Back!

Mateo and I took our first solo trip this weekend, to visit friends out of state. He did such a good job. I am so proud of him. He did all sorts of new things, went new places, slept in a strange place, and he just rolled with all of it. Ever since we figured out the sleep thing, he has turned into a mellow and easy-going little guy.

Today on the plane coming home, we had one of those fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants parenting moments. We were waiting on the tarmac while they tried to finish getting the plane ready while the air conditioning was broken, so we were cooking inside the plane...and suddenly I heard the familiar sound of a gigantic poop taking up residence in Mateo's diaper. Since he started on solids, his number twos have become stinky and much grosser than ever before. I was sitting next to this nice older man and couldn't see just changing M right there, so I flagged down a stew- oops, flight attendant - and asked if we had time to go to the bathroom before we took off. She said yes.

So, we got into the even hotter and massively pee-smelling airplane lavatory. It was disgusting and there was nowhere to put the baby down. The last one I was in had a changing table thing, but not this one. I finally took out the pad from our diaper bag and balanced it and the baby precariously on the toilet lid. He was inches from all the crud around the toilet seat, but there was really nowhere else to put him. I opened the diaper to one of the biggest and grossest blowouts he's ever had. Which he immediately stuck his little hand right into. We eventually got him all cleaned up and the diaper disposed of and he didn't fall off of anything. I was kind of proud of myself. I think it's experiences like these that will eventually make me feel like the type of confident parent that can handle anything :)

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This weekend, I was talking to a friend who mentioned that she had told many friends about how we came to have a child. This was not the first time this has happened. In fact, it's happened frequently that friends (straight, mostly) have found our process of baby-making fascinating and have told us about how they have shared our story with lots of people and what their reactions were. I'm not sure how I feel about it. In some ways, I'm glad that our experience is helping normalize LGBT families to people who haven't heard much about them. And I'm happy to have our experiences shared in a way that might be helpful. In other ways, I wish it didn't have to be such a novelty. I guess it makes me feel vulnerable in a way that talking or writing about our lives myself doesn't.

This is about as close as I'm going to get to a contribution to Blogging for LGBT Families Day. I had lots of other thoughts to put into a post for it...so actually, maybe I won't give up on it quite yet. I'll post something in the next couple of days!