Monday, January 31, 2011
bed rest blues
This was an interesting article from the front page of Sunday's Chicago Tribune on the value (or lack thereof) of bed rest for pregnant women.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
about a boy
Today, the artist formerly known as Wiggle is six weeks old. Can you believe it? I can't. Given this milestone, I thought it was time to fill everyone in on some things we have learned about Will since being graced with his presence in early December.
1. He loves ceiling fans. He could stare at them all day. In fact, he does stare at them all day. The sharp contrast of the brown blade against the snow white ceiling is thrilling. Ceiling fans are the new rattle.
2. Pacifiers are fantastic. So is the Baby Bjorn.
3. He can roll over!
4. He loves being in his car seat, but hates being put into his car seat.
5. He's pushing 11 pounds.
6. He smiles at me and Colin and likes playing the "stick your tongue out" game. He thinks it's downright silly.
7. He pees on his mommy at least once a day.
8. All that hair can get kind of greasy after a day or so. So greasy, he's been known to go by "Greaseball" from time to time. He has his dad to thank for that one.
9. Keeping with Condon tradition, Will goes by several nicknames: Bub, Sweetest, Littlest Wonder, and my dad's personal choice, Reggie. I'm not so sure about Reggie.
10. Breast milk is a hit. A big, big hit.
1. He loves ceiling fans. He could stare at them all day. In fact, he does stare at them all day. The sharp contrast of the brown blade against the snow white ceiling is thrilling. Ceiling fans are the new rattle.
2. Pacifiers are fantastic. So is the Baby Bjorn.
3. He can roll over!
4. He loves being in his car seat, but hates being put into his car seat.
5. He's pushing 11 pounds.
6. He smiles at me and Colin and likes playing the "stick your tongue out" game. He thinks it's downright silly.
7. He pees on his mommy at least once a day.
8. All that hair can get kind of greasy after a day or so. So greasy, he's been known to go by "Greaseball" from time to time. He has his dad to thank for that one.
9. Keeping with Condon tradition, Will goes by several nicknames: Bub, Sweetest, Littlest Wonder, and my dad's personal choice, Reggie. I'm not so sure about Reggie.
10. Breast milk is a hit. A big, big hit.
Friday, January 14, 2011
tummy time
Being a baby is a tough job. You eat, you sleep, you poop, you cry. And, you have tummy time. Here are a few shots from this week.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
my boys
I'm lucky enough to have two very handsome men in my life, and those two men loved hanging out together during Daddy's time off from work for the holidays.
Will got all dressed up for a New Year's Eve party (not pictured: Colin in matching red polo shirt).
They cuddled with Bean and watched "The Town" together (Daddy turned down the volume during the shooting scenes).
Daddy gave Will a computer lesson.
And, best of all, they slept in. Well, a little bit. This picture is deceiving.
Also, that pacifier may or may not belong to Will.
Will got all dressed up for a New Year's Eve party (not pictured: Colin in matching red polo shirt).
They cuddled with Bean and watched "The Town" together (Daddy turned down the volume during the shooting scenes).
Daddy gave Will a computer lesson.
And, best of all, they slept in. Well, a little bit. This picture is deceiving.
Also, that pacifier may or may not belong to Will.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
mommy guilt
Blame it on the hormones or the lack of sleep, but in the last day or so the tears have begun to trickle and flow.
Will is three weeks and five days old, and I haven’t cried once since his birth. Until today.
What pulled my emotions to the surface, proved too much for my stressed mind to handle without breaking down (or at least breaking just a little bit)?
Bean. And my crazy, overwhelming, heartbreaking love for her.
After a night of, say, two hours of sleep, five diaper-changing and breast-feeding sessions, endless walks around the condo with a rigid, arched, screaming newborn in my arms, I started my day a little strung out, to say the least. When, late in the afternoon, I finally made it into the shower, into that quiet solitude that the expectation of daily hygiene affords me, something inside of me broke.
And it broke for Bean.
During my pregnancy, I was haunted by the looming reality that my relationship with Bean would be changed by the birth of the baby. People talk about how after the birth of your child you grieve the life you lost with all of its freedoms. I do not grieve for freedom. I grieve the loss of, or rather, the permanently changed shape of, my relationship with Bean.
Colin and I got Bean in 2005, right after we graduated college. When we first saw her at the breeder’s house, we immediately knew that we were hers, and she ours. In truth, that was the moment our family was born.
