'Enjoy it while you can...'

Lately I've been thinking a lot about parenting styles, and I've been reflecting on a phrase I'm hearing often: "Enjoy [it] while you can..." "It" refers to whatever positive experience I'm having with Natalie. This phrase is then almost always followed by "because..." and some statement. Usually what this implies is, "Things are about to get crappy."

Call me ridiculous, but part of me also can't help but think that there is also a hidden "misery loves company" element to this all in which these advice-givers, consciously or not, are waiting for that crappy period to commence so they can have something to commiserate about.

Part of me also can't help but think that people are so used to being told that parenting a newborn is so difficult that they have to make their experience sound difficult so it will seem like they're doing everything right. Who is ever willing to admit that their experience parenting a newborn was easy? (Thankfully, two of my girlfriends with slightly older babies did admit that to me, and those were a couple refreshing moments of honesty.)

But I digress.

How does "Enjoy it while you can" typically come up in conversation?

For example, with Natalie sleeping through the night -- nine hours in a row for the past two nights, specifically -- I'm told, "Enjoy her sleeping through the night while you can because soon that's going to stop."

This is ultimately a rhetorical statement (and rather annoying to boot) that doesn't warrant a response, but if I were to respond, it would sound something like this: "Thank you, I will enjoy it!"

I feel like too many parents -- new and old -- spend their lives worrying. I recognize that worrying is part of parenting, but this more consuming philosophy seems to be to always be preparing for the future rather than enjoying the present. I suppose this is part of the definition of helicopter parenting -- hovering over the child being ready to anticipate disaster and scoop up the child before it strikes.

This blog clearly chronicles the fact that I like to be prepared, I like to be organized, but I also feel like I've lived this lifestyle to build up to what matters, to get ready for something important. And you know what, that important thing has happened. It's here. I'm living it.

So, despite my genetic predisposition toward worrying and my inclination toward pessimism, I am shocking myself by being (by my assessment) a rather calm parent. In addition to keeping my ongoing resolution to accept the things I cannot control firmly in mind, I am also living a life where I realize I do not know what the future holds, nor do I care to, and I'd like to take parenting one day at a time. As a teacher (in an affluent suburban area) I've encountered many a helicopter parent and I want to avoid that parenting style as much as I can.

Most March 8ths in the D.C. area do not produce temperatures in the low 70s. Most March 8ths the majority of flowers are not in bloom.

Most March 8ths I am not home with an eight-week-old baby girl. And maybe if most eight-week-old babies don't sleep for nine hours straight then I'm just lucky.

Rather than looking at the blooming flowers and thinking that one day they'll die, or looking at Natalie and thinking one day maybe she won't sleep through the night, I'm enjoying it while I can, and I'm totally happy.

Cloth diapers: Getting started

It's been a big week over here in baby world.

First off all, a follow-up on my last post about Natalie's sleeping schedule:

Turns out that by writing about her sleep habits I did not, in fact, jinx the pattern. Instead, Friday night she slept soundly for 7 continuous hours, prompting us to go ahead and move her to her crib in the nursery for the first time ever Saturday night. We figured it was better to give it a trial run on a weekend night rather than on a week night in case incessant crying became the order of business and kept Matt up before going to work. Somewhat miraculously, after rocking Natalie to sleep for the first time ever in the glider in the nursery, I carefully laid her to bed, turned on her Sleep Sheep sound machine, hit the switch on the baby monitor, and quietly left the room. Saturday night she stayed asleep for 7 hours before waking up!

Sunday night she did wake up in the middle of the night, but it was only once at 3:30 a.m., and after a quick feeding she was back to sleep for another 4 hours. I had the confidence on Monday during the day to put away her Pack N Play.

Then last night she fought sleep for a while after having a big bottle at 9:30 p.m., so by 10:45 p.m. I fed her again, she fell asleep by 11 p.m. and stayed that way until 7 a.m. today. Thank you, Natalie, for a solid 8 hours of sleep.

