the next thing

I thought we would stay in this apartment for a really long time. Tim and I have never enjoyed a living space as much as this one. Before we found this apartment, we fiddled with the idea of buying a home and quickly found out that we would have extra hoops to jump through on account of being self-employed, including proof of a growing income for five consecutive years...and we hadn't even been out of college for five years yet. So we decided to be happy renters until further notice. We found this place and settled in. It's enough city to keep us entertained and enough suburb to let us sleep through a quiet night. I renewed our lease for 2013 without thinking twice about it.

And then Liesel came along and changed our priorities in the way that babies do, and when I started seeing the world through her eyes, I realized that there are a lot more friendly places we could be raising her. We had started getting serious about being smart with our finances when I was pregnant (things like retirement savings and life insurance) and at some point I added up how much we have spent on rent. Knowing we'll never get any of that back was disheartening. Of course there are risks in home ownership, but when stacked against the assurance of losing money in rent, those risks seem less daunting. 

As someone who has moved at least once every two years since I was 18, the prospect of being tied to a piece of land makes me shake in my boots. There is a sad side to it too...neither Tim's nor my parents are within 1,000 miles from here, and buying a house looks a lot like a nail in the coffin of "we aren't moving closer to you". We did a lot of soul searching on that one. We imagined our business in Florida and in France, we even pushed on some doors, but nothing opened, and meanwhile we kept getting requests to shoot Chicago weddings in 2014. That looks a lot like job security and an invitation to stay and grow right where we are.

So we started looking toward the West Suburbs to see what there might be for us and doors just started flying open. Part of this whole process involves us going to a new church, and that bit is just an upheaval. Church community is really important to us, so to leave one church and start at another was a hard decision, but in the last two months we have felt a lot of confirmation that we are going the right direction. Through the whirlwind of June, we found ourselves connected to an amazing realtor who found us a surprisingly perfect house, and we cautiously approached a recommended local lender to see how they would deal with us and our self-employment situation. Three hours later, we were pre-approved for a home loan. We couldn't believe it.

That was a big moment for Tim, and I am still reveling in pride for him. Because when you decide to start a business when you're 22, it's one thing to actually make a little bit of money at what you do. And then it's another thing to be able to feed yourself doing what you do. And it's another thing and another thing to add a wife and then a baby and be able to take care of them with what you do...and then to turn over your tax returns to a bank and ask them to trust you with, um, a loan for more money than you can make in a year, and they say yes--quickly-- that means that you pretty well made the transition from a dreamer to a doer and the world has looked at what you can make out of nothing and says they need that thing on a regular basis. He skipped down the sidewalk that day and I wiped away a couple of tears.

So we're buying a house and moving to the suburbs. It's a nice house with a fenced in yard with lots of trees for a swing and shade for playing. It's walking distance to a little elementary school that has amazing community reviews and good test scores. It's close to our friends and our new church. It doesn't have a fireplace, but we did find hardwoods underneath the carpet. There are rosebushes in the back yard and hydrangeas in the front yard. We're really excited, and we close in three weeks.

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 at 4 months

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.

Hero

Tim calls me Liesel's hero. Sometimes she runs him out of every soothing idea he has and she's still sad, so he hands her to me and she quiets down. It's sweet to hear him say that, and I need to hear these things for when I run out of solutions too. This bond we have grows stronger daily, and next to my love story with Tim, it is my greatest treasure. My favorite thought.

One evening she woke up sad. I was brushing my hair or something so Tim went to pick her up and laid her on the changing table. She really lost it then. It sounded like she was hurting or terrified or some other awful thing so I dropped what I was doing and ran into the nursery to find a bewildered husband and hysterical baby. We couldn't figure out what was wrong (an unfortunate but regular occurrence with little babies) so there was nothing to do but hold her close and rock.

When you're a parent, you never know which moments are going to sneak up on you and etch themselves in your brain and set a seal on your heart. It'll probably happen when you're exhausted and still wearing yesterday's smeared eye makeup. But thank God these moments come and remind you of the only important things in this world full of stuff and nonsense.

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.

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: