Ellie is two months old today! I can’t believe it. I thought the second pregnancy flew, and it turns out that the baby days are flying, too (though as someone said to me the other day, it’s a marathon, but each day is a sprint).

It hasn’t been easy, adjusting to two kids. I feel like I’m dropping all the balls most of the time, but each time we have a good sleep night (which last night was, after a hideous, horrid miserable weekend including one 11-1:30 a.m. period where E woke up every 3 to 15 minutes) I feel like I might just make it through to the other side. One thing that is making it go faster is keeping up with Tuck, who has classes to go to and friends to play with and doesn’t let me just sit around staring at the baby.

I found this ominous, especially since T just said “I fix baby Ellie” while brandishing his screwdriver

And now I know what we’re working towards, having done it before. As Ellie starts smiling, I turn and see Tuck making jokes. He is so very, very funny these days, all silly faces and perfect mimicry. “Gee whiz,” he says to himself when something is hard, and “oh, Tuck, silly Tuck” when he’s amusing himself. He’s been pretending to be a doctor and heal his little orange doll’s stomachache (“Make Neddy feel better”), or he puts on his hard hat and gets out tools to work on his “cherry picker” (step stool) with the “jackhammer” (grabber claws).

We had a bad scare a week ago–through a variety of misunderstandings Tuck was alone in the room with Ellie on the window ledge/changing station, and he pulled her off, three feet, onto her face. She’s too young for any “is the child acting normally” observations to apply, so we ended up in the pediatric ER until 1:30 a.m. getting Baby’s First Head CT. I was so furious at Tuck; he’d been being pretty aggressive towards Ellie and ignoring anything we said about being gentle or nice to her. But my friends Ann and Greta encouraged me to turn on hardcore positive reinforcement techniques, and a week later they finally seem to be working. Yesterday he played gently with her, tickling her feet while she smiled for a couple minutes.

And honestly, how could I stay mad at this face?

Besides, he’s just two. He’s so big that even I sometimes treat him like he’s older, which isn’t fair at all. I had a sad week or two recently when I realized most of his friends have started school this fall, so we’re on our own during times when we used to have consistent playmates. But suddenly I met a bunch of new people–mostly through the awesome block party our neighborhood threw the weekend before last–and it turns out there are lots of new babies and families with kids Tuck’s age within a block or two. It’s nice to expand the circle.

Meanwhile, Ellie, as I said, has started smiling and is suddenly much more interested in the world. She loves to lie on that ledge (now ALWAYS with an adult right next to her, sigh) and stare at our faces or at the windows. And she appears to be deeply in love with the dangling monkey rattle on her bouncy chair. I don’t have nearly as many photos of her because much of the time we look like this:

She’s so snug, she snoozes through all our morning activities, and I don’t think Tuck even realizes she is there.

It’s fun to see her starting to emerge from that newborn haze, all unfocused eyes and eat-sleep-poop. I think we’re going to like her.

And I can’t wait until both kids are sitting on a blanket with me at the farmer’s market, enjoying a grilled cheese and soaking up the early-fall sun.

Ellie is up, after a record-breaking 40 minute nap not on me WHILE TUCK IS ASLEEP, miracle of miracles. Off i go!

Next time (which will be sooner): Apartment stuff!

Tuck is two! It’s nearly impossible to remember life before he came along; and as I look at little Ellie it’s even harder to remember that my big boy started off looking like this:

Two days old

Here he is during Ellie’s newborn shoot (more on that later), just before turning two:

Anelise Tubinis Photography

Where to start talking about Tuck at Two? He is ridiculously verbal. Everything we say gets repeated, from the mundane (hubcap!) to the hilarious (he now says “silly goose!” when he decides he’s being funny or when one of us makes a mess). He remembers everything we tell him, and refers back to things that happened weeks or even months before (after spending one day with my friend Stephanie‘s son at a beach in SF in May, he said “[Son’s name] trucks beach” nearly every time we mentioned a beach or lake all summer). He knows full well if he’s been or is being bad, and tells us exactly why we’re mad when we ask. (“Daddy angry. Spitting.”) (On that note, his newest trick is to fill his mouth with water and then spit it on the floor OH MY GOD WHY?) He has the sweetest voice.

At Squam last month

He’s so, so two. Combined with bringing Ellie home, he’s definitely pushing back much more than even a month ago. Lots of sudden melt-downs and seemingly nonsensical resistance. We’re working through it–I’ve been trying to spend as much one-on-one time with him as I can, leaving Ellie with my Due-for-Sainthood Mother-in-Law, and that’s helped a bit. He spends an hour or more in his crib chatting with his stuffed animals before giving in to his naps. He sings. He thinks I know a song for every tool and machine, because I made up front loader and backhoe songs.

