A Day in the Life – 4 Months

5:20 AM: Alarm goes off for work.  Check email, scroll through Twitter for interesting updates.  Roll out of bed to shower & get ready for work.  Make coffee, empty the dishwasher, and get my own breakfast together.  Thank myself for having the foresight to pick out my outfit the night before so I don’t stand in front of my closet for 15 minutes (that I don’t have) trying to figure out what to wear.

6:15 AM: Wake L up for the morning.  Some days, she’s already wiggling around and kicking her legs in her crib.  Other days, she’s still sound asleep.    Today is a wiggly day!  Once we peer over the edge of her crib and make eye contact with her, she starts grinning.  I change her diaper, get her out of her PJ’s and into her clothes for daycare. 

6:30 AM: First bottle of the day in the glider in her room.  We still use the Boppy for arm support now that she’s a bit bigger/heavier.  Such a lifesaver.

6:45 AM: Pack L’s daycare bottles as well as breakfast for myself.  Get L in her car seat, give her an a&a swaddle blanket to chew on.  Pack everyone (and everything!) in the car and hit the road.  Hubs and I commute together, and it’s his day to drive.

7:10 AM: Arrive at daycare.  Sign her in, fill out her daily “tracking” sheet, put her bottles in the fridge.  Take her out of her car seat, give her a hug and a kiss, and tell her we’ll be back soon. 

7:30 AM – 4:00 PM: Work, work, work.

4:20 PM: Arrive at daycare to pick L up – best time of the day!  She’s just gotten done eating and is in a pretty good mood.  Grab her leftover bottle, put her in the car seat and head home.

4:50 PM: Arrive at home.   L has fallen asleep on our drive, so we keep her in her carseat and set her in her room with her white noise on to finish her catnap.  This gives us some time to go through the mail, rinse out bottles, change our clothes, and figure out what the plan is for dinner.

5:10 PM: Start making dinner. 

5:15 PM: Hubs gets L out of her car seat, as she’s woken up.  He changes her diaper, plays with her, and keeps her occupied and happy while I finish dinner.

5:30 PM: Dinnertime for the adults.  L sits her swing, content to chew on her Mortimer moose. 

5:45 PM: Dinnertime for the peanut.  She has about half of a bottle as an appetizer, then has her rice cereal. 

6:00 PM: Bath time!  One of L’s favorite times of the day.  We splash, I sing “Rubber Ducky” to her, and we enjoy some time together.

6:20 PM: Time to wind down for bed.  We change her diaper, get her in her jammies, and swaddle her.  Then, hubs finishes feeding her the last part of her bottle in the glider in her room.

6:45/7:00 PM: Hubs comes out from L’s room after she’s fallen asleep.  I’m usually making bottles for the next day at this point. 

7:15 PM – 9:00 PM:  Our downtime for the evening.  This is typically when we’ll do our web-surfing/catching up on TV/talking about our days and what we have on the docket for the next day.   Tonight, I’m working on a Peapod order and watching “American Ninja Warrior” with hubs. 

9:00 PM: Bedtime!  Since I get up at 5:20, I’m typically exhausted by 9:00 so we head into bed.  Hubs reads for a bit on his phone, but usually by the time he goes to sleep I’ve been sleeping for at least a half an hour.

Crossroads.

I know I haven’t blogged much lately, and it’s not because I don’t have much to say – on the contrary, I could regale you with tales of L puking down my shirt 5 minutes before I had to walk out the door this morning for work, or how I had a 102 degree fever on Friday with some sort of virus/infection from hell….or I could choose to be positive and tell you just how adorable L was last night when we were feeding her before bed. 

Instead, however, I’ve let my blog gather dust and sit in silence for one reason: I’m not sure how to blog about my life anymore.  You see, my life now includes another life – one that weighs roughly 13.5 pounds and is quite ticklish on the bottoms of her feet.  And when I think about blogging about her or our life together with hubs as a family, I stop myself.  I’m not sure how much of L’s life I want on the internet. 

I’ve gone back and made my swaddle video private.  I am afraid to type her full name on my blog because I don’t want her to be “Google-able.”  I’ve only posted a few pictures of her to Twitter since she’s been born.  I’m not sure what I’m afraid of, really…but I do know that when I read blogs where the author asks their readers to “please do not post any pictures of my baby to Pinterest!” it makes me feel sick to my stomach.  The thought of people pinning and re-pinning pictures of my baby alongside the latest crock pot mac ‘n cheese recipe?  No thank you.  (Admittedly, the pictures that I would be posting wouldn’t be Pinterest-worthy anyway, but people pin some crazy things.)

