A Woman and the Mountains: 2016

Monday, November 7, 2016

The Opposite of Everything I Value

This election is giving me anxiety. Seriously.

I know it’s a big deal everywhere, but I live in a swing state that also happens to be the first to vote in the country, so all eyes are turned on us. Candidates have been campaigning here for the last bajillion weeks. I’m not sure how it is in other states, but literally every single commercial on the radio and on TV has been a political one in the last 6 months, every street corner is filled with signs, every other yard has gigantic signs in it, etc. You can’t get away from it.

My anxiety doesn’t come from this bombardment and assault on my eyes and ears. It comes from knowing how drastically the country could change tomorrow night, and knowing that it’s the new world that my baby is going to start his life in. When you have children you realize that although you still matter, you feel like your baby matters more. You’re an adult, you can handle life’s bullshit. All you want is a good world for your child to grow up in. I rocked my Noah-boy to sleep this weekend, and as I looked at his precious sleeping face I thought about what our world may look like if Trump gets elected. I held him and cried, because I don’t want him to grow up in a Trump-world.

This isn’t about support for Hillary, this isn’t really about politics either (aside from the fact that it’s a political election). This isn’t about the fact that he’s running as a Republican. Yeah, I lean left of center, but there’s some things about the Republican platform that I agree with (though not necessarily about the tactics used to meet those objectives). I don’t not like Trump because he’s a Republican. He’s run for President under the Reform Party anyway, so the party doesn’t mean a whole lot. I don’t like him because he’s not who I would raise my son to be. Every quality I hope to instill as a value in my son, Trump displays the opposite.

I consider myself a feminist, although not a crazy hardcore one (whatever that means). I will raise my son to respect women. Trump clearly does not. I think the word “misogynistic” gets used a lot these days, but I really think it fits.

We will teach Noah to treat others with kindness and respect, and that some words are inappropriate no matter how or where you use them.

We will teach him to use manners. Trump cannot seem to use the basic ones that are hammered into your head in first grade.

We will teach him to tell the truth. I have never been so blown away by a person’s blatant disregard for what they have said.. ON RECORD! ON TV! ON THE RADIO! ON TWITTER! Like, something that anyone can pull up in .02 seconds and be like “uh… dude… actually you just said this… so….?”

We will teach him that some people aren’t like us. They don’t look like us, they don’t sound like us, they don’t act like us. That’s not a bad thing. We don’t need to fear people that are not like us, we just need to ask questions about things we don’t know about.

We will teach him that we are no better than someone because we happen to be white. It’s painfully obvious that Trump doesn’t feel or act this way, especially when he wants to a build a fucking wall in between us and our neighbors, when he refers to immigrants as “bad hombres”.

When the time comes, we will teach him about the importance of a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body and her healthcare. We will explain to him why the scare tactics are unfair and what it’s really like for people who have to make those incredibly difficult decisions.

We will teach him that the environment is important and why protecting our public lands matters. That we have an impact on our environment, large and small, and that we need to take steps to lessen our impact so that his children and grandchildren can enjoy the outdoors like we do.

We will teach him so many other things, so many things that Trump is 100% the opposite on. I’m not against Trump because he’s a Republican, I’m against him because of the type of person he’s shown me he is throughout this campaign.

I know my precious baby will not be a baby forever, and I can’t keep him sheltered his entire life. I just don’t want him to start his life in a world ruled by a bully. It’s just really fucking unfair. I was always taught to respect the leader of our amazing country, but I couldn’t ask my son to accept Trump as his leader. He displays no leadership qualities aside from business savvy (or should I say knowledge of how to use tax code and bankruptcy to your advantage) and the ability to gain a following. You can say what you want about how the country will change with Hillary as President, I know that there’s two sides to every coin. I think a civilized debate is healthy. But again, what I'm writing isn’t about Hillary, it’s about Trump. It’s about how the thought of him as the first President my son would remember literally makes me cry.

