Perspective

This is us. A little over 7 years ago. We were at a beach bar in the Caribbean and I think the bartender was over us being chatty and needed some silence in his world and so he managed to coerce us into duck taping straws to our mouths with the straws in a bottle of some mixed rum cocktail poured into a bottle. When I say we were living a life of no responsibility I was not exaggerating. Fast forward a few years and we are now the proud parents of 4 little ones. If you had asked us back then if we ever wanted to have kids, one guess what our answer was?

So far you have heard all about our good times and travels and fun that we have had. We travelled the world on a luxury yacht, had a gourmet chef cook our food, took international trips to South Africa, went diving in the Bahamas, drank too much and pretty much lived a hedonistic lifestyle. Little did we know in less than 2 years from this drunken day in the Caribbean our little Leo would be born.

I titled this blog post perspective because having kids is pretty normal, especially being the fully fledged adults we were, but going from the picture below to changing diapers and through the night feedings in a little over a year and a half is a shock to anyone's systems. It. Was. Not. Easy. Parenting is not easy, I reckon it is arguably one of the hardest things there is to do, well, for me it is any way. Add to that we had just opened a bar and I was working between 80 and 100 hours a week and I can freely say that this was a darker period of our lives despite all the joy and pride that came with having our first baby and opening a bar which had been a lifelong dream of mine. I still find parenting hard but I seem to have found a happy medium between pulling my hair out and cooing at the cuteness of our 4 feral children.

That first year was tough. Real tough. Being the suckers for punishment that we are, a couple months after Leo was born Lana was pregnant again. Apparently the doctor was not exaggerating when she said Lana would be very fertile after Leo was born! Faced with one new born baby and another around the corner we made the difficult decision to sell the bar so that I could be home more. So we sold the bar and I started bartending 30 to 40 hours a week. It felt like a working holiday going from an average of 90 hours a week down to 35. That made a world of difference and probably saved our marriage. yes, things had been that rough, neither of us had been happy for a while and had been too overwhelmed with life to pay much attention to that minor detail! Our little Logan was born 11 months after Leo. We will always have a little chuckle when we tell people our kids birthdays and they are both in 2016. We have had more than a few looks of confusion!