How I spend the majority of my afternoons: a baby quietly sleeping on my chest and a good book in hand.

Can I confess something?  It’s 11:30pm and I am sitting here with my laptop on my knees, enjoying a glass of red wine and soon to pick up where I left off in the book I am reading from the night before.  I don’t intend to go to bed until 1am, and I will not wake up for a feeding until 5am.  At 5:30am I will be back asleep and so will Maddie, and at 8:30-9am Mark will grab Maddie for the morning feed, allowing me to sleep until 10 and therefore get around 8 hours sleep.

This is every. single. night.

I am truly blessed with the best, most easygoing baby in the world.  Aside from when plagued by gas, Maddie is quite content doing anything and everything.  Most mornings and early afternoons we have a wonderful rhythm down whereby she will swing contently in her baby swing, watching me get in my morning workout followed by shower (where she follows me into the bathroom in her swing).  Most days her sleep patterns afford me the ability to do the dishes, clean up the house, and get the laundry done.  Hell, most days I can also get in an hour or two gaming whilst the little beauty gets her sleep.  She will also happily spend some time with daddy when he gets home, allowing me to perfect my cooking skills on dinner.

When awake she offers up little flirty expressions and wonderful smiles. Most of the time (98% of the time, as my mom says) she is quietly content with snuggles, feedings, diaper changes, and the one way conversation I am always offering to her.  Bath time is another blessing where, instead of tears, we are treated to a baby who kicks and splashes, enjoying the water and the rubs she receives.  Breastfeeding, while a little rough in the beginning, is a pain free and pleasant experience and I am blessed with an overflowing milk supply with which to feed her.

I say I am blessed in these things because I know, even as a first time mom, that these things are not always the norm.  Many mothers are up every hour in the night with a hungry and fussy baby, and many mothers have to give up on breastfeeding due to the pain of cracked and bleeding nipples.  Sometimes I can get a little frustrated when Maddie has painful gas, causing her to fuss and cry for hours on end.  But, at the end of the day when the moment has passed and I am enjoying some wine, I know I’ve got it easy considering.   My little Moochie and I have an amazing rhythm down and an intuition about each other that makes it all work.

And for that I am so lucky.

It’s so hard to believe already a week has past since Madeline graced us with her presence!  This time last week I was lying in a hospital bed, numbed with an epidural, waiting to become fully dilated.   We were discharged from the ward on Monday evening and finally allowed to go home.

Being on the ward as a new mom is hard.  Visitors were instructed to leave at 8:30pm, leaving us to fend for ourselves in this new state of being.  Nights were long, and oftentimes I was awoken several times an hour by various babies crying on the ward.  If it wasn’t the cries, it was the anxiety: the need to watch Maddie to make sure she was breathing, or to check her to make sure she wasn’t too hot or too cold.  To be in that position, a new mother with a new baby and left to simply “get on with it” was very scary for me.  My mom was in town to help me and teach me how to do this but even she had to leave with the other visitors.  Mornings were a relief as the midwives started coming around again and visitors were allow back on the ward.

Monday we got to come home and what a relief that was.  And Maddie is such a good baby.  She feeds twice during the night, and my  mom wakes up for each feeding with me to lend support. Maddie and I had a bit of trouble with breastfeeding initially, but got it down to an art by day 5 and eliminated the need for formula completely.

It’s amazing to watch her look at things and try to figure them out.  I love looking into her little face and her big blue eyes and kissing her little cheeks and nose. I love the little flirty faces she pulls when looking at you. I love the soft coos she makes when feeding.   And I am in such awe at just how big a change this has been in our lives, and grateful my mom has been here to help me get used to it.

I am still healing.  To use mom’s terminology, I ripped “from bow to stern,” which makes walking and going from sitting to standing painful.  I have my emotional ups and downs, and my body is still forever changing as my uterus continues to shrink.   It will take a while still to heal but she is so worth it all.

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Introducing our most beautiful daughter, Madeline.

She was born on July 24th at 9:39pm weighing 8 pounds, 9 ounces.  I was in labor for 41 hours.  In the end I was prepped for a c-section but given one last go and, with the help of foreceps, she was born.

But it’s a story for another day, a tale of her birth.  For now I am exhausted, and there is a cute little lady calling me.