“When your children arrive, the best you can hope for is that they break open everything about you. Your mind floods with oxygen. Your heart becomes a room with wide-open windows. You laugh hard every day. You think about the future and read about global warming. You realize how nice it feels to care about someone else more than yourself. And gradually, through this heart-heavy openness and fresh eyes, you start to see the world a little more. Maybe you start to care a teeny tiny bit more about what happens to everyone in it” – My girl, Amy Poehler.

Trump: The Opposite of Everything I Value

This election is giving me anxiety. Seriously.

We will teach Noah to treat others with kindness and respect, and that some words are inappropriate no matter how or where you use them.

We will teach him to use manners. Trump cannot seem to use the basic ones that are hammered into your head in first grade.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Baby Amnesia

Everyone says that you will experience amnesia, forget how hard pregnancy, labor, delivery, and those first few weeks (months) are, and want to do it all over again. To them, I say:

You serious?

1. Pregnancy

I am surrounded by a lot of pregnant women, and anytime I see them I get a twinge that says "awww, I kind of miss it". Then I'm like

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed being pregnant and I do miss some aspects of it. For example, people aren't kidding when they say that no one really cares anymore after the baby is like 3-4 months old. Trust me, lots of people DO care, but eventually people stop asking you 24/7 about the baby and tolerate you babbling about the baby less and less. At some point, people outside your most immediate circle don't really want to hear about it every time your baby pooped up and out the back of his diaper in the grocery store. You stop getting the "pass" for being sleep deprived, except you are still as sleep deprived and you still deserve a goddamn red carpet for being able to get out the house and be a functional human being almost every day. Pregnancy is just so obvious that everyone and anyone wants to talk to you about it (sometimes to a fault).

Here is where I DON'T have pregnancy amnesia:

Being so large I couldn't fit through some doorways

Being so swollen and uncomfortable that I sat in my yard pouring cold water on my legs

The inability to tie my own shoes, or eventually even wear my own shoes

Having legitimate tree trunks for legs

2. Labor and Delivery

PEOPLE AREN'T KIDDING ABOUT THIS ONE. I have labor and delivery amnesia, however, there are certain things that stick out very clearly in my mind and I will never, ever, ever, forget. Let's start with what I do have amnesia about:

When the hell did I look this good? I'm like 10 hours into labor, and not just the first stage of it.

When the hell did I FEEL this good? Oh wait, it was the nitrous.

I LOOKED THIS BAD?

I saw that last photo a few weeks after Noah was born and went "holy shit....I look like I'm about to die". I didn't know at the time that I was a hair away from getting a blood transfusion, and I can see it in this photo. I look like I'm about four seconds away from being reanimated as a zombie. This was also the first time I really met Noah, because he spent about 15 seconds on my chest after he was born before being taken away to the NICU. It was just a few hours after birth and I was an emotional mess, I'm surprised I was even able to smile for that photo. I know I felt pretty wrecked but I don't remember it. I also don't really remember or know how to describe exactly how labor and delivery felt. The know the pain of it, I can remember how much it hurt and what it felt like, but there's something I can't pinpoint and can't really describe when people ask me how much it hurt. Like, it's something I wouldn't be scared to do again.

That being said, I will always remember: the feeling of his head being pressed up against my spine and pelvis (like you need to poop a 10 pound brick), screaming at the top of my lungs without medicine through contractions, realizing contractions hurt worse than getting a needle inserted in my spine, the sound of an episiotomy (google for birth control), watching my doctor hold up my placenta and say "oh, that's a nice one!" (I laughed out loud), and hearing Noah's billy goat cries.

3. The Fourth Trimester

Oh, let me tell you, I have no fourth trimester amnesia. The fourth trimester, aka the first three months, are hard on everyone. It was exaggerated by colic. I had a tough recovery from birth and still deal with the physical repercussions. Our stay in the NICU felt like a month. I'll never forget how hard it was to have him strapped up to a bajillion wires.