Meeting Ellie in the hospital

His favorite toys are his tools, and he spends hours “fixing” things around the house.

He’s very active and strong, and seems pretty agile. At his gym class he keeps up with all the odler kids (he’s as big as they are, for one), and he excels at climbing ladders and balancing on the beam. He’s never happier than when Ben gets to take him to a playground.

This all seems so…surface-only. I can’t adequately explain who he is except to say that he’s a very special, sweet boy. Every night when we tuck him in before we go to bed, my heart swells when I watch him sleep; that peaceful cherubic face under the golden curls.

Not cherubic.

In the car the other day Ellie was fussing and Tuck was bored, so we asked him to tell her a story. We could just barely hear him “One-upon-a-time there was boy named TUCK.”

I can’t wait to find out what happens to him.

Anelise Tubinis Photography

We are thrilled to introduce our new addition, Ellie (Elizabeth Christy, named for both grandmothers), who joined us 11 days early at 1:01 a.m. on August 2 (missing my birthday by 1 hour!).

Baby salad

Ben was in NC for a business meeting last Wednesday, and his mom was headed up from Long Island to join us for Tuck’s early birthday party (planned so we could do it before his sister arrived!) and then stay on through Ellie’s birth to help out. She was originally coming on Friday but she had a dream about the baby coming early and made her ferry reservations for Wednesday instead (though she didn’t explain why). Ben and Christy were both due in around 6 p.m. At 4 I started feeling what I was fairly certain were contractions–spaced well apart but enough to make me throw some final items in my half-packed hospital bag. Tuck had gone down very late from his nap, and by the time I woke him up at 5:15 (thinking I really needed to get to Whole Foods and pick up the CSA by 6!) my contractions were about 4 minutes apart. He woke up miserable and then freaked out about the heavy rain that was falling, and I realized driving around and grocery shopping probably weren’t on my agenda, so I called Ben in his taxi and asked him to get the CSA.

He showed up right when his mom did, at 6:15 or so, with vegetables in hand, to be greeted by me saying “Hi, I’m in labor.” (I did notice that the kale looked lovely, though.

Long story short, we headed to the hospital not long after, and after an intense (I’ve gone drug-free with both births) but mercifully fairly short labor, Ellie joined us early the next morning. Seven pounds, 5.8 oz., 21 inches long, with dark hair just like Tuck had.

The next morning

She is already a week old! A few scenes of our sweet, mellow snoozer (knocking wood all over the place):

All dressed and ready to head home

New baby in travel bassinet

Old baby hamming it up in travel bassinet

Relax, already!

My little watermelon girl

Tuck is fascinated by “Baby Ellie” but a little off-kilter, as you can imagine. I’m trying to spend one-on-one time with him whenever I can. Any tips from those of you who had toddlers/preschoolers when you brought home #2?

This is totally off-topic from what I normally talk about here, but what the heck. Have you read the (very lengthy) Anne-Marie Slaughter piece in The Atlantic, Why Women Still Can’t Have it All? Really interesting stuff. I chose the opposite track from Dr. Slaughter, I’m more than a decade behind her in parenting and life, and I’ve made choices that all but guarantee that I’ll never be in any seriously powerful career position. But I made those choices in a really informed way, and I’ve been very grateful for the thought I put into it many, many years ago, in addition to the luck/flexibility I’ve ended up having now. (That is to say, my choices do not reflect on yours! Everyone goes about this differently and I respect whatever arrangement you’ve made. Also I know I’m lucky to be able to choose to stay home rather than have a choice made for me for whatever reason.)

From the article:
In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

Before my senior year of college I was very seriously considering law school. I come from a family packed with lawyers of every stripe–judges, ADAs, corporate types–and I’d always really enjoyed talking through their cases, pulling the facts apart, understanding how they argued one side or the other, etc. I’m a logical thinker and in general really felt like the law was the flip side of the coin for me, if I didn’t pursue my by-then-almost-a-decade-old journalism dreams. (What can I say, I latched onto this career very young!) I spent some time that summer shadowing my uncle, then a corporate defense litigator and partner at a big firm in Portland. I spoke with as many of the women in the office as I could, especially the ones who had come from the white-shoe firms in NYC, where I assumed I’d end up, and asked them about work-life balance. I will never forget one of them looking at 20-year-old me and saying “Honestly? There were two female litigating partners in my office. One never had kids, and the other would send out memos when her nanny was on vacation asking things like where to buy kids’ shoes or easter candy.”

