A Day in Our Life

Here is my chronicle of 24 hours beginning Sunday night at bedtime and ending Monday night at bedtime. The point is to give an example of what a stay-at-home mom of a very young baby does all day. It seems like there wouldn't be much going on, and some days are busier than others, but you may be surprised. I will freely admit that I think I have an easy baby. I decided to create this post because I thought That Wife had a particularly taxing day as compared to my usual day. Anyway, here goes...

9:00 pm

Snuggled and ready for bed

10:30 pm

I go to bed for the night

6:00 am

Sweet Baby Girl wakes up, eats and goes back to sleep

9:03 am

Good morning! Ready to be changed and eat.

9:20 am

SBG is done eating, happy, and we chat in bed for a little while

9:40 am

SBG sits in her boppy pillow while I get dressed, put in contacts, get hair under control, and pick out her clothes for the day

9:50 am

SBG is dressed and ready for the day!

9:55 am

SBG sits in her swing while I make breakfast and try to eat before she is done with swinging!

10:10 am

SBG is done swinging

After I got her out of the swing I put her in the Moby wrap which bought me some time to check email and maybe upload some pictures

11:00 am

We need to empty the dishwasher, and it's not because the sink and counter are full of dirty dishes. We don't have dirty dishes at our house...

...made possible by the Moby wrap!

11:15 am

Feed SBG again, update blog

11:45 am

Head out to meet my friend Leighanne for lunch

12:00 pm

Lunch with Leighanne!

1:15

All done lunch and headed to Target to pick up some necessities

1:50 pm

Leave Target and hurry to get in the car - thunderstorm approaching!

Racing the clouds home...

This picture doesn't quite capture the magnitude of the downpour, but we did not win our race with the clouds :[

2:10 pm

Time to eat again!

3:00 pm

Make faces and chat with SBG for as long as she'll let me!

This is her pirate face, arrrr!

Time to change SBG's diaper! I realize this is one of the only pictures of her getting a Diaper change, but I DID change her throughout the day, I promise!

4:15 pm

Take out tilapia to thaw for dinner

4:20 pm

Back to making faces until daddy gets home

5:00 pm

Daddy's home! I hand SBG over for her much-loved daddy time.

They hang out while I make dinner

Dinner is ready- Tilapia, rice and steamed broccoli

Can't forget to feed the furry friend, too!

SBG sleeps in the Moby while we eat dinner

After dinner I work on some paperwork for the business I'm starting

SBG wakes up, eats again, and chills out on the couch with us

9:30 pm

Back in bed for the night, snug as a bug :]

And there you have it. What do you think?

Chronicle Coming Up

I first began the 24-hour chronicle on Thursday night at bed time like I had mentioned in my last post. Then I realized that the next 24 hours were not going to be a very good sampling of what our "typical" days look like. First of all, we had gone to the Orioles game Thursday night and didn't get home until very late, so Baby Girl wasn't in bed until midnight (ha, like how I said last time that we're in bed by then?). Beyond that, the next morning we were scheduled to have our FiOS hooked up, so Josh wasn't going into work. This makes things dramatically different because I can send our sweet girl downstairs with him after the 6am (or thereabouts) feeding and snooze for a few more hours. This is definitely not typical. So then we had the weekend which is also not typical because Josh is home to help out and I get to do a lot of other things I wouldn't on a regular day. I decided that if the purpose was to show what a SAHM of a small baby does all day, that would be a little misleading. As a result, I ended up starting the chronicle last night at bed time and will post probably tomorrow. Stay tuned... :]

24

Speaking of time... (2 posts ago), do any of you read That Wife? She recently did a post chronicling 24 hours of her life with her 2 month old baby to explain what a SAHM of a young baby does all day. I found it to be starkly different from 24 hours with my 2 month old baby. Now, given that we are different people in different parts of the world with different patterns and habits, it's not that unbelievable that there would be some contrast between a day in each of our lives. However, since our babies are 2 weeks apart in age, from the parent/baby perspective specifically I was somewhat surprised at the differences.

SO, I have been inspired to chronicle 24 hours of my life with our 2 month old Sweet Baby Girl. Aren't you excited? You will notice if you read That Wife's blog, that she began her chronicle at 12:00 am. I am going to begin at bedtime tonight. Why?? Well for us, because our day is different than That Family, we're asleep at midnight. I'm not waking up to take a photo in the dark. And in the morning, sometimes we wake up and go back to sleep several times between 3 and 7 am, so I'm not really sure what I consider the start of our day. Therefore, we'll begin at bedtime which is probably the most consistent event of our day.

If you haven't yet, head over to That Wife Blog and read this post of 24 hours in That Wife's life so you can compare our stories.

Check back over the weekend for my post!