Our little space man

You would think the sleep deprivation would blur your memory so much that you would forget how hard the first three months are, but for me it just seemed to extend every minute, every hour, and it felt like there was no end in sight.

We're all struggling, bud!

I know parenthood always looks like some version of this

"Please send a team of professionals to my house immediately"

But what you get in the end

is a lot of love from a tiny, hilarious, adorable human, who also happens to be so cute and he spreads smiles to everyone that sees him.

It's totally worth it... but that whole amnesia thing is a bunch of bull. Anyone that says they don't really remember how hard it was probably has an empty nest.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Just A Girl and a Boob-Hoover

Me trying to decipher all of this

Entering the realm of parenthood means learning a whole new language. It starts in pregnancy with things line fundal height, anterior placenta, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, etc. If you scroll through any sort of forum or community board about pregnancy and parenthood the language gets more obscure – LO, SO, 38w4d, 6w PP, PPD, MIL, EBF, MOTN session, FF, the list goes on. For our purposes, the two acronyms that apply are EBF and FF – exclusively breastfed and formula fed. A baby that is “EBF” only nurses, “FF” babies take formula. The curveball Noah threw us didn’t have an acronym, so I made it up – PP. Primarily pumping. Or EBFBPP, exclusively breastfed but primarily pumping. It was too many letters.

I struggled with breastfeeding early on emotionally, we didn’t have any serious issues except for when he wanted to feed literally every hour and I thought I was going off the deep end. It’s hard to feel like you still don’t have your body back after being pregnant for 40 weeks. The pro-breastfeeding movement promotes that women’s breasts are not sexual, they’re for feeding babies. Yes, that’s true, they are for feeding babies - but for many people their breasts are part of their feminine identity in more ways than just baby-feeders. Breastfeeding can sometimes screw with that identity a little because it can feel like they’re purely functional, nothing else. What used to be an intimate part of your body is suddenly on display, all the time, to lots of people. They lose their novelty REAL quick. On the same token, I think even those that struggle with breastfeeding develop a deep appreciation for their body and what it can do. Anyway, I’ve stuck with breastfeeding through stubbornness, a learned but wavering enjoyment for it, and a commitment to what I believe is bets for Noah. I digress.

Noah was EBF (remember your acronyms, people!) until I went back to work, then I pumped during the day and nursed him any time I was home, including over the weekend (very little to no pumping). It was going fine… and then it wasn’t. Bottles are easier for babies, milk flows consistently and they don’t have to work hard to get it. He started getting frustrating with nursing because he had to work at it (GET A JOB, LAZY BUM). It would take a few tries and sometimes some crying from him, me, or both of us, but we hung in there. I started wondering if we should add more bottles in for all of our sake, but I remembered how convenient breastfeeding is and reverted back to my mantra: Don’t Quit On A Bad Day. We didn’t quit.

Then we travelled. Traveling is stressful anyway, but it was out first time going on a long trip with Noah and I was FREAKING. OUT. I probably drove Adam insane with the amount of text message, prioritized to-do lists, packing lists, incessant planning, and worrying. It went as well as it can when you have to drive 10-12 hours with a 3-month old. Anyway, during our travel Noah went on a full-on nursing strike. A nursing strike is when baby abruptly starts refusing to nurse. I wouldn’t say it was abrupt, we kind of trended towards it for a few weeks, but he started straight up refusing to breastfeed directly with me. I thought it was situational (stressful situation, new and chaotic and temporary environment, etc), but it continued at home even with me trying to trick him into it again. I tried dark, quiet rooms, catching him before he was starving, skin-to-skin contact, singing, silence, different positions, etc. Suddenly we were faced with the situation I had pondered before – switching to primarily doing bottles of breastmilk – and I did not take it lightly. For all of the times I wallowed around thinking I couldn’t wait for the experience to end, when I was faced with the fact that we might not make it to my goal of a year I was crushed.

