June 16, 2013

Oh, Father’s Day

Oh, Father’s Day– I’ve got a good dad myself, and so do my children. And never am I more grateful to my co-parent than right now when we’re both adrift in newborn land. I bought Stuart’s Father’s Day presents (A Users Guide to Neglectful Parenting and Jamie Oliver’s Great Britain) a month ago because I remembered how the day got lost after Harriet was born. Amazed to find how much further along we are this time around though–I got up this morning and made us pancakes. We also have intentions of heading out for lunch today, which is brave of us. We’ll see how that goes. Yesterday we went on a picnic and Iris slept through it, which was some mark of success. I still can’t walk so far so it was a picnic on a patch of grass close to home, but it was sunshine, fresh air, fun and being in the world. Which feels like a miracle, actually. I am very proud of us, though of course it has not been all smooth sailing. The nights have been hard and if I could describe Iris’s general temperment, I’d have to employ the term “miserable”. In my experience of babies, this is fairly typical, though I’d been hoping to get something different this time around, one of those elusive “chilled out” babies you hear about sometimes. But it was not to be, and we’re exhausted. Last night, for just the second time in two weeks, we managed to get two three-hour blocks of sleep, which makes today feel quite glorious.  Anyway, the fact is that without Stuart, none of this would be working at all. The greatest lesson of everything that went wrong after Harriet was born was that I need so much more support than I’d figured, that without that support, I’d fall apart. And Stuart has been amazing at providing that support, at making the nights not seem lonely, at keeping food and drink coming to help me get better, at keeping Harriet happy, at rocking Iris to sleep, at listening to my kvetching and fears and making nothing seem quite so bad. He’s working as hard as I am, which makes everything so much easier, and I’ve never been more aware of how lucky we are to have him in our lives.