This weekend, we went up to Maine to introduce the girls to their
new cousin, Deklan, who has now attained the ripe old age of three and
a half weeks. He's a cute little dude. On Saturday night, my brother
and his wife went out for a few hours, and my mother, Alastair and I
babysat for him. I was reminded of how simultaneously sweet, exhausting
and dull the newborn weeks are. It also made me think back on the
surreal-ness of going from being childless to suddenly being a parent.
Once,
when the girls were just a couple of weeks old, and my parents were in
town, Alastair and I snuck out for a quick dinner at a Thai restaurant.
It was the strangest thing to be suddenly back out in the world, doing
something we might have done on a typical weekend night just months
before. Since our babies were born, our lives had changed dramatically,
but we hadn't yet made the full psychological shift. It was as if we
were in a strange, prolonged dream, so that this -- being alone
together in a restaurant, surrounded by mostly twenty- and
thirty-somethings -- felt more like reality.
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