true.  And what's better is that, I know TIH knows that he has a great daddy.  you can just tell the baby loves him so much.  The smile on TIH's face when we go in to say good morning to my husband is just incredible.

He is an even better husband.  Seriously, this man takes such good care of me.  I know I have tons of problems balancing being a good mom and a good wife.  It's like second nature to him to both nurture our marriage as well as nurture our son.

We love you, The Daddy.



Happy Father's Day, babe.

It takes two where it used to take one...

It occurs to me that I wrote a record THREE blog posts last week and have yet to write one this week.

What's strange about this is that last week I was playing the role of single mom while my husband was away on a rare business trip and I still managed to hack out three posts before the week was through.  But then again, it seems like everything in my life is like that. 

When my husband is gone, I rise to the occasion.  I do dishes.  I make meals.  I do pick-up and drop-off at daycare and still get to work on time.  I get more loads of laundry done than our washer has seen in a year.  I catch up on my correspondence. Like with stamps and pens and everything. I single-handedly wrangle a 7-month old who has learned to army crawl across the room, but has not learned how to get uncaught from between the entertainment center and his toy box (or how to avoid crawling into small spaces in general.)  And on top of it all, I write three witty well-constructed grammatically correct blog posts and still manage to get a good amount of sleep.

But now, he's home.  And there are four hands to do all of the things above.  So while that equation would lead you to believe I'm getting even more done, you would be wrong.   Now, basically, I check Facebook, I play Cooking Dash on my phone, I attempt to make some more homemade baby food and burn pears (ruining a very expensive Calphalon pot in the process).  I order pizza for dinner.  We learn that two college degrees and general common sense still will not afford you the ability to install new car seats.  Thank God my husband is kind of a neat freak (read: loads the dishwasher), or else we probably would have eaten dinner on a couple of paper towels last night.

I often find myself wondering what causes this phenomenon.  Why am I rendered completely helpless and awestruck by reruns of Real Housewives of Orange County when my husband is home?  Because when he isn't in town, I hardly even turn on the television.  And situations like what happened with me and the Bastard Jeep Compass definitely wouldn't happen - but only because instead of me carrying the diaper bag, my purse, my pump bag, and the carseat (with baby) in the house, I honk the horn for him to come out to the garage and carry most of it while I carry a travel coffee mug.

On the weeks that he's gone, you know, when I'm all, "CARPE DIEM, BIOTCH!  LET'S DO THIS," I start to kind of understand how a single mom might make it on her own.  When you don't have the choice, but to do it by yourself, you just do it.  But, the minute it returns, it's back to business as usual.  I lay on the floor and play with the baby instead of running the vacuum.  I refresh my Twitter feed instead of doing important things...like, showering.  All while my husband follows behind me picking up the trail of stuff I shed behind me.  Even though a week ago, I was able to do all of this and more and entertain you all with my cute little quips.

Is it because my husband enables me a little?  Probably. 

But, it's mostly because he's awesome.  And because we long ago decided that our whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  We're a team. (He's usually the captain and I'm usually the eighth-string benchwarmer, but whatever.)

So, even though the house smells like burned fruit and the laundry is piling up.  Even though we can't leave the house with the baby because we have no working carseats.  And even though I neglected my blogging duties for the week. When it comes down to it, there's nothing else I'd rather be doing (or not doing as the case may be.)

There's no other team I'd rather be on.

You were only waiting for this moment to arise...

I guess I imagined that at 4:38 am on July 17 that I was going to be magically transformed.  And I was.  But not in the way that I thought.  It took a little bit longer for that "light bulb" moment to happen when I could say:  This is it.  I'm a mommy.

Up until today, I was pretty sure it happened one night when our monitor stopped working unbeknownst to either of us.  Our monitor is one of those voice-activated ones that has both lights and sound.  Except one night, for some reason, the sound just stopped working.  And my husband and I slept and slept.  It wasn't until almost 4:00 am, that I turned to check the time and thought to myself "He's sleeping through the night at 1 month old! HE IS THE BEST BABY.  EVER."  And then reality set in when I saw that those little LED lights on the monitor were lit up a bright angry red and I could suddenly hear the cries of our tiny boy emanating from his room.  I jumped out of our bed cursing up a storm muttering incoherently about the faulty monitor and ran into his room.  And the instant I picked him up, he quieted.  All he wanted was me.

And I thought: This is it.  I'm a mommy.

But today, in slightly terrifying moment, I think it really happened.

I don't have to work today so my husband and I both got to sleep a little later and not have to wake up my precious little guy from his beautiful slumber.

We both got completely ready for our days and my husband retreated to his home office in our basement. As I made my way downstairs to get my coffee, I peeked into his room and saw his beautiful blue eyes open, shining, and happy to see me.  We went about our morning routine: diaper change, reflux medicine...and the whole time he was smiling at me in the sweetest way.  As I sat down to feed him, I changed my mind and decided to bring him downstairs to share his sweet little good mood with his daddy.   I don't think I was going too fast.  Not even taking my signature two-steps-at-a-time.   But, before I even knew what was happening, my bare feet had slipped out from under me on our carpeted steps and I fell.  Down only four steps on to our carpeted landing.  But I fell.  And I fell holding my sweet little baby.

You hear about those women who pull cars off of their babies in a moment of sheer panic.  I couldn't stop our fall, but I squeezed him tightly to my chest in a way that defied all time and somehow managed to keep him safe in my arms as I landed solidly on my butt.  I can tell you the sound of it all must have been terrible, the way my husband raced out of the basement to find us.  There was one moment of silence.  Two.  And then this horrible cry came out of my sweet baby who almost never cries.  I handed him to my husband so I could stand up and he held him tightly and asked me several times "Are you okay?  Are you okay?" While I asked him several times "Is he okay?  Is he okay?"

The baby was fine.  Just scared.  And crying.

Back on my feet, my husband pulled me in to hug me and I said "Can I have him?  I want to hold him."  And then it happened.  My baby reached for me.  All he wanted was me.

My husband pulled both of us in for a bear hug and our little guy's cries turned into little whimpers and then eventually adorable little laughs and smiles.

After what happened today, I'm sure I'll take steps more carefully than ever.  I'll clear piles of bills and shoes off the steps to make sure there's nothing that could trip us.  I might even think twice the next time I take him down to the basement.

But most importantly, I will never forget the moment when I squeezed that little body to mine as we took that terrifying spill and I thought: This is it.  I'm a mommy.