It's worth noting that each night I have done something different -- one night she had a bottle, one night she had a bath, one night she stayed out late socializing, one night she took a late evening nap and stayed home. In all cases, though, she still slept through the night (or in the case of Sunday night virtually made it through the night uninterrupted). So, I have no secrets to share about what was gotten Natalie to sleep through the night, other than perhaps her increased age. Right now we don't have much of a bedtime routine, besides making sure she has had a diaper change, a Sleep Sack around her, and she's been fed.

Now that we've successfully transitioned Natalie from the Pack N Play bassinet in our bedroom to the crib in her nursery, I'm feeling bold and ready to take on a new experiment: cloth diapering. It also doesn't hurt that we only have about five disposable diapers left.

So yesterday one of my few agenda items included washing all 17 of Natalie's Bum Genius 4.0 cloth diapers. We have the one-size-fits-all pocket style diapers with snap closures. These are intended to fit babies from 8-35 pounds. We opted for the snap closures instead of the hook-and-loop Velcro closures because the snaps seem more durable. The rather cute and colorful polyester diaper shells each come with two inserts: a newborn insert and a one-size-fits-all insert. According to the Bum Genius people, once the baby outgrows the newborn inserts they can be used along with the one-size-fits-all inserts for added protection at night.

To prepare a diaper, simply stuff the insert inside the diaper shell's pocket, snap it on your baby (adjust snaps according to the baby's size) and you're set. As I've said before, these are not your mom's cloth diapers.

Confused yet? Here's a visual to help. Notice the pocket on the inner diaper shell.

  
Insert the smaller newborn insert and/or the one-size-fits-all insert that comes with a couple built-in snaps that allow for three different sizes: small, medium and large. The one-size-fits-all inserts are thicker than the newborn inserts, but note that when adjusted to the smallest size they are as long as the newborn inserts.

Select the snap settings best suited for your baby. There are three different length options and five different width options. I know, lots of snaps, but you only use a couple snaps at a time.

Before Natalie's arrival one of the items on my long to-do list involved washing all her clothes and linens. I did not, however, wash her cloth diapers because I knew it would involve more than standard laundering practice, so I decided to wait until we actually needed to use the cloth diapers. I'm also, frankly, afraid of screwing them up. But, I went ahead and followed the instructions on the Bum Genius website, and I have to say it wasn't that complex.

First I prewashed both the diaper shells and inserts on a cold cycle. Then I washed them with detergent on a hot cycle with a second rinse. I'm using Tide Free and Gentle to clean Natalie's diapers. It's the same detergent I'm using on her clothes and linens, and it's free of dyes and perfumes but not free of enzymes. On this detergent link on the Bum Genius website it says that "at best" the detergent used on these diapers would be free of dyes, perfumes, enzymes, optical brighteners and anything else designed to stay on the diapers after washing. Given that this says "at best," though, I'm taking that to mean that my Tide Free and Gentle is fine -- at least for the time being.

To dry the diapers I line-dried the shells and put the inserts in the dryer. The inserts themselves take up a decent amount of space. Aren't all the colors so pretty?

In the future as Natalie starts using these diapers I'll be washing a load of them every other day, seeing as it's recommended because it's not a good idea to let dirty diapers sit around. Because newborn waste is water soluble these diapers can be thrown straight into the washing machine. Later on down the road we'll be installing and using our Bum Genius diaper sprayer to spray down the diapers before throwing them in the diaper pail and then in the washing machine.

I'm still working on the best way to organize these diapers in the nursery, but for now I'm thinking it makes the most sense to keep the shells and inserts separate, seeing as we'll probably double-stuff her nighttime diapers (especially if she keeps sleeping through the night!). It also seems like there's no use in snapping the shells or folding them much. Although they'd be prettier all neatly folded, the reality of changing and diapering a baby needs to take priority here.

