The Wedding - Part I

I’m not sure if I ever wrote about this here, but one of my sisters in law, Ana, is getting married in June. She is exactly my age, 26, and she’s a doctor. She is getting married to a very nice guy (I mean this in the best way) whom she’s been dating for about 10 months now.
Although my in-laws have 5 daughters, all of them grown up (the youngest is 21, which is how old I was when I got married), this is the first one to get married so, as you can imagine, ever since the transplant this is all the family ever talks about anymore.
Because my in-laws need all the financial help they can get with this wedding (in Portugal, the wedding is traditionally paid for by the bride’s parents), and because we love Ana, my husband and I decided to give her the dress as our wedding present. My sister and I went to pick it out with her while we were on maternity leave. Now we’ll start working on the flower girls’ dresses (R is going to be one of them), which should be a saga in itself because my MIL and I cannot agree on what we would like the girls to wear. And then there’s the invitations, the theme, the DJ, the photographer, the hairdresser… And somehow it seems that they can’t do anything without my help. DH says his family is too dependent on me and I shouldn’t let them take advantage of me like that. The nerve!

Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be reading a lot more about “The Wedding” in the next few months so be ready. Oh, and I bought my dress already. Now I just have to lose 8 pounds.

I will only have boys from now on

R was a really difficult child in the sleep department. When she was a newborn she would eat every 2 to 3 hours day and night and it wasn’t before she was 4 months old that she first slept for 8 hours.
She was my first child and I was nervous and stressed out, and I’m sure that had a pretty big influence in her behaviour. I probably fed her every time she fussed, even if she was not even that hungry. The fact is I was desperate back then, I got depressed, I cried all the time and I was always exhausted. Looking back now I feel like I haven’t enjoyed her newborn/baby stage as much as I should have.With Manel everything is different. From the day he was born, he always slept at least one 5 hour stretch, usually follow but another 4 hour stretch and when he was 2 months old he was consistently sleeping for 8 hours straight. A few weeks go he started refusing the midnight bottle. I give him a bowl of cereal at 8 p.m. and put him to bed shortly after. I used to wake him up at midnight to give him a bottle but he’s been refusing or eating very little so I just stopped giving it to him. And he now sleeps soundly from about 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. straight. I’m in heaven. I almost feel guilty for saying this but I am enjoying this phase of is life so much more than I enjoyed R’s.
I’m not sure if this is because M is a second child and therefore I am less stressed, or if it is because he is a boy, or even if it’s just that every child is different and it just happened that he is a sleeper. But just in case, I think I only want boys from now on.

Eternal Dilemma

As you know, I work in Mergers and Acquisitions in an Investment Bank. However, I’m not the typical investment banker. At all.
The majority of my colleagues are young, single, childless and workaholic. They dedicate their life to this job, they spend nights and weekends at work (most of the time, needlessly, I must say), they have a silent competition going on to see who works more weekends, who leaves the latest. So you can often find them taking 3 hour lunch breaks, going on 4 or 5 coffee breaks a day, spending hours reading the papers or surfing the internet.

I, on the other hand, am the only married woman (and the youngest) in my department. And I have two children. I have a housekeeper/nanny who picks R up from school and stays with both kids until I come home. She works until 7 p.m., by which time I have to be home, of course. So you won’t see me taking lunch breaks longer than an hour (most likely 30 minutes) and when I’m at work I’m actually working. I truly believe that my work has not suffered in quality since I had R and I have yet to break a deadline. My boss is also happy with my work, or so he says.
However, I still get “dirty looks” when I put my coat on at 6.30 and I still have to hear all the jokes about how I have a “good life”. I’m used to it and it shouldn’t bother me but the fact is it does. I just came back to work yesterday and already I’m feeling uncomfortable about it. Why should I feel bad that I chose to have a family? Why is a person’s value judged by how late they stay at the office?

Back at work

So I’m back at work. After 4 months (can you believe it has actually been 4 months already?) of being at home with Manel, I now have to leave him every morning and come to work. This first day is going to be hard but I must admit I was starting to miss some adult interaction, especially since my sister went back to work 3 weeks ago. And I do love my job, so I’m sure I’ll get used to this new stage soon. And I’ll definitely have more time to update my blog more frequently, which it sorely needs.

I’ve been asked to update about DH and BIL. They are both doing great, we couldn’t ask for anything to go any better. My BIL has cut his cortisone meds (the immune-suppressors) from 80 mg to 10 mg and is reacting just fine. His levels have been absolutely stable since about a week after the transplant which is great. His not out of the woods yet and he will be on meds for the rest of his life but it is going as well as possible.

The kids are doing great. Manel has started solids last week and eats his mashed veggies like it’s all he’s ever eaten. He is so much easier than R was in every aspect so far. He’s been sleeping through the night for a couple of months now and he only fusses a bit when he’s about to poop.

Here is a picture of Manel and Diogo taken last week. Manel is the one on the left.













And here is one of Rosarinho last weekend