Four weeks ago I entered St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan to embark on that rite of passage that millions before me have undergone: hellish amounts of pain the likes of which you can never prepare yourself for, no matter how many books and blogs you read or conversations you have with those who have tread before you. Pain, thy name is childbirth. And like millions before me, I walked away from the experience feeling grateful (WTF?) for that pain and uttering the phrase heard over and over and over again, “it was all worth it.” All 25 hours of bone crushing, body rending pain. WORTH it.
Because my husband and I left St. Vincent’s with this guy.
Since then, we received trial by fire education on how to care for a newborn. As everyone knows, there is no instruction manual, but big props to BabyCenter.com because shit, that site comes pretty close. It’s like they can read my mind! I’m sitting there staring into space, anxiously jiggling my leg up and down wondering how in the hell my 1.5 week old already has awkward teenage acne, and before I can finish typing in “.com” the site’s lead headline is “Find Out Why Your Baby Has Acne”. Crisis averted! My baby does not have some rare disorder that caused him to enter puberty thirteen years too early. Big sigh of relief.
It was not enough to add ‘learn how to parent’ to our to-do list though. My husband and I threw ‘move into a new house’ on that list as well. And so, two weeks after we left the hospital, me, Mike and baby Drew left our apartment and set forth for greener, more expensive pastures. We buried the baby thermometer in one of the many moving boxes. Note: do not do this when you are an anxious first time parent and believe that every time the baby cries he must have a 103 degree fever. I nursed the baby in our white-tiled bathroom while the moving men systematically dismantled every inch of our one bedroom apartment. And after we got to the other side, we changed diapers amidst packing paper and bubble wrap. It sucked for a brief period. Disorder and chaos and ‘where are my…’ are not conducive to calming sleep-deprived parents or soothing wide-eyed infants. But we made it. We settled into our new home. Baby Drew is growing, finding his eyesight, letting off adult-sized farts all day long, and Mike and I are finding a new rhythm to our lives. More to come…
Tags: family, home, I'm going to be a mom?!
