Trying to figure it out.

 “Adulting” is so damn hard. We hear this growing up, but do we really hear it? Well allow me to answer that question – we don’t. We rush through our childhood and adolescence wanting nothing more than to be older. To have more responsibility, more things, more money, etc. Well guess what folks, that’s called being an adult and sometimes,

it’s hard AF.

And this is where I find myself right now. In a hard place.

It’s funny. All my life I’ve longed for balance, but seldom have I been able to achieve it. When things were great in school academically growing up, friendships were usually not so good. When I’ve been my healthiest physically in years past, I’ve also been the loneliest, longing for a partner. When my family is finally exactly what I’ve always dreamed of, my career is in the toilet and I’m exhausted. Again.

Right now, my life looks pretty darn perfect from the outside, and it almost is perfect, except for a few things. Why must there always be those few fucking things?! My children are healthy, happy and ridiculously cute, and I have a pretty great wife. She’s near perfect but not all perfect, because none of us are. Georgia and I will be celebrating 11 years together next month and my God, have we been though a lot in those 11 years. We’ve often had conversations about all we’ve been through together and that we don’t know that most couples would have survived even half of what we’ve navigated… losing jobs, losing friends because of our commitment to each other; moving, buying a home, surviving infertility, surviving miscarriages, raising children as two gay moms, navigating Gracie’s operations, finding ways to pay for fertility treatment and said operations, dealing with crappy family members and, at times, falling “out of like” with each other.

What’s falling out of like, you ask? Allow me to explain. I will always love Georgia because of who she is and the impact she’s had on my life. She will always love me, but that doesn’t mean we’ll always like one another. All the hard shit listed above puts a lot of strain on a marriage and over time, if you’re not careful, it changes the way you speak to each other, how you view each other and it can make you fall out of like with one another. Lately, I find myself thinking back to our early years, when Georgia worshiped the ground I walked on and when I only had thoughts of love and rainbows for her too. You know, those years when the sex is amazing and frequent. When you take naps together only waking to eat and have more sex. You’re so connected because there is nothing pulling you in any other directions. It’s like you’re the only two people in the world and you’re basically obsessed with each other. Those were some great years.

Then, over time you decide to get married and fully blend your lives. This is when the hard stuff starts to creep in. The bills, the mixed family, the making of babies, the finding time for all of it and the other stuff that can be hard AF on a daily basis. Suddenly, you wake up and realize that you aren’t happy in your job, your house is always a mess, you’re exhausted and your wife hasn’t tried to seduce you or even cop a feel in months. This is basically where I am right now.

I remember feeling this way when Gracie was born. This is when I first realized that to be truly happy in life, I need 3 things: 7+ hours of sleep a night, an organized and somewhat tidy home and a feeling of physical connection to my wife – even if it’s just the occasional make out session. It doesn’t help that I learned 3 days before returning from FMLA that my position at work had been “absorbed” because the company is bleeding money and in huge financial trouble. I was told that I would be coming back to a completely new role, in a new department and would be building things from the ground up. It’s pretty much the last thing a mom with a newborn wants to hear, especially after spending 2 years building my previous position that now appears to run so perfectly that they want to “use my amazing talents in another area”… i.e. we’re going to continue to use you in any way we can. It also doesn’t help that a new baby means less sleep and more stuff and that the only “alone time” Georgia and I have each day is maybe 2 hours at night, which we often spend getting different things done in different rooms of the house…

I hate even writing things like this because how dare I complain. I have everything we’ve worked so hard for. We have our baby boy and he and his big sister are everything to us. We have a roof over our heads and we are both gainfully employed. Still, it’s so hard. Change is hard. Feeling like you can never truly find balance is hard. Being tired all the time is hard and missing the way your wife used to look at you -- is hard.

Adulting is fucking hard. Thank God for coffee.

5 years later...

On this day, 5 years ago, my wife and I took one last picture of our beautiful girl before she went in for her first cleft lip surgery. We were so incredibly scared for her to be put under anesthesia and for everything that was to follow - but not her.

Our brave girl was all smiles and did absolutely amazing! 

To this day, she is our fearless little warrior princess and it all started here, before she was even 5 months old.

First Holidays with our Little Guy!

It’s nuts to think that our little dude has already celebrated his first 3 holidays – Easter, Mothers’ Day and 4th of July! The time has flown and having him here with us on these special days has been such a joy for the entire family! It’s amazing the love and happiness that a new baby brings to a family unit. We’re all a little more excited to see one another. We stay at functions a bit longer than before, taking turns holding our little cutie, and there’s just more love all around. I know that Easter and Mothers’ Day were months ago, but I still wanted to document them because they were our baby boy’s very first! That and he’s growing so fast that Mama loves any excuse to share pictures of him when he was still teenie tiny!

