Finn as a person didn't really exist to me until the day of the first baby shower in Odessa. Because of the problems we had in the pregnancy it was hard to think of him as a real person that would eventually actually exist in the real world, but seeing his name on that day on the sign welcoming people to the house really hit home for me.
On that day and at the following shower we got all this "stuff" for Finn, some based on our registry (which I put together with little experience to guide me) and some based on what people knew we would need. Between the two showers we had an army of clothing for him to wear, devices for him to sit and bounce in, places for him to sleep.
Early on these gifts and devices were critical when every bit of extra effort was a real effort. I will never know how much harder it would have been with a heavier infant carrier, or how much less we would have slept without the Snoo, but even without that knowledge the daily use of those gifts and the fact that he used them eventually built up an emotional tie to the gifts we got at the showers.
But as kids do Finn grew, and grew quickly. Suddenly the infant carrier that he road everywhere in was too small and too unsafe. A mamaRoo that we had to wedge towels in so he could first sit in it would creak under his weight, warning us that it wasn't going to help much longer. The infant clothes, and 3 month clothes, which were the bulk of what we got, stopped fitting. Eventually even the biggest Snoo sack wouldn't fit him.
At first I was in a little shock about replacing these things and held off, but eventually I worked to replace each item with something we could afford (read: is less nice) that was a step up in size. Some things, like the mamaRoo, had no larger equivalent and therefore him outgrowing it simple meant we had less things to put in him and less ways to placate him. One by one the presents of the showers stopped being useful, and at this point we have moved on from hundreds if not thousands of $ of gifts we got on the day when Finn first felt real.
Soon after we retired the mamaRoo Rene offered to buy it for another mom she knew who would need one. I was happy to be able to get value out of it without me having to negotiate a deal like I would with the rest of the stuff we would need to sell, but the day she dragged the mamaRoo away both Lindsey and I got sad about what was lost that would never come back again.
On that day, we found that in less than a half a year we built up a real emotional tie to these devices that had helped us through the hard newborn stage. The day it left with Rene was the first feeling that something in life was lost, that a stage had been moved past never to return.
There would always been new experiences with Finn, and hopefully plenty of new stuff for him to climb into in the future. But sometimes in life you don't know what you lost until its gone, and on that day I realized that Finn the newborn was a memory left to history.
On that day and at the following shower we got all this "stuff" for Finn, some based on our registry (which I put together with little experience to guide me) and some based on what people knew we would need. Between the two showers we had an army of clothing for him to wear, devices for him to sit and bounce in, places for him to sleep.
Early on these gifts and devices were critical when every bit of extra effort was a real effort. I will never know how much harder it would have been with a heavier infant carrier, or how much less we would have slept without the Snoo, but even without that knowledge the daily use of those gifts and the fact that he used them eventually built up an emotional tie to the gifts we got at the showers.
But as kids do Finn grew, and grew quickly. Suddenly the infant carrier that he road everywhere in was too small and too unsafe. A mamaRoo that we had to wedge towels in so he could first sit in it would creak under his weight, warning us that it wasn't going to help much longer. The infant clothes, and 3 month clothes, which were the bulk of what we got, stopped fitting. Eventually even the biggest Snoo sack wouldn't fit him.
At first I was in a little shock about replacing these things and held off, but eventually I worked to replace each item with something we could afford (read: is less nice) that was a step up in size. Some things, like the mamaRoo, had no larger equivalent and therefore him outgrowing it simple meant we had less things to put in him and less ways to placate him. One by one the presents of the showers stopped being useful, and at this point we have moved on from hundreds if not thousands of $ of gifts we got on the day when Finn first felt real.
Soon after we retired the mamaRoo Rene offered to buy it for another mom she knew who would need one. I was happy to be able to get value out of it without me having to negotiate a deal like I would with the rest of the stuff we would need to sell, but the day she dragged the mamaRoo away both Lindsey and I got sad about what was lost that would never come back again.
On that day, we found that in less than a half a year we built up a real emotional tie to these devices that had helped us through the hard newborn stage. The day it left with Rene was the first feeling that something in life was lost, that a stage had been moved past never to return.
There would always been new experiences with Finn, and hopefully plenty of new stuff for him to climb into in the future. But sometimes in life you don't know what you lost until its gone, and on that day I realized that Finn the newborn was a memory left to history.
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