Now that my little one is four months old (that flew by, but at the same time it’s barely a blip of what’s to come) I have come to realize that some of my expectations that I had while pregnant are totally different than how things actually came into play. People warned me of things that both never happened or were amazingly accurate, but there were things that I was not warned of, that probably would have been pretty nice to know.
So alas, I am sharing with you now, the things that no one told me as a first time mom, for the benefit of future first-time-moms all over the world. You can thank me later.
10. My cute shoes, dresses, and jeans will collect dust for a while. Yeah, I pretty much can’t remember the last time I wore any of my adorable heels, I’m thinking it was probably around the time that I found out I was pregnant. And those jeans I assumed I’d fit into after a month or so after having my baby, yeah those could probably go into storage at this point. Or I maybe just listed them on a garage sale site.
9. I’d never want to leave her. I never thought I’d be the mom that would have a hard time dropping my kids off somewhere, but even leaving her for a couple hours right now – I miss her and I constantly think about her. We’ve barely even known her for half a year and all of a sudden our lives revolve only around her. My friends were talking about daycare the other day and I can’t bring myself to even think about it. You mean drop her off for like a bunch of hours at a time? Hard pass. Don’t put me down for daycare.
8. The overwhelming feelings and emotions that make you want to protect them like a german shepard. Seriously, the term “mama bear” is no joke. That cute little toddler at the grocery store that I’d smile at pre-baby, is now a walking cesspool of germs and ticking time bomb with his sticky, pokey fingers and Lord only knows what he’s about to do when getting up close and personal with my golden nugget sitting peacefully in her stroller.
7. Sleep is your number one thought every second of the day. From the moment you wake up, until the second your head hits the pillow at night, all I can think about, at the forefront of my mind, 24/7, is when I get to sleep again. I knew when I was pregnant that I’d lose sleep, whatever, but I never realized just HOW much sleep I’d be losing… and I really, really love sleep.
6. That breastfeeding is excruciatingly hard. Movies, magazines, and women in general tend to make this much more pleasant-sounding and easy than it actually is. I won’t go into ALL the wonderful details, but it is extremely time consuming. And it’s going to be your next thought right behind sleep all day; pumping, freezing, washing, storing, supply and demanding is now your life.
5. All the redundant questions. I’m glad that I don’t have twins, because my sister says that she gets more dumb questions while out and about than she’s ever gotten before. But even with one baby, I all of a sudden get the same questions from strangers that make me go hmmm. For example, “Is she sleeping through the night?” As if these bags under my eyes don’t give away our current sleeping situation, this seems to be the most frequent question I get from random strangers.
4. Serious mom-brain, and the inability to still call it pregnancy brain. About a month after I had my daughter, I had a business meeting that wasn’t super in-depth in it’s content. But I sat there, staring at my business partner trying to understand what he was saying as if I was only able to read lips. I honestly couldn’t hear or comprehend what he was saying because I was so sleep deprived, hungry, and run-down (and oh, it was also time to pump). I left the meeting trying to piece together the information that I did register, but I felt like I had just tried to watch a movie all the while getting up and walking away from it every 10 minutes.
3. I would find myself Google-ing things I would never have dreamed of. Is green poop a bad thing? How to get snot out of 1 month olds nose? How to tell if a newborn is constipated? What to eat to produce more milk? Babies who hate their mothers? … The list goes on and on. The bottom line here is, never underestimate the power of google, because all of these things came up with answers – believe it or not. Whether or not the answers were right, meh – the jury is still out on that. But at least it made me feel better at the time.
2. Laundry never gets folded anymore. It just gets washed, dried, and thrown into a basket with other clean laundry – only to be dug through, picked through, and end up covered in spit up again.
In fact, we don’t even sort whites and darks anymore, our new system is everything of my daughter’s goes straight into the washing machine and when it’s full, it gets started. If another piece of laundry is needed anytime soon, it also goes into the washer as well. If it’s something that isn’t in dire need, it goes into the laundry hamper and likely never seen again for the next month or three.
1. How much your heart feels like it will literally melt at times. Sometimes when she smiles at me, or giggles when I yawn, I feel my heart burst at the seams. Other times, I sit there and watch her drink her bottle and think about the things I would do to protect her from ever getting hurt. I think about how fragile she is, how sweet she is, and how I can’t imagine ever letting her go. I once saw a quote that said, “Being a mother is like watching your heart walk around on the outside” and I can’t even begin to explain how accurate that is.
I think I could probably go on and on with this list because every day brings it’s own set of surprises. But at the same time, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
What surprises hit you when you became a mother for the first time? Leave a comment below with your words of wisdom to share with future moms 🙂
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