The Internet is great and terrible, and that holds true for this, too. It tells you that exclusively pumping will probably hurt your supply. There’s random statistics that pumping will only ever get you 60% of what the baby gets (may be true for some, but for me primarily pumping has actually upped my supply). You can read a multitude of stories of people that eventually had to supplement with formula and stop breastfeeding altogether. On the flipside, I learned that this is actually really common for his age. Between 3-4 months babies are way more aware of their surroundings and easily distracted. It seemed like a lot of people with babies in that age range had experience an intense nursing strike, too. And to my comfort, a lot of them had gone to still keeping baby fed with breastmilk.

If you’re wondering why I’m so against using formula, I’m not. Another term you get used to as a parent is “fed is best”, it’s kind of a middle finger to the “breast is best” saying from people that are unable to breastfeed or choose not to for personal reasons. I agree that fed is best – if your baby is fed and everyone is happy then so be it. For me, though, I feel strongly about the benefits of breastfeeding and breastmilk, and in my mind I should provide that for him because I can. Plus, formula is DAMN EXPENSIVE, especially if you want to get formula that isn’t basically a bunch of soy and corn syrup. The internet tells me formula can cost $1000-$1200 on average per year. My pump cost $300, I do buy storage bags, steam cleaning bags, I got extra parts as a baby shower gift, but I may buy another $200 or so of stuff over the year, maybe more. Either way, it’s probably half the cost of formula feeding over the first year.

Are there steps to take to get him off the bottle so much? Sure, but not all of them are practical. You can cut out bottles entirely and spoon/cup feed until he accepts the boob again. Not practical for us. I came to a point where I had to decide if it was more important to directly nurse or to just receive breastmilk in general, and I realized the latter was more important. The delivery system WAS important, but not as important as the fact that he was still getting the benefits of breastmilk.

Now here we are almost two months after Noah's first nursing strike and we're back to the point where we can add some nursing back into the mix. It’s a curveball I wasn’t anticipating (I suppose that’s why they call it a curveball in the first place…?), and just another thing I didn’t really consider may happen. Pretty much everything on this journey is new and weird and unexpected, just add this one to the list. You have one thing in your mind and reality is totally mismatched… and I’m pretty freakin’ zen about things! Seriously, I’ve worked hard to go about pregnancy, birth, and parenthood with as much fluidity and flexibility as possible, that way I wouldn’t get heartbroken if things didn’t go how I “wanted” or “expected” them to. I have hopes, sure, but I don’t want to dwell on it when it doesn’t happen – for example, I hope to sleep at night but I don’t. Some nights I do, and those nights are awesome. I hope to continue our mix of primarily pumping with a nursing sessions when we can until my goal of a year, but like all things so far I know that could suddenly change. But for now it works, and I’ve learned that’s what matters.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Just Do It.

I detailed my journey with gaining the weight of approximately 8-9 standard sized bowling balls and my motivation to lose it gradually. I was immediately faced with the seemingly impossible task of how to do it. SEEMINGLY is the pertinent word here, because it’s not impossible. First step – fitting in exercise.

We've all been there.

Everyone has to figure out how and when to fit exercise into their day, and having an infant (yes, that’s right, he’s technically not a newborn anymore!) complicates that. I work full time, I’m in a Master's program, I have to do my part to at least keep the house from looking like an episode of Hoarders, etc. Oh, and the baby. There’s that too. Did I mention he’s a bit time consuming as well? I say that with love, I promise. Even though it’s complicated, in some ways it’s really not. The simple solution is **just make it a freakin’ priority**. We prioritize things all the time, and if exercise is important enough then you will make it a priority. If watching Netflix is more important then that’s what you’ll do. I see this simple concept all the time in the students I work with – if school is a priority for them, they’ll make sure they do what they need to do to start. If it’s not (even though they tell me it is), they’ll fall off the map and I won’t hear from them anymore. I’ve decided that staying active is a priority for me, so we’ve fit it in. One morning a week Noah leave with Adam just before 6am and I don't have to be at work until 10:30a. That’s my morning to go for a jog, a longer walk, etc. On week days that I’m off at 5:00p we usually go for a walk after dinner. We usually do active things on the weekends, even if it’s going out shopping (hey, every step counts). Boom, there ya go.