I can't comment on the effectiveness of these diapers yet on a newborn as we're just getting started with this experiment, but I'll be back with more extensive reviews as we gain experience. And, assuming this experiment goes well, I'm planning to still pick up a few more cloth diapers to at least make an even 20 diapers.

Newborn sleep: Predictably unpredictable

Here's a prediction: This is the first of many times I will write about sleep.

In my experience as a mom of seven weeks, get two or more new moms together and a significant portion of the conversation will come back to newborn sleep habits. How much does your baby sleep during the day? At night? What's the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep you've gotten at night? How do you soothe your baby during the day? At night?

We do this, I think, not to compare our babies in the "my baby is better than your baby sense" but rather to see if we are at all within the range of normal and if other women have any wisdom to pass on to us.

My baby is not better than your baby, but she is awesome!

The unfortunate answer to these questions is that there is no such thing as normal and what works one day may not work the next.

The other unfortunate answer is that the absolute earliest "sleep training" can occur is at three months, and true sleep training likely won't occur until four months. At three months parents can, according to the experts, set up routines that encourage better sleep habits, but because the majority of babies can't self-soothe until they hit the four-month range there is not much parents can do but grin and bear their babe's sleep cycles.

I've acquired quite a few books about baby sleep (including Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child; On Becoming Baby Wise; Secrets of the Baby Whisperer) that I'll discuss more in coming months (once they actually apply to us) but for newborn sleep there is really only one book everyone will tell you about: The Happiest Baby on the Block by Harvey Karp, M.D. My friend loaned me her copy along with the accompanying DVD.

There are a few ideas that emerge from this book that are worth noting:

1) A lot of babies confuse night and day thanks to their time in the womb.

2) Babies are born three months too early, so newborns enter the world during something Dr. Karp calls the "fourth trimester." His whole theory is that human babies must be born when they are born because of their enormous brain size (and subsequently enormous head size). They wouldn't be able to make it out of the birth canal if they waited any longer. This also helps explain why, compared to other mammal babies, human babies are especially helpless during their first few months of life. It's interesting to note, also, that a lot of babies begin to roll over during their fourth or fifth month of life.

3) Because babies are born too early parents can best get their babies to sleep by recreating the environment inside the womb. This does not seem like a particularly revolutionary idea, as much of what he suggests parents do is no doubt what our great grandparents did for our grandparents, but he does package his suggestions neatly into an easy-to-remember mnemonic device: The 5 S's. These stand for: swaddling, side/stomach cradling (on the parents' bodies, essentially), shhhhhhh, swinging, and sucking. Parents are encouraged to follow these steps in this order to get their babies to sleep.

After reading/skimming this book, though, I soon discovered: this book doesn't really apply to us. Dr. Karp's suggestions, while they work for all babies, are really targeted towards "colicky" babies. He takes issue with the word "colicky," believing it's more of a Western concept, but regardless in my opinion you can simply replace the word "colicky" with "fussy" and you wind up in the same place with his suggestions.

With the exception of a few nights and one memorable day last week calming Natalie has never really been the issue. She cries when she needs something -- to be fed, changed, or held -- and once her need is met she usually finds her happy place and gets to sleep relatively quickly. I like to thank her regimented schedule in the NICU -- where she was fed and changed every three hours on the dot -- for encouraging her to expect this as normal. Again, with the exception of a few nights, she has never anticipated getting fed every hour. And once she surpassed her birth weight when she hit three weeks of age we no longer felt the pressure to make certain she was waking up at least every three hours for nighttime feedings.

So we've been fortunate to get at least three-hour chunks of uninterrupted sleep at night with Natalie between the hours of about 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. This means I have not felt particularly sleep deprived since we've been home from the hospital.

So, I started to get greedy and wondered what I could do to get her to sleep even longer at night and move her to her crib in the nursery. The answer, of course, is that there's probably nothing I can do, seeing as she's only seven weeks old, but here's what we've been experiencing this week.

