It has been a wonderful, glorious, rough past 3 (almost 4 months) making the transition into parenthood. Yes, that sweet baby is worth every minute of lost sleep, every ear piercing cry, every exploding diaper, but I would be lying if I didn’t say that it’s also been hard. Nothing anyone can say can possibly prepare you for the joys or the woes of being a first time parent. They’ll tell you you won’t sleep for a month, but until you’ve experienced it, you can’t really know the toll that no sleep can have on you. They’ll tell you that you’ll love that child more than life itself, but you won’t know the heart wrenching depth of that until they sleep for 5 hours the first time and you fear they have stopped breathing! (Can I get an Amen?)
That being said, I feel like I’m coming out of a stupor. Maybe it’s because my sweet pea finally lets me sleep for 6 consecutive hours (sometimes even 8!!), maybe it’s because I’m adjusting, or maybe it’s because I finally have some idea of what to expect on a daily basis (until she changes again). Regardless of why, I have found a renewed vigor for getting stuff done. Life may have been on hold for those first few months, but now I actually feel like I can put on make-up, leave the house, get errands done, read a book, even clean my bathtub. I can plan out a couple of things to do at naptime and sometimes even sneak in a little power nap for myself.
This has been coming a little at a time over the past month or so, but I finally feel like I can live again! For any new mom out there who feels like life outside of baby has ended, please know that it gets better. A dear friend of mine always says: This too shall pass. I distinctly remember the day that I realized I don’t have to sit and watch her sleep, so I got some scrapbooking stuff out and worked on a few pages. She was only about a month old then, so it was only the beginning. Then I realized that I could do bigger things while she napped. That wasn’t until she was a almost 3 months old when her naps were actually a decent stint and I wasn’t in desperate need of a nap myself. Now we’ve developed a rhythm (rather than a schedule) and I know when I can plan to do things.
Ebooks are my new favorite, though. The books I’ve been reading have been encouraging me to get dressed and actually wear jewelry (still working on that) and to take charge of my home. I downloaded the Kindle app on my phone long ago and never used it, but then I started following Money Saving Mom and found several free ebooks (she has new ones all the time). You might think, who has time to read with a baby! And I know some would suggest this as a “no-no”, but I read while nursing. 10-15 minutes a time, 3 or 4 times a day gets you about an hour of reading in! Some say you should pay attention to your baby while nursing, but mine is very distractable. If I start talking to her… well, that’s the end of eating and it makes nap time that much harder. I do make sure to spend uninterrupted time with her afterwards (if it’s awake time), but I digress. Finally, I feel like we can get back to “normal” (whatever that is) or at least we have established a new “normal”. Ahhh, it’s good to be back in the land of the living.