-  E A S T E R -

Let me start by saying that neither Easter nor Mothers’ Day went off without a hitch… I think I forgot what an adjustment it is to have a new baby when you’re trying to look nice and leave the house on time… I don’t remember it being as difficult with Gracie, but at that time we also only had one baby to bring along while now we have a crazy dog running around driving me crazy + a very active 5-year-old who never wants to get ready + a new breastfed baby who is hungry all the time! Easter was a bit stressful because Will was so new, just 5 days old and while we wanted to stay home in our little nest because Will was still recovering from jaundice, we knew the fam would be expecting us, so off we went.

I don’t remember if I mentioned Will’s jaundice following birth in his birth story, but it was pretty bad. The hospital did let us leave on day 3, but only because we were sent home with a Neonatal Jaundice Treatment Unit that we had to place him in as much as possible. We did everything we were told to do and yet, every morning when we would have his blood checked, his improvement was minimal. It broke our hearts to have his foot pricked so much but we just kept pushing forward and doing everything as instructed. Then, on Easter Sunday as we hung out with family at my mom’s house, we received an emergent call from the on-call nurse at our Ped office informing us that following Will’s most recent re-test the evening before, the results showed that he was not in good shape and because his numbers weren’t where they should be we needed to come in immediately! As you can imagine, both G and I panicked leaving Grace with my mom while we sped off to the Dr. office. Turns out that the nurse we spoke with had completely overreacted and he was perfectly fine and making the progress that was needed. While this was good news, we were super upset that our nurse put us into a state of panic for absolutely no reason, and as a result, caused us to miss nearly all of our baby boy’s first Easter with family. We had to miss Gracie’s Easter egg hunt and Will missed what would have been his first egg hunt as well because by the time we returned, most of our family had left, which made me so sad. :(

Thankfully, our adorable babies made some other pretty great memories the week of Easter, including their first visit to the Easter Bunny together as brother and sister along with Gaga and Papa, Easter crafting at Nani and Grandpa K’s and Easter morning was so much fun for the four of us! I made a special Easter basket for baby boy just like I did for Gracie’s 1st Easter and it turned out so stinkin’ cute! I learned my lesson since making Gracie’s basket years ago, to just go BIG with the basket from the get-go and while his basket was so large he could have fit it, it turned out super cute! My little sis was also in town for Easter for the first time in probably 10 years, which was so amazing! She had flown in for Will’s birth and I was able to talk her into staying through Easter, so it was so great to have her here for our guy’s first Easter, waking up with them the morning of to help find where the Easter Bunny hid their baskets! It just meant so much to us that she was here!

- M O T H E R S D A Y - 

In the weeks leading up to Mothers’ Day, I was so excited at the thought of having another reason to celebrate! Another sweet beautiful baby to call us mom! We decided that we would give our moms photo collages of Will and Grace from our newborn photo session as their Mamas Day presents, so I got busy finding pretty frames and ordering prints the week prior. The plan was for both of our families and my brother’s family to get together for brunch at one of our favorite restaurants with a beautiful patio and just lounge and sip mimosas together all afternoon. Well, our day didn’t exactly turn out that way… For the first time ever, Georgia experienced some milk production issues and was having a hard time pumping enough milk to feed baby. And because she refused to give him formula, we basically had to just keep having her pump and wait. There was some miscommunication between G and I regarding who would put the picture collage together for her mom and we didn’t realize this until after we were already running late… Then I sliced my hand open on the glass of one of the frames while trying to quickly put the gifts together and bled all over the place! Long story short, we ended up joining our family nearly 2 hours late and were hardly speaking to one another by the time we arrived, lol!

Thank gawd for our amazing families who made us feel better about being so late. They loved on our kiddos and showered us with presents, which definitely helped to ease some tension and saved the day. It also helped that I had a great hair day and loved my new outfit, ha! Our moms LOVED their pictures and Will looked just as cute as ever in his baby suspenders. Grace was pretty darn adorable too!

After both holidays passed, I had to laugh at how they both went. If you saw our pictures on social media via Instagram, you would have thought that our Easter and Mothers’ Day went perfectly, which is sooo not what happened. Still, even with all that did go wrong, both were pretty great!

Mama's new charm for my boy! Thanks wife!

And for G - an everything you need breastfeeding basket! 

{2 Months of William}

Alright sonnie boy, Mama’s going to come clean with you… you turned 2 months old nearly 4 weeks ago and I’m just now gathering my notes and sitting down to write your two-month post. Gulp... If there is one thing you will learn about your mama over the years, it’s this – I typically have a million things going on at once and I’m not always on time. But guess what? Mama gets all things done eventually and that’s what counts. Right?! Yes, yes, that’s what counts!