Saturday night
On Saturday night, at the recommendation of my friend Kate, I took Natalie's Pack N Play with the bassinet insert (where she's been sleeping at night) and moved it away from my side of the bed. It had been so close to the bed that I could just reach over and grab her at night. Kate suggested that before we move Natalie to her nursery we try moving the Pack N Play to the other side of our bedroom, as far from our bed as possible. When we did this last Saturday I told Matt this was the first step of sending Natalie away to college, and that first night her bassinet felt so far away she might as well have been off at college.

I also thought that if we fed her a lot at night right before bed that might help her sleep for a longer time, so we gave her a 5-ounce bottle. She typically gets about 3 ounces in a feeding, so 5 ounces seemed like it would surely hold her over.

 
At the recommendation of my friend Mimi we also gave her a bath right before bed. Before we were giving her a bath whenever she seemed like she would best tolerate it, seeing as bath time has not been her favorite time thus far.

Miraculously, that night she slept for 6.5 hours uninterrupted from 11 p.m. to 5:30 a.m.! Sleeping through the night for babies is defined as sleeping for 6 hours uninterrupted, so here we officially hit a milestone!

I thought I was on to something by combining the wisdom of Kate, Mimi and my own intuition. Of course, Saturday was a really busy day for Natalie as we had relatives visiting from both California and Richmond and Natalie got held for hours by 13 different people.

Sunday night
With the bassinet now in its semi-permanent location as far away from our bed as possible, Natalie had another 5-ounce bottle and a bath right before bed. This time she slept for 7 hours uninterrupted from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.!

Monday night
We repeated the pattern above and Natalie slept for 6 hours uninterrupted from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.

Sleeping through the night puts us in our happy place! (Blurry newborn iPhone pictures = par for the course)

Tuesday night
Well, that all went out the window. I secretly hoped that after three nights in a row of sleeping through the night we had a new "normal." But then, after going to sleep at 9 p.m. she was making noise at 11 p.m. I thought to myself, "Baby, there is no way you could be hungry." So, I went over to her bassinet and looked at her for a while. She stopped whining. I went back to bed. She started whining at 11:15. Then at 11:30. Then at 11:45. These were not her all-out "I'm hungry" cries. Instead, these were true whimpers, her little fake-me-out noises that indicate she's basically not tired but doesn't really need anything either, which is the worst. Then she woke up at 12:30 a.m. for real needing to be changed and fed. Then she was up at 2 a.m. with the same needs. Then 4 a.m. Then I got her back to sleep until 8 a.m.

Wednesday night
This night was better than Tuesday night. She woke up twice at night to be fed, this time giving us 4 hours of sleep better feedings. This is basically "normal" for her, and it's really not bad at all. So I figured the sleeping through the night thing that we were blessed with for three nights in a row was just a random fluke and we'll stay in this 4-hours-of-sleep-at-a-time holding pattern until we can do real sleep training.

Thursday night
But then a funny thing happened last night. She slept for 8 hours uninterrupted! From 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. little girl slept so soundly I did, of course, have to go check on her a couple times to make sure she was exhibiting signs of life. There is a certain irony to the fact that even when she gets uninterrupted sleep I do not because I feel more of an urge to check on her.

This morning I came to a realization: Tuesday night and Wednesday night are the nights we skipped out on her bath. Coincide? Perhaps. Will she be getting a bath tonight? Absolutely!

Another thing I've noticed is that if Natalie sleeps a lot during the day she will wake up more at night. Yesterday I took her to the mall, we hung out with our friends Gretchen and Luke, and then we went to a party to watch our friend Susannah on Jeopardy. When Natalie gets good stimulation during the day, gets held by different people and doesn't sleep too long she seems to sleep better. Fortunately tonight she'll be going out on the town again to get some loving from a bunch of lady friends, and hopefully that can help encourage her to have another marathon sleep session. If good sleep habits continue I'd like to move Natalie to her crib in her nursery by next week.