Perhaps it’s my mama bear instinct to protect her from people.  Perhaps it’s me grappling with something I have been since pregnancy – how much sharing is too much sharing?  On one hand, I love the sense of community that I’ve gained from blogging, and truly value the friendships I’ve made from blogging.  On the other hand, anyone in the entire world can read this blog and look at pictures of me and my family and my baby….and that makes me feel a little weirded out. 

Do I try to continue blogging without sharing pictures?  (boring.)  Do I make my blog private?  (kind of a pain.)  Do I start blogging at a different address as an anonymous blogger?  (ugh.)  Do I just suck it up, watermark my pictures, and try not worry about the random strangers on the internet or what L will think when she is old enough to realize that I’ve blogged her childhood?  (I’m not sure.)  Since I know I have an audience that includes mamas, mamas-to-be, and bloggers….what say you?  How are you handling being a mother and a blogger, or maintaining a sense of privacy as a blogger?

Holy Mackerel…I’m Blogging.

Well, I should say that I’m attempting to blog while L takes a nap.  We shall see how long this lasts.

The first few weeks of motherhood have been going well, all things considered.  That’s not to say we haven’t had our share of bumps along the way — oh…have there been BUMPS — but when I think about what I knew about being a mom to a newborn just three short weeks ago and compare it to what I (think) I know now…I like to think that I’ve learned a thing or two.

Some musings on the first few weeks of motherhood:

1. You really have no idea how many blankets / outfits / burp cloths you can go through in a single day.  I now do more laundry for my infant than I do for myself.
2. Related to number 1, always (ALWAYS!) have a burp cloth on your shoulder when burping your baby.  I learned this the hard way the other day, thinking “oh, L doesn’t really spit up all that much, I can forego the burp cloth this time.”  WRONG.  SO VERY WRONG.  The aforementioned scenario ended up with me covered in spit up  (ok, who are we kidding: the sheer amount put it squarely in the category of baby puke) all the way down my shirt.   Use the burp cloth.
3. L has been steadily gaining weight, but so far the bulk of her growth has come in the length department.  (Perhaps she’s going to get my height?)  Anyway, the other day as I was stretching her sleeper to be long enough to cover her legs, I realized that I might want to take a peek at the 3 month clothes in her dresser.  What I quickly realized that 3 months in one brand of clothing has absolutely no resemblance to three months in another brand.  Baby clothing companies: do us all a favor – get some consistency in your sizing!
4. Related to number 3, to all of those people (both in real life and on the internet) who said “Don’t bother with newborn clothing!  They outgrow it so fast!” — this is true, as L is donning her first 3 month outfit this morning.  However, if we hadn’t had some newborn sized clothing on hand, L would have gone naked for the first three weeks.  Cute to us as her parents?  Yes.  Functional and, um…warm?  Not exactly.  I’m glad we had a good variety of newborn sized clothing.
5. I’ve quickly learned that what L loves one day she might hate the next…or even what she loves one hour she might hate the next hour.  She’s had a love/hate relationship with her swing, and last week she detested the bouncy seat.  This week the bouncy seat has made her happier than a clam, and the swing has been hit and miss.  It’s good to have options, is what I’m saying.
6. We’ve gone through several brands of bottles in our household, looking for the golden fleece.  I read online reviews, went off of people’s recommendations, and generally researched the heck out of bottles.  In the end, we tried 5 different types.  Surprise, surprise:  the ones that L (and I) like best are ones I picked up on a whim off of the Target shelf.
7. Babies have a tendency to pee at inopportune times.  L has a penchant for peeing in between diaper changes, and has peed on our comforter, on the carpet in her bedroom, and all over the changing table several times despite my attempts at being as quick as possible with diaper changes.  Be prepared.
8. I’m at that weird in-between stage with my clothes where maternity clothes are a bit too big but all of my pre-pregnancy clothes are still a bit too small.  This has resulted in me wearing my pregnancy clothes and feeling kind of silly about it (much like I did when I first started wearing them in my first trimester).
9. I’m three weeks and a day postpartum, and I realized something the other day:  I miss being pregnant.  Yes, it sucked at times and it was hard and I ached and I could barely roll over in bed…but I miss feeling her kicks and hiccups and stretches.
10.  Although I miss being pregnant…I will admit two things:  red wine is just as tasty as I remember, and being able to sleep on my stomach again has been glorious.