You, my boy, are the cutest, happiest, most loveable little stinker in the world and you have your mommy, sister and I wrapped around your cubby little finger! You grew a ton in month two going from 8.7 pounds to 11.1 pounds and you grew 2 whole inches, now “standing” at 23 ¼ inches tall! You can now fit in 3-month clothing but can still squeeze into some of your NB stuff. You can control your head much better now and prefer “tummy time” while lying on me and Mommy’s chest as opposed to the floor (and who can blame you for that, we’re comfy)! You still have a ton of hair that’s grown even longer over this past month and is still just as fluffy as ever. Mommy and I enjoy styling it in a baby mohawk or the cutest little Superman part to the side-do. Basically, you have the best baby hair of any little guy we know and I think anyone who has met you would agree with that!

  

Here are a few more things about you – our precious TWO-month-old!

You LOVE:

* To eat your hands! You ball them into a fist and suck and gnaw on them all day. A fun game Mama plays with you is to pull your hand out of your mouth and bop you on the nose, which makes you crack up every time. :)

* Cartoons! You love them! Mommy and I feel slightly guilty when you sit with sister watching an entire cartoon from beginning to end, but you’re just so into it that we can’t help but let you watch! You usually fall asleep all cozied up on your Boppy while watching, but the fact that you can focus on the television so intently for around 20 minutes before falling asleep is amazing to us!

* Hello Mr. Social Butterfly! Your moms have not been shy about taking you out and about and you love it! This past month you went to birthday parties, swimming with friends, sister’s graduation (where there were about a 100 kiddos that you couldn’t get enough of), Northern NM for a little road trip, bowling with family, sister’s soccer practice and your first ever Pride events! You still sleep most of the time, so we baby wear you, but you will wake up on our adventures to see what all the commotion is about and just smile and let everyone love on you. Mama’s going to wait until the end of the summer to share our Summer Bucket List adventures with pictures of all of these outings and there have been many! 

* Sleep! You’re such a great sleeper! You began sleeping through the night when you were just weeks old and have slept like a champ since. I try not to mention this to fellow parents because Mama doesn’t want to brag, but wowzers! Great sleeper! You currently go to bed for the night between 10-11pm and wake between 6:30-7:30am ready to eat! You never wake in the middle of the night crying and you are so easy to put to bed. We usually get you cleaned up, change your diaper and feed you a 4oz bottle of breast milk before putting on your Owlet baby monitor. We then swaddle you and lay you to sleep in your play yard next to Mommy and Mama’s bed. This knocks you out for 7-8 hours straight, every single night. It’s pretty great!

* Your surroundings! You aren’t as into “things” as sister bear was. In fact, we rarely lay you on your activity mat nor do you stare at flashing lights on toys because there is just so much commotion going on around you 24/7 that we don’t need to keep you entertained, haha! You love to watch your sister and Mavie chase each other like a bunch of crazies and you enjoy being propped up on the couch where you can check it all out. Since it’s summer, we occasionally eat outside and you love that too. You look up at the sky and give us the biggest smiles!

You CAN:

* Say “Mum”, “MaaaMaaa” and “Ma” – I swear you can and if you don’t believe me, just ask Mommy! You only say these things when you’re hungry and crying, but it’s amazing to hear when it happens! Now, I will credit myself for this one because from the moment you were born, we’ve practiced saying “Mama” every.single.day and all that brainwashing has obviously worked! Yay!

* Give kisses! You pucker up and kiss us all the time and we LOVE it! You started doing this around 7 weeks and when Mommy told me that you could pucker up for a kiss when asked, I didn’t believe her! Once you showed Mama your trick, I had to get it on video!

* You sure can use that BIG voice of yours. Like, wow! You were such a non-crier in month one that I thought you would remain that way but month two brought screams like nothing we’ve ever heard. You literally go the entire day either smiling away or sleeping – but if you’re hungry and Mommy can’t pump fast enough… Well, the screams that come out of you could make anyones ears burst and it breaks my heart when you cry that hard. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen often!

* Swim! Ok, so technically it’s your Ottero that keeps you afloat but you kick and swish yourself around in circles in the tub moving your little arms like you’re really swimming. It’s so stinkin’ cute!

* SMILE! You smile all the time now but you just started to show us the beginnings of a smile in month two and it melts our hearts every time.

And that about sums it up! I will leave you with these adorable pictures! There were obviously a ton taken of you this past month, per the usual with your Mamarazzi! Here are a few of our favorites!