six month reflections of a mother

parker will be six months old on tuesday.  six. months. old.  half a year.  closer to a one year old than a newborn.  crazy talk.  and of course there have been many milestones, he has grown, & he's doing so many new things this month.  so yeah, there will be a six month update.  but this isn't that post.

i've been a mom now for six months.  i guess this is where i should insert a disclaimer that some people would argue you're a mom as soon as you're pregnant.  while it's true that when i was pregnant i felt love, worry, compassion, & cared for another person more than i had experienced up to that point in my life, the love that i felt for parker while he was in my tummy multiplied by amounts i could never have imagined the second he came out.  so this is that post that talks about my first six months of being a mom to an outside baby.

like just about every other first time mom i've ever talked to, there was nothing anyone could have said to prepare me for motherhood.  no word of advice, no story, no online forum, no amount of babysitting {which i really never did as a kid}, & no amount of book reading.  people told me it was hard, that there would be sleepless nights, & i might get the "baby blues" but that was ok, it's normal.  i shrugged those words off & thought, "eh, that won't happen to me."  plus, i knew sam would be home for four weeks of paternity leave so i thought i had it made. 

what part of "if you want to breastfeed you won't sleep any longer than a three hour block straight for a month" did i not understand?  well, apparently the whole part of it because that was a huge shock.  what part of "you really won't feel like yourself for at least two weeks after the birth because your hormones will be all over the place" did i think wouldn't affect me?  i realized real quick while crying on a daily basis just because it felt good that it definitely affected me.

i don't know how all the moms out there without their baby's daddy around for weeks after the birth do it.  having sam home was amazing.  those first four weeks he had home with us were so special & during that time he probably did more fathering than i did mothering, and he just let me recover & heal.

but yeah, at times those first couple months weren't easy, & by all standards, parker was an easy baby.  despite some relux issues, we were extremely lucky.  he wasn't colicky, he didn't cry just to hear himself cry, & he started sleeping for 7-8 hour stretches at about a month.  thank goodness.  you know how they say God only gives you what you can handle?  i guess he knows i'm a wimp, because he gave me a pretty easy baby.  i try to remember to thank Him daily for that. 

but i don't care what anyone says.  having a kid is an adjustment.  it's life changing.  but you know what it is?  it's life "bettering."  life doesn't end when you have kids, it just begins.  it's the beginning of learning how to love something more than you ever thought you could, & truly caring for someone else more than yourself.

and of course, i was naive about a lot of other things too.  i thought i would be able to keep my kid from ever having a snotty nose or a dirty face.  while i try to stay on top of it, i really had no idea how much a nose could truly run before parker had a cold.

i didn't think i'd be the mom that would stay awake through exhaustion just to watch her baby breathe in his sleep, but yeah, i still sometimes think that parker won't breathe unless i'm in the room.

i was pretty sure i would know if my kid wasn't cute.  what i didn't expect was to truly think i had the cutest kid to have ever been born.

i didn't think i could fall in love with sam all over again, or get butterflies while listening to him sing the abc's to quiet a crying baby.

i never knew what it was like to wish for more hours in a day, while simultaneously counting down for tomorrow to get here.

i didn't expect that having a baby would make me look at other people differently.  that i would look at that handicapped man struggling to walk down the sidewalk & get teary eyed hoping that people are nice to him, because that is someone's little boy.

i really could go on forever & ever.  i didn't even touch on the spit up in the hair, the yoga pants uniform, the struggle to find a work-out routine, & so many other cliche things i didn't think applied to me.

but one thing i know is that having a kid has been nothing like what i expected.  it's been better, it's been harder, it's been amazing.

i also didn't expect to care this passionately about your vote. i love me some votes.