Father's Day 2013

It seemed like the third time in as many days that we had to backtrack, break down the miscommunication, apologize to each other, offer reassurance, make a new plan, and then try to invent humor or romance out of dry air to move forward with our evening together on a positive note. This from a couple who usually never fights.

Unaccustomed to my happily ever after being shaken up, I wanted to know what the deal was.

"I'm trying to be everything I need to be here. It's hard."

I suddenly saw him as I first saw him, and realized in a moment how much he has had to change for us. The first time I met him he was 24 and still wearing his college wardrobe, almost hyperactively trying to impress me. His business was just taking off and he had more money than he knew what to do with. He cut his own hair, spent all his time with his friends, and had more light moments than serious ones. He could get his work done in one sitting without getting interrupted. His most important family role was to be a good son. He was always available when a friend needed him and he saw all the new movies when they came out in theaters. His actions affected only himself. His highest degree of responsibility was to his clients. There were no life or death situations. No one depended on him to be able to eat. He spent every day fending off boredom, and he did it well.

Everything since then has changed, and I suddenly felt sad for asking this of him. As I went along marrying him and making him a father, I didn't really think about how I was also urging him into heavier and heavier responsibility. Before me sits the complete package: loving husband, dependable provider, joyful dad, constant companion, dream chaser. He works so hard for us to be all that he is.

"I'm sorry you had to give up your easy life for this."

And then the same boyish grin and sparkling eyes I saw at my front door on the first night I met him smiled at me and said: "I'm not."

Liesel's mornings

Someone recently asked Tim what changed the most about his life with fatherhood and he replied: "I love mornings now."
It's true. We used to lolligag around our mornings and desperately reach for the coffee to wake us up, but now we have Liesel. I get up once during the night to feed her in the nursery, but when she's ready for her next meal at about 7am, Tim gets up and brings her into bed with us. We have our sweetest times together when she first wakes up.


Liesel's Morning from Tim Tabailloux on Vimeo.

That's Tim playing the background piano music, by the way. While we were dating he wrote me this lullaby called "Berceuse pour Bethany" (lullaby for Bethany). Still makes me all swoony.

settling in

It's April now and we're doing fine. We've been traveling a lot, fitting in visits with family members before wedding season sets in solid and keeps us in Chicago all summer. Most of my family is in the South, so we're enjoying the warm weather where they are while it continues to snow in Chicago.

My mother in law assured me that at 3 months, babies just settle, and I've found that to be true for Liesel and me and our new life together. It's just getting easier every day. A lot of the ease is because I'm letting go of some expectations I had and just letting our family find its own pace apart from other models and schedules I was trying to copy.

We have our very own dynamic in the Tab house. Unless it's a wedding day, Tim and I are both home working together to juggle baby needs, business needs and household needs. I run the gamut of being a working mom, stay at home mom, and work-at-home mom on any given day. Some days Tim's workload is heavier than mine so I take care of Liesel's needs and on other days I get behind on my own work and Tim takes over with Liesel. It's not a regular schedule or a single-minded task. It wasn't before Liesel either. I tried really hard to get her on a predictable timetable early on but after a couple of months of that not working I've just relaxed into flexibility, because that's the only thing that works and doesn't result in a crying baby, crying me, and stressed out Tim.

I've been so pleased to experience the good changes that have come to our marriage with the addition of our baby. We have a new glue. A new joy. We are stronger together but incomplete without her. She is a new reason to love each other and work together for her good. Part of me was a little afraid that adding a baby would stress out my marriage, and we do have our moments of stress and difference of opinion, but overall we just have this grand new common obsession to experience together. 

I'm so proud of the man I married. When we were dating, I thought once or twice that he would be a good dad and moved on. I had no idea how precious he would be with her. I can't picture these things in my mind before they happen in front of me. Liesel loves him so much. The sound of his voice still makes her stop and reach out, like she did before she was even born. I'm so thankful that I get to parent with him for the rest of our lives.

I'm sinking into my role as a mom with comfort. The stroller pushing, spit-up wiping, baby rocking, nursing, kissing, dressing, diaper-changing...I'm good with this. I know I may struggle in the future, but this is meaningful work for me now and I'm humbled and grateful that I get to feel this way about it. She is an important person. Her life is so valuable and I get to be her caretaker and role model to get her ready to work in and impact her world. But before all that, this time of littleness while she's still all mine is so precious to me.

mid-March update

With an almost 3-month old, sometimes the only free time I have to write is at 4am when I can't fall back to sleep after a middle-night feeding. Ah, well. Like everything else I've gone without in exchange for this new life (coffee being a key example), it's worth it.