The same summer, a friend loaned me Flux, by Peggy Orenstein, and I read it in about two days. The book says a lot of what Dr. Slaughter does, that very few women can actually “have it all,” and no matter which path we choose we tend to end up questioning ourselves.

I went back to school determined to stick with journalism, and I never bothered to take the LSAT. I didn’t want to choose a path where if I eventually wanted to stay home with kids (and if I’m honest, I always assumed I would) it would be at a crucial point in my career where, as one of my uncle’s colleagues said, stepping a toe off the conveyor belt would mean giving up any chance of getting where I wanted to go. I graduated, interned, temped, and eventually worked my way onto the staff at Fortune, and then just when I’d gotten the promotion that meant I could really begin pursuing my own bigger stories, I quit to get married and move to New Hampshire for a year. A year in consulting after we moved to Boston, followed by a couple years of full-time freelance work, and then Tuck came along and here I am. I do a couple freelance pieces for Fortune each year, and I have other projects here and there, but 90% of the time I’m a stay-at-home mom, and I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be doing something else.

That said, I still have moments of real doubt, where I question where I’ve ended up. Did I squander my potential? Where would I be if I’d stayed in NYC (the answer for an awful lot of my colleagues is “laid off,” so…), or even if I’d been more ambitious once I actually got the job? Am I lazy? What will I do for a Second Act when my kids are in school? It’s not like full-time magazine work is thick on the ground in New York these days, much less Boston, and is that what I’d want, and where would I be going back into the hierarchy? One of the things that was hard to take when I was in consulting was starting at the New-College-Grad level despite seven years of work experience, since I was jumping industries. Will I look back when I’m in my late 30s and wish I’d stayed on *some* conveyor belt, or will continuing to write and blog and freelance be enough to keep a toe on?

When I was at Fortune I got into a pitched battle with a very senior (female) writer about CEOs in the Fortune 500. She is of the generation that has fought for every step up the ladder in male-dominated fields, and her career is her life, from what I saw. I was probably about 25 at the time, and I remember she asked me when I thought my generation would get to the 50-50 split in terms of CEO slots. I thought she was joking, but when I realized she was serious I said “That will never happen.” She was FURIOUS, but I stuck to my guns–as I told her, I think my generation is less willing to make the sacrifices her generation did, and in any group of 100 equally-qualified men and women there will never be as many women willing to give up what they would have to give up to be a CEO. I was amused to see Slaughter mention the generation gap in her article:

Only recently have I begun to appreciate the extent to which many young professional women feel under assault by women my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York, several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast my career with the path being traveled by “younger women today.” One expressed dismay that many younger women “are just not willing to get out there and do it.” Said another, unaware of the circumstances of my recent job change: “They think they have to choose between having a career and having a family.”

And yet she closes her intro by saying the best hope for changing our current situation is to have 50-50 representation everywhere from the Senate to the C-Suite. That, I’m afraid, is putting the cart before the horse. People like me won’t choose a path that leads to a position of power when we look to those positions and see nothing but sacrifice. (Side note: The year I argued about women CEOs the Most Powerful Women cover story was about stay-at-home husbands. And when Dr. Slaughter addresses the husband issue, she rightly points out that assuming marriage to a man willing to pull more weight with the kids solves the problem doesn’t address how women vs. men feel about being away from their kids. The section talking about this very sensitive topic is *fascinating.*)

One last thing. I loved this from a Q&A about the story on the NY Times parenting blog:
We need to have managers who will look at someone who’s still in the office at midnight and say, look, you’re not managing your time as well as the person who can do the same amount of work and be out of here by 6:30. Then, things change.

Seriously. I remember one of my editors used to be out of the office by 6:30 or so almost every night, and yet her section was always the first one finished. She managed her writers and her own time exceptionally well; why should she stay until 11? This is why I prefer to bill my freelance work by the project, not by the hour: I work fast and I write fast, and I don’t think I should be penalized for it.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to write about this. Maybe because I think almost everyone I know is struggling with some aspect of it, or has in the past, and we need to be honest about our fears. It’s sensitive stuff, made harder to discuss by the fact that I think everyone tends to get a little defensive and assume they’re being judged, no matter which decision they made. Ugh. If you get a chance to read the article, do. I’m interested to discuss with anyone who is in the mood!