A year later, Colin moved to San Diego, and Bean and I were on our own. Initially, we moved into a tiny studio apartment, but the stomping noise from above terrified Bean and the notion of life without Colin terrified me. We moved home to my parents’ house, and set up camp together in my old bedroom. By the summer of 2007, Bean and I were ready to try our hand again at independence. We moved into a big apartment in a basically abandoned pink building on Cornelia Street, a few blocks from Wrigley Field. Bean held fort during the day, growling at passerbys out the window and chasing mice back into the walls, while I went to graduate school in the city. At night, she made me feel safe as we lied in bed together listening the wind and sounds of the city. I held her close when I woke to noises on the back deck and was comforted by her confident growls.
By the end of that school year, in June of 2008, Colin asked me to marry him. He moved back to Chicago and our little family settled into a small but lovely garden apartment in Lakeview. Reunited, in memory this time is golden. We had a small park with a gazebo in front of our apartment where Colin and Bean threw sticks most evenings after work. I would pull up and see the happy arch of Bean's back leaping in midair, Colin’s arm swinging through. We loved walking through our neighborhood with Bean, admiring the beautiful homes and dreaming of our future.
In September of 2009, a couple of months after our wedding, Colin got a job at Eastern Mountain Sports in Peterborough, New Hampshire. We moved to Chelmsford, Massachusetts, an industrial town about forty-five minutes outside of Boston. With Colin working over an hour away, me without a job and totally isolated in a place I didn’t belong, my focus, and perhaps my survival, fell to Bean. We watched television, read, applied to job after job, and, when the time came everyday, got dinner ready. We explored the nearby woods before the weather got too cold, where I let her run off the leash and took pictures with my camera. I can still see her bounding up rocks and charging ahead in the unmarked forest, bold and unafraid. I drank up her joy and in that found the strength to keep going (remember the Cranberry Bog, Bean? You sure liked that place, too). It was my companionship with Bean that made the unbearable bearable during the last year of my life leading up to the pregnancy, a year of incredible loneliness and numbness and confusion.
The night I took the home pregnancy test and the results were positive, it was Bean by my side as I paced that barren, cream-colored apartment in Chelmsford all night long, not wanting to disturb Colin’s sleep. It was Bean on my lap when I called my mother with the news. And it was Bean curled up by my side as the first symptoms hit and I found my afternoons overtaken by naps.
In August, Colin and I bought our first home, a condo in Lincoln Square, and Bean moved with us yet again. She finally had a home that she didn’t need to leave in three months. We finally had a home we didn’t need to leave in three months. We finally had a home, period.
Bean accompanied us on the many walks of the first and second trimester, when the warm Chicago summer lured us to the paths and fields in a nearby park. Bean sat with me during my weeks of bed rest and nestled her little body against my swollen belly, unaware of how permanently and deeply life was about to change. We dropped her off with my parents before we went to the hospital for my labor to be induced, and I kissed her a brief and distracted goodbye.
And now there are four of us, and she has a brother, I tell her. She seems to love him, has responded with more sweetness and gentleness to his presence than I ever could have imagined. I still pet her and kiss her throughout the day, and she still cuddles against one of our legs at night.
Still, I feel I have abandoned her. It’s no longer only our world. She’s no longer my purpose, my only source of innocent joy. We’re no longer partners. As our family has grown in size and love, my relationship with Bean has found its place outside of the center for the first time. And so, as filled with love as I am for my son (and I really, truly am, despite the tone of this post), I grieve for me and Bean and what we once were.
And so I’ll kiss her extra hard tonight, and scratch her ears an extra minute, and take comfort in the fact that we will always share those moments throughout the years that initially bound our hearts together, and that moments yet unlived are spread out before us, moments that will undoubtedly be different but hopefully not lesser, moments perhaps unfamiliar but no less radiant.
Will is three weeks and five days old, and I haven’t cried once since his birth. Until today.
What pulled my emotions to the surface, proved too much for my stressed mind to handle without breaking down (or at least breaking just a little bit)?
Bean. And my crazy, overwhelming, heartbreaking love for her.
After a night of, say, two hours of sleep, five diaper-changing and breast-feeding sessions, endless walks around the condo with a rigid, arched, screaming newborn in my arms, I started my day a little strung out, to say the least. When, late in the afternoon, I finally made it into the shower, into that quiet solitude that the expectation of daily hygiene affords me, something inside of me broke.