My diet, however, is another story. There’s been no “Boom, there ya go”. I only weigh myself when Noah gets weighed, and at his 4-month checkup I was down 39 pounds, meaning I have 33 to go. I have dieted before in that I cut calories and increased my exercise and I was able to lose weight with a normal amount of effort. I’ve successfully changed my dietary habits before – I was a vegetarian for a few years as a teenager, I dabbled with a vegan diet just to try it out for a little bit in college, and I’ve had a semi-healthy-but-not-too-worried-about-it diet since. I’m now in a very unique situation. I still need to produce breastmilk, and that requires a lot of calories. Breastfeeding moms needs about 500 calories additional to their regular diet to keep up their milk production (“milk production” makes me feel like a cow), which is the same as mom's in their third trimester need. I’m committed to continue breastfeeding, but I’m also committed to start knocking off some pounds. So, for the first time in my life I have to eat a ….. drumroll please…..

Balanced Diet.

Ugh.

Not only does my diet need to be well balanced with grains, healthy carbs, healthy fats, minimal sugar, blah blah blah freakin’ blah, but I need to eat more of it while somehow still aiming to lose weight and not being able to exercise every day because of my schedule. I repeat my last sentiment of “ugh”.

As with all things foreign and baby related, I turned to the Internet for information. Some people said just eat cheeseburgers and eventually you’ll hit a point where you lose weight no matter what while breastfeeding, some said you need just drink way more water, some said who cares and ate whatever they wanted to. I considered going to a nutritionist because what I want more than anything is to just have someone who knows what they’re talk about tell me what to eat for every meal every day, even if it means eating the same thing every Monday, same thing every Tuesday, etc. Then I remembered that my insurance doesn’t cover that stuff and I don’t care $175 (or more) worth. Instead, I found a sample menu online for a healthy breastfeeding mother, which includes three meals and three snacks per day. I forget where I saw it (new mom memory loss), but I love the idea of eating healthy 80% of the time. For me, “healthy” means “well-balanced meals”. 80% of the time is doable and it’s not so strict that I can’t have a cookie or pumpkin pie poptarts. If you’ve ever had my mom’s baking you will know that it is 100% unreasonable to ask someone to give up baked goods entirely. I also want to give myself the freedom to go out for meals and not feel like I’m a total failure. The biggest change so far was that I willingly chose to not eat a bagel for breakfast, which is what I have done every day for like 15 years.

I wish I could say that changing my diet has been as easy as being more active, but it really hasn't. It's fair season, how can I not eat fried dough and hand dipped corn dogs? HAND DIPPED?! I've been to like 6 birthday parties in the past month. We've been treated to special dinners and breakfasts. I literally have next to no time to go grocery shopping, and I'm freakin' serious when I say that, not like "Oh I have no time to go to store" and then I go home and watch The Walking Dead. Guys, I'm just whining about it. It's hard. It's hard to make a change. It's hard to make a lunch for myself every day when I get 1/2 off of yummy food at the caf at work. It's hard to go to the fair, something that happens once a year, and not get 3 cider donuts because they're only 75 cents each. But just like with being active, I need to prioritize it and just do it.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

What They Forgot to Tell Us

Adam and I attended a childbirth class when I was like somewhere around the 30-something week mark (it's funny how fixated you get on how many weeks along you are, then after the baby comes you couldn't remember details about it if someone paid you). We got some useful information and I think it was worth it seeing as how neither of us had experienced childbirth before. There's a few things they forgot to tell us, though, and thankfully I have other mom-friends that filled me in on some of it. A lot of it I had to learn myself. Here's what I wish I knew before I learned it firsthand.

