The DeCook Family Adventures: Taking Care of Number Three

Simply put, in the last couple of weeks I have hit a wall. The onslaught of new emotions, coupled with the hormones and exhaustion of being a new mother finally caught up with me. I have spent the last few months trying to strike the delicate balance of nurturing and caring for my baby, maintaining my household, and making sure that my husband is happy and able to relax when he gets home from work. Caring for myself and allowing my body, emotions and mind to recover from having a baby has not been my daily focus. Our doula warned me about how important making myself a priority and taking time for myself was when we first came home from the hospital. She cautioned me not to push my recovery and expect to be back to the "old" physical and emotional me too quickly and explained that she typically sees mothers who are impatient with their recovery start to feel really worn out and defeated by the time their baby becomes 4 months.

Truth be told, I was probably just arrogant enough to think that this wouldn't be an issue and heeding this warning was much easier said than done for me. When your job is maintaining your home and caring for your family, work is constant and there is always something more important to do than take care of yourself. There really isn't even time to stop to realize that you are not taking care of yourself. For those of us who wait until we are in our 30's to have children, it's a complete paradigm shift from the past decade (and a half) we have spent completely focused on bettering ourselves. The time I now have to spend on myself is so limited, I often have to make decisions like, should I make myself a meal or try to squeeze in a workout? Should I go to sleep or should I respond to emails and read the news so I have some idea what is going on in the outside world? Should I sit down and have a conversation with my husband or should I do our laundry and clean the kitchen? How to manage important, yet time consuming tasks, like returning calls from my family, checking my email and generally maintaining communication with the outside world seem to have escaped me.

I feel like I am starting to come out of the funk of the last few weeks, and begin peeling myself off of the wall. Part of what has allowed me to do this is to realize that emotionally, I will never really be the same again. I have given a whole chunk of myself to this little person I am responsible for shaping and caring for and I will never get that part of me back- it belongs to him. Intellectually, I am sure I am still capable of the tasks and conversations I used to complete on a daily basis. However, it is more important in my new world to know how to sing "Where is Thumbkin?" and practice my ABC's then to be well versed in the European financial crisis. Physically, I know my energy will return and my body can (and will!) get back to a form that is close to what it used to be, but it will also never be quite the same because I created another life with it. Pushing myself too hard to be the old me in my new world has only lead to my being exhausted and frustrated and upset about all of the changes within me. I have had to slow down and begin adjusting and accepting who I have become. Once I know how to take care of the new me, I will successfully be able to reintegrate with the rest of the outside world.

Inside the little bubble of my house, a lot of joy and fun has been happening. Emmett is getting so big, so quickly, that I wish I could stop the clock and freeze time. The majority of my days are spent playing with him- he is just SO much fun right now and is SO happy that I have a hard time stepping away from him. He lights up when either Todd or I walk into the room and we are greeted with a huge gummy grin and an immediate onslaught of a new dialect we are learning, Emmettian. This boy LOVES to talk! He is also holding up his head and sitting in his bumbo and anything else we can prop him up on. We won't find out how much he weighs until next week, but he is wearing his 6 month clothes, so our little chunk is definitely growing in all directions.