And it broke for Bean.
During my pregnancy, I was haunted by the looming reality that my relationship with Bean would be changed by the birth of the baby. People talk about how after the birth of your child you grieve the life you lost with all of its freedoms. I do not grieve for freedom. I grieve the loss of, or rather, the permanently changed shape of, my relationship with Bean.
Colin and I got Bean in 2005, right after we graduated college. When we first saw her at the breeder’s house, we immediately knew that we were hers, and she ours. In truth, that was the moment our family was born.
A year later, Colin moved to San Diego, and Bean and I were on our own. Initially, we moved into a tiny studio apartment, but the stomping noise from above terrified Bean and the notion of life without Colin terrified me. We moved home to my parents’ house, and set up camp together in my old bedroom. By the summer of 2007, Bean and I were ready to try our hand again at independence. We moved into a big apartment in a basically abandoned pink building on Cornelia Street, a few blocks from Wrigley Field. Bean held fort during the day, growling at passerbys out the window and chasing mice back into the walls, while I went to graduate school in the city. At night, she made me feel safe as we lied in bed together listening the wind and sounds of the city. I held her close when I woke to noises on the back deck and was comforted by her confident growls.
By the end of that school year, in June of 2008, Colin asked me to marry him. He moved back to Chicago and our little family settled into a small but lovely garden apartment in Lakeview. Reunited, in memory this time is golden. We had a small park with a gazebo in front of our apartment where Colin and Bean threw sticks most evenings after work. I would pull up and see the happy arch of Bean's back leaping in midair, Colin’s arm swinging through. We loved walking through our neighborhood with Bean, admiring the beautiful homes and dreaming of our future.
In September of 2009, a couple of months after our wedding, Colin got a job at Eastern Mountain Sports in Peterborough, New Hampshire. We moved to Chelmsford, Massachusetts, an industrial town about forty-five minutes outside of Boston. With Colin working over an hour away, me without a job and totally isolated in a place I didn’t belong, my focus, and perhaps my survival, fell to Bean. We watched television, read, applied to job after job, and, when the time came everyday, got dinner ready. We explored the nearby woods before the weather got too cold, where I let her run off the leash and took pictures with my camera. I can still see her bounding up rocks and charging ahead in the unmarked forest, bold and unafraid. I drank up her joy and in that found the strength to keep going (remember the Cranberry Bog, Bean? You sure liked that place, too). It was my companionship with Bean that made the unbearable bearable during the last year of my life leading up to the pregnancy, a year of incredible loneliness and numbness and confusion.
The night I took the home pregnancy test and the results were positive, it was Bean by my side as I paced that barren, cream-colored apartment in Chelmsford all night long, not wanting to disturb Colin’s sleep. It was Bean on my lap when I called my mother with the news. And it was Bean curled up by my side as the first symptoms hit and I found my afternoons overtaken by naps.
In August, Colin and I bought our first home, a condo in Lincoln Square, and Bean moved with us yet again. She finally had a home that she didn’t need to leave in three months. We finally had a home we didn’t need to leave in three months. We finally had a home, period.
Bean accompanied us on the many walks of the first and second trimester, when the warm Chicago summer lured us to the paths and fields in a nearby park. Bean sat with me during my weeks of bed rest and nestled her little body against my swollen belly, unaware of how permanently and deeply life was about to change. We dropped her off with my parents before we went to the hospital for my labor to be induced, and I kissed her a brief and distracted goodbye.
And now there are four of us, and she has a brother, I tell her. She seems to love him, has responded with more sweetness and gentleness to his presence than I ever could have imagined. I still pet her and kiss her throughout the day, and she still cuddles against one of our legs at night.
Still, I feel I have abandoned her. It’s no longer only our world. She’s no longer my purpose, my only source of innocent joy. We’re no longer partners. As our family has grown in size and love, my relationship with Bean has found its place outside of the center for the first time. And so, as filled with love as I am for my son (and I really, truly am, despite the tone of this post), I grieve for me and Bean and what we once were.
And so I’ll kiss her extra hard tonight, and scratch her ears an extra minute, and take comfort in the fact that we will always share those moments throughout the years that initially bound our hearts together, and that moments yet unlived are spread out before us, moments that will undoubtedly be different but hopefully not lesser, moments perhaps unfamiliar but no less radiant.
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