A Small Army Attends Your Birth
The team of caregivers you have to bring a baby into the world is impressive, especially if you have a hospital birth. I went to practice with multiple OB's, and we saw all of them at least once throughout the pregnancy. The doctor that delivered Noah asked me if his student could attend the birth (we had met her on one of her office visits, and I said yes). We went through multiple shift changes of nurses, so we met many. What I didn't realize, though, was just how many people would actually be in the room for birth. I pushed for three hours and was in a haze almost the whole time, but there were certainly moments of clarity (ahem, episiotomy, ahem... don't Google it if you don't know what it is... or maybe DO Google it if you want some free birth control). One of those moments of clarity was me looking at the freakin' army of people in the room and thinking 'When did 14 people get here?' That's probably very close to being an accurate number. I was the only birth happening in the hospital that day, and apparently everyone wanted in on the party.

Motherhood Has a Certain Smell
The first few days after birth smell like Dermoplast (aka hoo-haa numbing spray, aka your new best friend after pushing out a watermelon) and raw, cavewoman, earthly scents. Some of those things linger for a few weeks. I'll keep it G-rated and leave it at that. You probably aren't showering much, and if you are you're using scent-free soap like I did. Then comes the smell of breastfeeding. It's so hard to define, but it's a mixture of leaking milk (like, on the inside of your shirt and (hopefully) into a pad) and pump parts. Showering is just so elusive with a newborn.

How Busted You Are After Birth

It's pretty obvious that you won't strut out of the hospital after childbirth like nothing happened. I know some women are up and at it really quickly after birth, and that's amazing. For them. That was not the case for me, and I have a feeling that's not the case for a lot of people (especially C-section mamas). I had a rough labor and delivery and eagerly took the standard-issue narcotic pain meds. I was offered to be discharged after only one night. I almost laughed right in the doctor's face. It seemed illegal that they would let me go home - "you remember what happened here, right? You can't possibly think I'm okay to leave this place." God Bless labor & delivery nurses, because they're the ones that get you to the bathroom for the first time after you just blew a gigantic baby out of your nether regions. It takes a long time to recover from birth, wether vaginal or C-section, and that seems really obvious but you don't think about those details until you're in it. On top of that, you're entrusted to take care of another human life and be fully responsible for not screwing it all up right away. It should be mandatory to go home with a team of nurses.

The Amount of People That Will See Your Nipples

Choosing to breastfeed means you will be topless in your home 24/7. There's really no point in wearing a shirt while for the first few weeks (though at almost three months I still don't, but at least I leave the house and wear normal clothes 5 days a week). What you don't realize is the sheer amount of people that will see your boobs for however long you choose to breastfeed. Here's a list of people that have either definitely or probably seen my boobs: Many of the OB's in our practice, about 4-5 lactation consultants, many nurses at the NICU and our hospital, my family, any person that pulls up next to me while I'm pumping on the drive to work, any person passing through our employee parking lot while I get disconnected from the pump and into my shirt, fellow shoppers in the parking lot of Target, Home Depot, Lowe's, Market Basket, Wal*Mart, Whole Foods, etc., the list goes on. I'm so used to my boobs being out that sometimes I have to look down to double check I put on a shirt before leaving the house.

How Hard the Fourth Trimester Is

HAHA NOPE

Huggies commercials make life with an infant look angelic. It is anything but. I can promise you that you don't know important sleep is to the human mind and body until you survive and keep a baby alive for the first few weeks of its life. Babies aren't particularly happy during the "fourth trimester", aka the first three months of life outside the womb. I get it, it probably sucks to go from the all-inclusive uterine resort to life in real world where everything is foreign. We're nearing the end of the fourth trimester and things aren't so difficult (though we have our moments), but I remember some days in the early weeks wondering if it was ever going to get better or easier. Everyone tells you it is, but the serious sleep deprivation combined with repetitive tasks newborns demand makes every day crawl by.

You're Not Ready for Anything at 6 Weeks
Seriously. You're not.

