First Born Son

By Conor | May 31st, 2009 | 5 Comments »

Liz and I have a son. His name is Finn; he is wonderful. We are madly in love with him. I am using the term “madly in love” here as a way of showing the lengths I am willing to go to illustrate how much I care for this child.

In any other circumstances, you see, the term “madly in love” is, for me, utterly unusable. In the past when I have heard parents use it to describe their feelings for their newborns I would, if I was feeling generous, merely roll my eyes. That’s because it always reminds me of a kind of dramatic proclamation that goes beyond the reasonable. “Madly in love?” Really? You will find the phrase in Jane Austin adaptations where Kate Winslet (who else plays these roles?) will burst into her mother’s bedroom in a flowing nightgown and cry, in an English accent, “I met him last night at the Wickersham’s Ball, Mother! His name is Philip and we are madly in love! We marry Friday week!”

We are not madly in love like that. But we are crazy about this boy and we love him to death. I’m going to tell you more about him now.

Finn Stanton Grennan was born on February 20th at 1:39 a.m. He arrived into the world – New York Presbyterian Hospital, to be precise – and was immediately swooped away by the nurse to be washed and inspected. I turned to Liz and we were both dazed – she more than I since she had just gone through the trauma. All I could do for the couple of hours was watch her and encourage her and tell her how much I loved her and how extraordinary she was.

I was in the middle of telling her that I was incredibly proud of her when the nurse called out “Get your camera, New Dad! You gotta get this photo!”

It was quarter to two in the morning after an awfully long day so I believe I did well just to recognize that I was “New Dad.” I looked over to see the nurse holding up my son, this baby, in what she must have thought was some kind of pose but which looked to me like she was inspecting a chicken. I was not (to be frank) super concerned with getting that exact photo but damn if they don’t make you feel like this is just how it’s done. She could have yelled “Headstand, New Dad! Headstand!” and I would have hurried to try to do a headstand for her as she and my newborn looked on.

So I gave Liz’s hand a squeeze, grabbed the camera and took a photo of this tiny little person, crying valiantly with his tiny lungs, which were suddenly filling with air for the first time in his existence. And how crazy is that?

Fifteen minutes and two photos later, Finn was wrapped and lay quietly, beautifully, on the chest of my wife, eyes barely open, his arms moving slowly as if he didn’t yet know that he was the one controlling them, his head turned and nuzzled instinctively towards his mom. I watched him calm himself slowly, just by being close to her. It was natural, I suppose, considering that was the body that had been his whole world until moments earlier. My heart filled up at that scene and yours will too if you haven’t been through it already. It was also the first moment of peace in the last couple of hours.

After a short time I held him in my arms and looked into his little face. All I could think in those first moments was not that I was holding my son but rather how much he looked like my father-in-law. It was that uncanny.

“Who do you think he looks like?” Liz asked, softly and exhausted and relieved and warm with bliss.

“Your dad. He looks exactly like your dad.”

“I know! I didn’t want to say anything! Maybe all babies look like that?”

We made our phone calls to our family at about 3 a.m. They were overjoyed.

“He looks like you, Dad,” Liz said to the speakerphone.

“He looks like Winston Churchill?”

I looked again. “He does look a little like Winston Churchill,” I whispered to Liz. “Huh!”

Finn is now just over three months old and each day we love him more. Truly we do. I come home every day and I cannot wait to see him and hold him and he can’t even talk yet, though he tries. He thinks he’s having a conversation – not just any conversation either, a really good conversation. I would go as far to say that he imagines himself to be something of a great conversationalist, judging by his enthusiasm and rollicking intonation and his smiles. And I gotta say, for a three month old, I believe he is a great conversationalist, considering he doesn’t have any words that he can employ, nor does he really know much about the world beyond his bouncy chair and his crib.

He’s a babbler. Any time is a good time for babbling for Finn. He will wake in the middle of the night, crying for food. Once fed, Liz or I will put him on the changing table to change him and he will start his tiny chattering. My eyes are barely open but he stares at me and laughs and peeps. I mumble “Uh-uh, Finn. Not now. No talky talky now, please,” but he either doesn’t listen or doesn’t understand.

We’ll put him down in his crib, and if Liz is doing the night feeding she’ll turn on his little mobile which has puffy little birds that turn around slowly. Those birds really get him going because he seems to consider them his best friends. And once he sees *they’re awake, well, he gets pretty excited. So it’ll be two a.m. and he’ll start chattering away to them, and I’ll lie in bed and Liz will be giggling listening to him and I’ll ask “Did you turn on the mobile for him? Please tell me you didn’t turn on the mobile.” But Liz will only giggle more and call to him from our room, “Hi Finn! You talking to your birdy friends, Finn? We love you!”

He’s a lovely, lovely, lovely boy.

It’s difficult not to write pages and pages about him and the exciting things he does, like grab his burp cloth and shake it. I shall spare you.

For now.

It is something like six months since I last wrote. I have used the same excuse the last few times and I’m going to stick with it. Life was busy. It is a common excuse and one I throw about freely, and in this case it happens to be true. Because you are reading this I will take the liberty of telling you why it was so busy – not to complain (quite the opposite) but rather to explain. Here’s what was happening: this past semester, I was in my second semester of business school at Stern, I was recruiting for summer internships, I was running Next Generation Nepal, I was serving as president of my class and now of the student body, I wrote an 80 page book proposal which was accepted by a major publisher (I was asked to do it, about my Nepal experience, and the manuscript is due at the end of the year), my son was born in the middle of midterms, and I was trying, desperately, to spend as much time with my wife as possible – we celebrated our one year anniversary on March 1st.

I missed blogging. I can’t imagine there are people still reading this, but I want to continue to do it.

But now: things are good. School is finished. I am going to be spending the summer in New York City working on the book. I have more time with Liz and more time with Finn and less time with my study group working on Corporate Finance projects. Life is very good right now.

I finished school on Monday the 11th or whatever it was and Liz and I went down to Maryland’s Eastern Shore where we got a really big farmhouse with my best friends from college and their children. Ten adults, six children (all under the age of four), two dogs. It was fantastic. After that we went to California to visit friends and go to a wedding that was on a ranch, a hill on a ranch, more specifically, in Santa Barbara. The hill was overlooking the ocean. It was one of those weddings – and I have not been to many like this – that make you want to get married again. (Get married again to Liz, I mean.) It was that beautiful.

I’ll tell you where I am now, as I write this – I’m in the Bahamas with Lizzie (or I was when I wrote this - full disclosure, I am sending this from my living room now). It is our last, and really our first, vacation with just the two of us in a long time; Liz goes back to work on June 1. We love this place – it’s our first trip to a place called Atlantis and it has all these water rides which are designed to propel as fast as possible while you sit in an inner tube. There is one ride where you go down a pitch black twisting tube which would be fun except my inner tube always spins around just before the tunnel and I end up going down backwards. The positive side of that is if I throw up, it’s not going to get whipped back into my own face.

But we miss Finn like crazy. He’s with his grandma, Liz’s mom, for a few days. We’re coming home soon and we’re going to stand over his crib and watch him sleep and, if I’m not mistaken, probably cough loudly and I might bump up against the crib until he stirs and we have an excuse to pick him up.

This is what he looks like. In this photo he is hanging out with Lion, his other best friend.

Ok, that’s all I wanted to say. I’ll try to write again soon, though I suck at that so I don’t really know. I do know that this is the summer of writing, and what could be better than that? Good times!