Or not. Newborns are predictably unpredictable. And, by writing all this down and sharing it on this blog I have no doubt doomed us to a sleepless night.

Packing a maternity-ward hospital bag: a retrospective

I have to say that back in December when I packed my hospital bag and subsequently wrote about it in this post, I did a pretty spot-on job. I used almost everything I brought with me. Here are the only things I did not use:

Labor and delivery room bag

• Cheap flip flops -- As I walked around the labor and delivery floor for hours, I was walking in my tennis shoes (which still fit me at the time). Before I gave birth I guess I thought things were going to be messy from the get-go. That was silly. Things are only messy at the very end of delivery and then in recovery, but recovery is not nearly as messy as I thought it would be, either. So, I would pack flip flops just in the recovery room bag.
• Sugar-free hard candies -- Although the nurse in the childbirth class recommended having these on hand I never touched them, probably because I ate about six Popsicles while in the labor and delivery room. Popsicles were way more exciting than candy at the time, though interestingly enough my nurse tried to track down sugar Popsicles for me (her idea, not mine) and could only gather up the orange, purple, and red sugar-free variety. Still they were amazing.
• Quarters for vending machines for Matt -- Never used them. Guess who used Coinstar yesterday at the grocery store to convert a bunch of coins into an Amazon gift card?

Overnight room bag

• Underwear -- Maybe it's because I had a c-section but I never wore my own underwear in the hospital. I wore those hospital-issued mesh disposable granny panties and, dare I say, I loved them. More on that below. I tried wearing what I thought were my huge, cheap underwear I picked up at Target and those were never even close to cutting it.
• Nursing supplies: soothies gel pads -- Never used these, but I chalk this up to the fact that nursing was and continues to be shockingly easy and pain-free for me. I am glad I brought these, though, as a safety measure to have on hand. Better to be prepared I think.
• Travel pack of baby wipes -- Never used these, but it's hard to say what my experience would have been like had Natalie actually been in the room with us and not in the NICU. My guess is, though, these could have stayed home.
• Newborn onesie -- Natalie did not wear this home because it would have rubbed against her umbilical cord stump, as I figured before, so we could have gotten away with just the long-sleeve T-shirt and footed fleece sleeper she went home in.

Other
Boppy pillow -- We left this in the car and never used it because I only fed Natalie in the hospital room one time before she was taken to the NICU. Also, the NICU provided me with a My Brest Friend (horrible name!) pillow but I found it horribly uncomfortable because it hit me right at my c-section incision.

Underpacking
Although I thought we were super prepared, we had actually underpacked, something I don't believe has ever happened to me. Of course, we thought we'd be there two nights max and we wound up being there four nights, so had we experienced a normal hospital stay we would have been fine. Here's what we needed:

• More clothes for Matt -- He only really brought one additional outfit. Fortunately he was able to run home in the middle of our stay.
• Bigger socks and shoes for me -- I really needed to wear Matt's socks after delivery, which is what I did when we got home from the hospital. I was painfully swollen to a degree I could have never anticipated, and that swelling did not go away until about six days after delivery. I could not even fit in my loose-fitting tennis shoes with the laces untied. So, I wore flip flops in the middle of winter, even when leaving the hospital, but thankfully it was not terribly cold (and I was still hot from the postpartum hormonal roller coaster).
• More nursing tanks/bras for me -- I brought one nursing bra and one nursing tank, the only ones I owned, to the hospital. Unfortunately I was sweating so much and got a weird cut on my chest (and subsequently bled on my nursing bra) that these felt gross fast. In retrospect I would have bought and brought along at least one more nursing tank to the hospital, probably the cheap, unfashionable variety, and saved the good stuff for home.

I think it's also worth noting what the hospital will give you while you're there. I wore the hospital gown every night while I slept because I was sweating so much that my own clothes would have just been damp. So, during the day it was nice to wear my PJs as my clothes and change into the hospital gown for sleeping purposes.