Liesel has become very expressive in the last couple of weeks, which brings us unending joy. She smiles bigger and bigger every day, coos and gurgles adoringly at us when all is right in her world, and is defining her different cries for different purposes, which is unbelievably handy. Her needs are usually simple; a full tummy, enough sleep, a clean diaper. 

I vacillate between feeling like I have an expert's handle on how to be her mom (when she falls asleep easily at the right time and is in an unbelievably good mood) and feeling like I'm clueless and my mistakes cause her pain (when I'm trying to put her down to sleep because I think she's tired and she won't stop crying because she's actually hungry). Contrary to a previous post where I touted that I'd figured out how to keep her healthy, she ended up getting sick during her 7th week and I learned on a gut level that my new greatest heartbreak in life is going to be witnessing the suffering of my child. You know when you fall in love and start to realize that you're in so deep, you can get hurt really badly if the recipient of your love fails or falls out or otherwise stops reciprocating? I'm in that place with my baby. Constantly quelling the "what ifs" of her lifelong health and feelings towards me. 

It's an impossible frame of mind to be in; whatever may come, I haven't the tools for it yet. And as complicated as it can be to decipher a crying baby's needs, I try to remember that my relationship with Liesel now is in its most primal form: she has basic needs, and I meet them with the resources available to me. It's usually milk. 

Onward. I feel like we've been in hibernation since the end of my pregnancy, and I'm so ready for Spring and socializing. It's hard to leave the house in the winter with a tiny baby who needs a nap every two hours and then thirty minutes of nursing after that. I can't just pull up my shirt on a freezing Chicago streetcorner or expect her to sleep well in my arms while I'm having a conversation with someone else. It's a perplexing situation, because I'd really like to be a friend, especially to other moms who are trying to figure this out too, but how do I get to the coffee shop or over to their house during naptime or expect them to take their babies out in the snow to get to mine? My hope lies in the Spring. Maybe when warm weather comes it will be easier. Until then, I'll keep spending most of my energy on family relationships (my sisters in law are becoming some of my best friends these days) and thanking my good Lord for giving Tim and I the opportunity to work from home most of the time. He is my favorite friend, and being able to talk to him all day while he edits pictures is a blessing of which I'll never know the end.

We're headed down to Florida next week to visit my parents and I think he and I will actually get to go out on a date together and take Liesel on walks outside. Outside! I can't wait.

we made it

life before baby

It's so easy for photography to feel like work that we don't often use more than our iPhones to document our life together, so we asked our good friend Sean Dorgan to come over for breakfast and do the picture-taking work for us.

I really wanted a reminder of how sweet this season has been, just me and Tim in our apartment where we love to live and do our work. For now it's just us, and it's quiet and we sleep in a lot and work very late most nights. I know it's all going to change soon, and I'm sure that these rooms will feel empty and blank without the sounds of a baby crying or the site of baby things or the smell of baby soap. Who is this person who's going to join our family, anyway? I'm dying to know.

So this is us, one month before we find out what we'd be missing if we hadn't decided to have kids.

And if you're wondering if I only have one outfit because you keep seeing pictures of it on this blog; the answer is yes. I only have one outfit. One pair of maternity jeans (I refuse to buy more), two of those white maternity tanks, and my go-to fall cardigan. When I'm not getting my picture taken I may or may not be wearing yoga pants and Tim's undershirts at all times. It's just too late in the game to justify buying more clothes that I'll only wear for a few weeks. And now I've said my peace and we can continue on with the pictures:

the labor scare that almost stole Thanksgiving

We had an eventful Monday in the Tab home. 

On Sunday night, I started having some lengthy bouts of Braxton Hicks contractions. It seemed like every time I stood up or walked around the apartment, I would get a contraction. So over the course of the evening I tried to stay as still and relaxed as possible to keep them away, but then they started coming back to back. I wasn't too worried because they weren't painful and even though they were frequent, they weren't growing in intensity. Tim had been out of town and I was anxious to pick him up from the airport when he arrived at midnight and have him back home.

The next morning they started coming again--before I had even gotten out of bed. I decided to start timing them to see what the pattern was and I was surprised that the first one I timed lasted over 5 minutes, with only a 30 second break before another one came. Thankfully, I already had a regularly scheduled appointment for that afternoon, so I knew I could get some advice on how to handle all this false labor. I went about my morning, but got a little alarmed when one contraction started as I got in the shower and didn't end until after I had finished showering, gotten dressed, and blow-dried my hair. It had lasted at least 15 minutes. But still, they didn't hurt, so it still really seemed like those "practice" contractions I had read about that don't lead to real labor.

Tim and I went to the Starbucks next door to the midwive's office to kill some time before my appointment, and while I was sipping my chai, I got hit with a really painful contraction that slowly grew in intensity so much that I couldn't respond to what Tim was saying to me until it was over. Then right away another one came and again I couldn't talk through it and had to really focus on breathing through the pain. I got scared.