How You Will Feel Tired, Even if the Baby "Sleeps Well"
For all of his colic and fighting every nap, Noah is actually a really good sleeper at night **knocks on wood until knuckles bleed so as not to illicit bad karma**. Of course, in those first few weeks he was up multiple times a night. Then one night he suddenly slept for 8 hours. I was convinced he had to be broken, we called the nurses hotline, and their flow chart of baby-crisis said that a sudden change in sleep pattern warranted a trip to the ER. So we went, they sent us to the pediatrician, the pediatrician said, "he slept through the night? CONGRATULATIONS! He's fine. Don't worry." Now at 2.5 months he usually sleep from 9 or 10p to 4 or 6p. Maybe once a week he'll have a random 2a wake-up.

So yes, we're REALLY lucky, that the baby "sleep through the night" many nights, according to his pediatrician (she considers 6 hours sleeping through the night), so why are the bags under my eyes so big they could hold the entire contents of my purse? Because eventually you can't "sleep when the baby sleeps". Now that I'm back to work I have about 300 more things to do in a much shorter amount of time every day. Noah goes to bed and I brush my teeth, shower, pump, clean pump parts, pack my stuff for the next day, make lunch, make Noah's bottles for the next day, maybe throw in a load of laundry, work on homework, etc. I'm usually up for at least another hour after he goes down. It sounds nice to say "he slept for 6 hours last night". Or I could say, "I've been up since 4 this morning." Both are true. Even on nights we get 6+ hours of sleep total, it's almost always interrupted sleep. So, yes, Noah does sleep through the night most nights, but we don't.

Going Back to Work Right as You Get Into the Swing of Things
America's crappy maternity/paternity leave policies/values make life so difficult for new parents. The most you'll qualify for under federal law is 12 weeks, and a lot of it is unpaid. I didn't qualify for 12 weeks, so had I not used personal time I would have been back at work after 6 week. SIX WEEKS! I have another tiny human life that literally depends on me to nourish him so he can stay alive. How the hell can I leave him after only 6 weeks?

The first few weeks are such a mess that there's no hope for any routine, schedule, normalcy, etc. I found just before the 8-week mark we finally got into some sort of groove. We had at least some idea of what we were doing, we were more comfortable going on outings and doing basic things like grocery shopping, we had adjusted as much as possible to our sad sleep routine, I even started exercising again for goodness sake. Then, suddenly, BAM, back to work. New schedule, new life, new responsibilities. I had overwhelming anxieties about being able to pump enough during the day to keep him exclusively breastfed. We started feeling stressed about him being without us all day (he's perfectly fine). I was expected to perform a job with responsibilities and tasks that require mental capacity that my brain doesn't have the processing power to engage in. As with anything, we're all adjusting to our new normal and things are going fine, but it seems like every time we "figure it out" we get another curveball. Such is life!

How Obsessed You Will Be With Being a Parent
I told myself that I wouldn't be one of those people that spams social media with photos and videos of my child. Guess what - I totally am. Parenthood is so all consuming and so simultaneously fun and horrible and draining and exciting and hilarious and awful that it's all you can talk about. Someone can ask me how work was and suddenly I'm about to start talking about how funny it was that I fell asleep while pumping before work the other day and woke up an hour later with sore boobs and a lot of milk. Things that are funny to a new parent aren't funny to any other normal person. All you want to talk about is your baby and your life as a parent, and any other topic seems lame.

You Won't Have Sympathy For Childless People That are "Tired"
No one knows sleep deprivation like a parent of a young child. You would think they would be the best to empathize with anyone that is tired. Trust me, I truly want to empathize, but, funny enough, the sleep deprivation gives me very little room for sympathy or patience. Any time a childless adult tells me how tired they are, I mentally do this:

I know that many non-parents have very valid reasons for being tired, and maybe they even slept less than I did that night. In the moment, though, I just internally scream because at least they'll get a full nights sleep at some point. I have a while before that happens, and literally there's nothing more on this earth EXCEPT for winning the lottery that I want more than a solid 48 hours of uninterrupted, sweet, glorious sleep.