As I mentioned above, I embraced the hospital-issued mesh disposable granny panties. Curious to see what they look like?

They're basically as big as a pair of boy shorts from Victoria's Secret, but step into them and you quickly discover the meaning of one-size-fits-all. These suckers are huge, and fortunately so. They will go over your still-six-month-looking-pregnant-but-not-pregnant belly and they will not at all cause your c-section incision to hurt, unlike all other underwear I tried on in the first week postpartum. I know some women hate these, but I was the weird one who asked for extras to take home.

As any woman who has given birth knows, going to the bathroom postpartum is a bit of a process, and the hospital has lots of supplies on hand that you'll be able to bring home with you too to make life a little easier. The first is the enormous hospital-issued maxi pad that may as well be called a diaper. For comparison purposes, here is one next to a regular pad, the kind you might wear for up to a month postpartum (remember, tampons are not allowed during this stage!).

Sexy, right? This is where my friends who haven't given birth quietly exit my blog post, scared out of their minds. Please return soon!

Then there are all the hospital-issued items you can place on top of the giant adult diaper. These include the giant ice packs that are activated when you twist them. (For what it's worth, even in my recovering state I was impressed by this technology.) Then on top of the ice pack you are encouraged to make what's been called a "salami sandwich" of witch hazel pads (aka Tucks). Spray the witch hazel pads with Dermoplast pain relief spray and add a dollop of hydrocortisone ointment and you're set.

Of course before you actually get up from the toilet you need to spray yourself down with warm water in one of these peri bottles, yours for the keeping!

If you're wondering why it takes a woman who has just given birth about 15 minutes to go to the bathroom, this is why.

The hospital will also supply you with what you need for a sitz bath, but that's something I never needed to take advantage of.

And yes, I still have extras of all these supplies on hand, so should a woman have a drive-by delivery on my front porch I can provide her with decent postpartum hygienic care.

Today's takeaway messages: be nice to the women you know who've just given birth, and when you go to the hospital leave your underwear at home.

6 weeks

So six weeks ago today I heard my baby scream for the first time as she was being pulled from my body.

Today that primal scream is back.


We have entered week 6, which according to quite a few moms I know and a book or two I've read is a difficult week.

Somehow we went from this...

...to this:

Like clockwork, today Natalie is being fussy and insisting on only being quiet when being held.

I tried the baby bouncer, which calmed her down for about two of the five minutes I was in the shower.

So we moved on to the Ergo carrier. I've used it on a couple shopping trips, including our solo expedition to the grocery store yesterday (we walked there and back and made a lot of elderly people very happy!). But now I've joined the league of moms who wear it around the house to soothe their baby to sleep and free up their hands for a bit.

All it took was about 25 minutes worth of Jack Johnson's Sing-Along Songs, an Ergo carrier, and plenty of mom dancing to get this baby to calm down.

It's just amazing to me that as soon as she hit six weeks she had her worst day. Maybe if Natalie stays this predictable we can cross our fingers that she'll magically be sleeping through the night as soon as we hit four months...right?

DJ Roomba's flaw

You may recall that right before we brought Natalie into our home we brought a Craigslisted Roomba robot vacuum cleaner -- or as we like to call him, DJ Roomba -- into our home. So far DJ Roomba is doing a great job keeping our main level of our home remarkably clean with one exception. All too often I wake up in the mornings, go into the kitchen, and notice this:

DJ Roomba is great on carpet. DJ Roomba is not so hot on wood floors. He is swirling all the dog hair around and distributing it into piles on the wood floors, but he is not actually doing his job of scooping up the piles of dog hair. I guess this is his one flaw. Of course, I can easily grab the Dust Buster and get up those piles of dog hair quickly, but still, I think his advanced technological prowess should include him completing this final step.