We had plans to fly down to Georgia and Alabama today to celebrate two separate Thanksgivings with my all of my extended family over the course of the week, and by the time we walked over to the midwive's office, I was nearly sure we couldn't go. The rest of the week was starting to look like bedrest and a Thanksgiving TV dinner for us...or something. I am 33 and a half weeks pregnant, so a pre-term labor at this point would be serious, fearful business. I tried not to think about it and just prayed prayers of thankfulness that I already had an appointment to get help before all of this happened. I was just worried that when we got to the office, I wouldn't be able to accurately explain all that was happening or I wouldn't be taken seriously. 

None of those fears materialized. As soon as I got to talk with one of my midwives, I was presented with options: she could do a cervix check, an ultrasound, a fetal fibronectin test, and a non-stress test on the baby that would also monitor the intensity of my contractions. "I'll take one of each, please!". It took over two and a half hours of testing, but we all learned for absolute certain that I wasn't in trouble, despite the painful contractions I had felt earlier. No other signs pointed to real labor. The baby's position was high up and breech, nowhere near ready to come out. By the time I sat back in the recliner to get hooked up to the fetal monitor to gage the contractions, I was so relaxed and relieved that I didn't have a single one for the thirty minute monitoring session. The baby's heart-rate was perfect.We were highly encouraged to go on with our travel plans.

As we were on our way out, one of the midwives asked me: "Have you been drinking at least 80 ounces of water every day?" No. Definitely not. Not even close. "Have you been under any additional stress?" Maybe that time earlier in the weekend when Tim had to fly to California to do a shoot and I disintegrated into the likes of a pitiful pup with separation anxiety over him being so far away? I was hoping to keep that whole incident private...but my body eventually told on me. So I went out and bought an adult sippy cup a Camelbak water bottle to keep full and nearby for the next 7 weeks, and I'm making big efforts to not stress about the next big thing that I could be stressing about: a breech baby.

I'm happy to report that we made it to Atlanta tonight to start the grand week of quality family time that I so look forward to every year. I'm still getting contractions, but they're painless (if not tiring) and I'm so glad to know they're harmless. My fetal fibronectin test came back negative this morning so I know for sure my body isn't remotely ready to have this baby yet, which is the greatest relief, because we both need at LEAST 4 more weeks of this pregnancy to have a healthy baby.

Happy Thanksgiving!

showered! again!

Tim and I were insanely blessed last weekend to have another shower thrown for us by dear family and friends. Paul and Amanda really outdid themselves with the planning, decor, food, games, and so many much needed gifts.

It was such a sweet time of fellowship with our closest friends in Wheaton. We almost forgot to stop partying to open presents.  

I'm not usually one for shower games (I probably made one too many toilet paper wedding dresses in my time), but these games were cool. The top photo is the baby picture game. Every attendee brought a baby picture of themselves and we had to guess who was who, with the help of a name bank. The below photo is The Price is Right, where everyone had to guess how much all the combined items cost. I probably loved this game because I got to take home all the items at the end :) They were mostly things that I didn't know I needed (butt paste? portable diaper trash bags? special baby Q-tips?) or didn't know which brand to buy (diapers and pacifiers: I had no idea where to even start), so walking out of there with it all bagged up for me was really helpful. 

Amazing cake, no? You should make friends with your local Whole Foods Cake Decorator and invite him to your parties. That's what we do.

Fall wardrobe tip: these cardigans are at Target and they're like $22. All your friends are wearing them...or maybe that's just me.

Really, it was such a swell time. Tim and I walked away that night feeling our first sense of "readiness" for New Tab to arrive. Between our own purchases, the two showers, and some early Christmas presents, we have all the must-haves: crib, stroller, car-seat, rocking chair, a few gender neutral outfits to get us started, some nursing and diapering essentials...that's all you need to bring home a baby, right? I hope so.

A word about the registry process: it was so overwhelming for me! And as I got started with some  early research on products I had a sneaking suspicion that the baby industry was out to try to fool me into thinking I had to have all their stuff just as like the wedding industry tried to do. Sneaky advertising campaigns. Plus, I just didn't have the time to tackle it during wedding season. My solution was to hand the bar-code scanner to my mother. I figured; she raised three babies, she knows what I need better than I do. We chose a nationwide chain store (Target) because she's in Florida and I'm in Illinois, and she picked out all of the things she knew I would really need. It turned out to be a great experience for her to get into the groove of grandmotherhood and it helped me so much. Then I went online and made the changes I wanted to the registry that she started for me. I also paid attention to what my friends use the most with their babies, asked them lots of questions, and even looked up their still-active registries online for specific product information when I needed it.