Excuse This House

More photos coming soon, I promise! I just wanted to pause for a shoutout to Scott for being so awesome the last couple of weeks. For 6 weeks after Luke was born, I got to stay home and be a full-time mom and not even think about work. Bliss. Scott, meanwhile, was plowing full-steam-ahead on his thesis work/RA work for his advisor. Now that I'm back to working full-time (only 12 work days to go! But who's counting, right?), he's a stay-at-home dad, but his school workload is still going. He's got double-duty to worry about. We're tag-teaming it these days: I feed/change the baby during the night & get ready for work at 6AM, Scott's on baby duty until I get home between 4 and 5, we have dinner or a snack together, and then he goes in to work from about 6PM until 1 or 2AM. We both nap when we can and sleep like crazy on the weekends we're home, but I know we'll heave a big sigh of relief come the second week of June when we'll both be done with work. I don't know how two-income families do it. Daycare, I guess.

I have to confess that I've always felt like the church's encouragement for women to stay home seemed a little...I don't know, limiting? Condescending? But after just 2 months of parenthood, I can completely see why. It just makes sense for one person to be at home--and at least when there's a baby on the breast, it logically needs to be mom. Historically, that was taken as a matter-of-course, but I think that the cultural mindset now is that a household can still run perfectly smoothly without that full-time home figure thanks to our modern advances. Not so. (I swear it's even harder now, thanks to the frenetic pace we all live in.) It's mind-boggling how much of a time suck the little darling is. Even now, two months down the line, I can't figure out how running a house and taking care of one little pooper can be a full-time job, but it is. I guess if you sit down to count the hours it takes every week just to keep a house livable (laundry, dishes, scrubbing, sweeping, paying bills, grocery shopping, running errands, fix-it jobs, returning calls, cooking, sorting, even just putting the TV remotes away for the hundredth time) and add a baby to the equation, it shouldn't be surprising, but it is. Little Luke is like a black hole: Everything close to him gets sucked in. Your entire day home with the baby revolves around his (still almost completely erratic) schedule, even though said schedule is a pretty unimpressive jumble of eating, sleeping, pooping, looking around, fussing, eating, and sleeping again. Scott and I both feel like we need to apologize to each other on the days we're not at work and the other one comes home to a less-than-sparkling house, but when you stop and think about it, it's an accomplishment just to have kept the kid alive another day. I saw a comment today on a friend's blog that said it better than I can:

Yes, what people generally don’t get is the safety hazard babies and toddlers are to themselves–stairs, doors, street, falling anywhere, anytime, poking fingers into sockets, putting ANYTHING into the mouth… they’re consumed with being themselves, which is innocently hazardous to their own health. So while it looks like a mom-at-home does “nothing,” the fact that the young ones survive to see the sun rise the next day is a wonderful accomplishment, service and credit to humanity. 

I guess there's no shocking revelation going on here; I grew up reading a saying my mom had on the wall about how it's okay the house is messy, because the kids came first (something like this, I think). It always seemed a little cheesy to me, but today it's comforting to remember that other people think it's okay that I didn't get the laundry done because I was snuggling my boy.

Trying out his new hat at the park

Little buddy