All Business

Remember a while back when I mentioned starting my own business? Well if you know anything about the past 10 months of my life, you won't be surprised to hear that working on that business was not the top of my priorities. I had to focus on my internship and graduating before Sweet Baby Girl was born, and since she was born it's been all her. However, I'm getting back to work on that business -- which I'm still not ready to fully disclose the details of just yet. Some people took guesses at what this business will be, and while I'll neither confirm or deny, I will drop a hint. This business requires that I get a license. So currently, I am working on getting my license. Once I have that, I'll begin advertising for clients/customers/whatever you want to call them. When that begins happening, I'll share more. So stay tuned. It's going to be a pretty big event in our lives if it all goes as planned...!

And happy summer :]

Transition to Mommyhood: A series

Part 4: Time

Interestingly, it has taken me the longest to compose this post about the role of time in my transition to Mommyhood. I guess that is due to 2 main factors: the first being a general lack of free time (which, yes, I'm much less busy in that I'm home all day and not working, but more busy in that I am caring for a baby and quite honestly spend time staring at her rather than doing house chores. Thus, there are always house chores waiting to be done. More on this in a minute.), and second being that I have a lot of mixed thoughts and feelings about this topic. Is it also interesting that when I finally sit down to hammer it out it's the longest day of the year?? So let's get started, shall we?

It will come as no surprise that day-to-day time is suddenly dictated by someone else when a baby arrives. Things that used to be easy are now a challenge to do with one hand (e.g. spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread, or typing this post). Things that used to take you 15 minutes now take double, or sometimes triple the time. By the same token 2 hours has never gone by so quickly as it does between feedings. If I ever think I have time to run to the store or make some lunch, it will invariably be time for her to eat just as I'm ready to walk out the door or sit dow to eat. Don't ask me how this happens.

But just as 2 hours has never gone so quickly, neither has two weeks, and now for that matter two months. Staying busy day-to-day sure makes the days and weeks move along quickly. Everyone tells me how quickly the time will pass and how fast she'll grow up. While I knew this all along and am now more aware of it than ever, I really hate for people to point it out to me. Why are your words to a new mom just how fast her baby is going to disappear before her eyes? While I want her to grow, I want to enjoy watching her grow without always feeling sad or fearful that it's going to happen in a blink.

So for all the moments that I wish she would play happily in her boppy pillow or take her naps in the pack 'n play, I cherish every second that we spend staring and cooing at each other. Sometimes I don't even try to lay her down when she's sleeping. One day when she's bigger I will never wish I had washed more dishes or more loads of laundry. I will never feel like I stared at her too much or our nonsense babbling conversations were a waste of time. The truth is, any time spent with her is precious. And one day she won't be content to stare and babble at me. I'll have to let her go play with her friends, and go to school and do all kinds of other things without me. So while my days of holding her and staring at her are still around, that's exactly what I'll be doing :]

Still to come is my last post in this series on various products and practices that have helped me in my transition!

Ketchup

Ever heard of a 6 week old baby that eats ketchup? Me either! What I really meant is "catch up" because I need to catch up on my blog in a serious way. We've had a very busy couple of weeks. I'll try to give it to you in a nutshell.

It all started Wednesday May 26th. Baby Girl went to her first baseball game! Yes, that's a baseball that her daddy caught for her :]

On Thursday May 27th, she saw her mommy get a master's degree!

On Friday May 28th she met her great grandparents for the first time!

May 31st we had a cookout at Nana's with her cousins, aunts and uncles

June 1st she helped mommy celebrate her 28th birthday!

Daddy was off work through June 1st, and we spent the rest of that week at our various doctor appointments. At Baby Girl's one month check up she weight 10 lbs. 1 oz. which was the 75th percentile for her age. She was also 23" long which was off the chart! We have ourselves one tall baby girl :]

That's kind of the long and short of what we've been up to lately. There are still two more posts coming in the "Transition to Mommyhood" series, so stay tuned for those. Is it a little comical that the post on time has taken me the longest to compose?? The final post for the series will be on a variety of little things that have made a big difference in my transition to Mommyhood. I'll also give you my humble opinion on some products and practices!

Oh and real quick before I go -- my attempt to cut out dairy was foiled. While the great grandparents were in town, we went to a German Bistro in Leesburg for lunch one day. The sandwich I ordered (knowing little to nothing about the food) was covered in sour cream. I could have scraped it off and eaten dry meat on a pita but I said "oh well." Then I ate ice cream since I'd already had sour cream! I thought Baby Girl's fussiness had started improving but then did not notice any negative reaction after eating the sour cream and ice cream. Rather than trying to start over with dairy aviodance, I decided just to wait until the end of that week when we were going to the pediatrician anyway and ask for her thoughts. She said it was very likely not anything I had been eating, but more likely the gastro-colic reflex which makes her have to poop after eating. She also said that Baby Girl is transitioning from pooping every time she eats to a more regular schedule of going a couple times a day and maybe not at all on some days, so that could be causing the fussiness. I've already noticed a decrease in the number of poops she has in a day, and she has started grunting and squirming more rather than crying. What a relief because we have a Cold Stone 5 minutes from our house and I am pretty well addicted to ice cream.

Until next time... :]