I will say, though, that is remarkable that once his little vacuum cartridge is full of dust, dog hair, and debris every night while we sleep DJ Roomba does what I call his "ET Phone Home" moment when he returns to his little port where he lives for 23 hours of the day. Smooth move, robot!

It's official, we are living in the future, and it is weird and fascinating.

And our future dogs will be the kind that do not shed.

New parenting 101: Redefining the word "schedule"

Everyone warns you before you have a baby to "get your sleep now because you won't once the baby arrives!" I assume the implication is that you can somehow stockpile your sleep. Well, obviously you can't. The good news for me, though, is that because I was (in retrospect) getting such horrible sleep throughout much of my pregnancy and it was at its worst in the final two months, I am actually getting better sleep now than I have in almost a year.

What people had warned me about that is true, however, is that I'm having to seriously redefine my waking hours and the concept of a schedule and productivity.

I used to be able to make a list of five relatively substantial tasks that I could tackle in a couple hours on a Saturday morning. Now I feel like that same list takes me at least a week to complete. I figured this would be true as we prepared for Natalie's arrival, but I don't think the degree to which it would be true struck me until last week when Matt went back to work.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about this fact; instead, I'm actually kind of embracing this new lifestyle and the less-intense level of expectations that comes along with it. Like I was telling my friend the other week, I have a to-do list, but the good news is that on any given day I don't actually have to do anything besides sustain the life of a tiny human (no big deal!). It's rather freeing.

Still, in an effort to keep myself goal-oriented I am keeping two running lists. One list contains everything I'd like to get accomplished eventually, which I'll define as in the next several months. The other list is my daily to-do list.

I've written before about my non-negotiable daily tasks. These still hold true with some slight adjustments. Here's generally what I always have on my to-do list:

1) Wake up and immediately make bed before Natalie starts fussing. Bonus points if I can put away last night's dishes before she wakes up, too.

2) Eat breakfast while doing the first nursing of the day.

3) Shower and change clothes.

4) Eat lunch.

5) Pump 1-2 times per day.

6) Make sure I'm giving Natalie lots of stimulation: reading, activity gym time, tummy time, toy time, etc.

This may seem absurd, but making the bed, showering, changing clothes and making sure I've fed myself well during daylight hours are critical to my daily routine and my sense of sanity. I could stay in my PJs all day, but that would make me feel pathetic (I know because I've done it a couple times already).

Additionally, so many of my hours are taken up by nursing that it's easy to overlook that as one of my most essential duties right now as well.

I also keep having to constantly remind myself that interacting with Natalie while she's awake is an important part of my job right now. Because she doesn't give much feedback yet, it's sometimes easy to forget that age-appropriate stimulation is still important to her development. The amount of hours she's awake during daylight hours is starting to increase, and she's hinting at the very beginnings of some social smiling, so hopefully soon she'll seem more like a little person than a little blob.

Each day I add a couple more items to that day's to-do list, and I am not satisfied unless I complete them. These change daily and I write them down to motivate myself to get them done. I am giving myself credit for accomplishing mundane tasks that before I did not even think of as accomplishments.

For example, yesterday I wrote three thank you notes and I mailed a gift at the post office. Those were the only two to-dos I required myself to accomplish yesterday on top of my regular to-do list.

Today my to-do list includes washing the new bed sheets I picked up over the weekend, emptying the dishwasher, giving Natalie a bath, and finishing reading a set of short stories. (Note about the sheets: I picked up a set of cotton percale bed sheets two years ago once I discovered that these are supposedly the longest-lasting kind of sheets. They really are holding up well, and I decided we needed another set because I am disgusted by how much I am continuing to sweat at night and how frequently I am washing sheets as a result. Postpartum night sweats are no joke. I am ready for that to end -- will it end, or am I doomed to be a sweat monster for the rest of my life? Moms, you tell me.)

As I hope you can tell, by giving myself significant credit for emptying the dishwasher I have clearly downgraded my definition of daily productivity.

And that is fine.