My friend Shannon told us that his mom sooooo adores completing things on her To Do list that she will literally write wake up as the first entry, just so she can have the satisfaction of crossing it off. David and I laughed and laughed. And then we started living with a newborn. Dear Shannon's Mom: I GET IT NOW. In my new baby-land of adjusted productivity, waking up is a huge accomplishment worth celebrating. You have a newborn and you managed to make coffee and drink two hot sips before said newborn stirred? Mad props. You took a nap? Miracle of miracles. You wrote a thank you note, dug up the correct postage and walked it to the mail box? Nobel Prize territory. In the middle of the night last night, I started a To Do list and actually wrote shower on it. With zero irony. God, help me surrender to this new normal. (And also sneak in a shower.)

In certain ways it's not so hard. This little peach of a dude is so cool and delicious. I am in awe of his littleness and his chirps and his emerging personality. AND: he started smiling this week. Bliss! Heartbreak! Wow.

In other ways, ALL of my buttons are pushed as I attempt to make peace with this new world of Never Getting Shit Done. As I nurse Louis (for a total of five hours a day, people), I look around me and take stock of things I'd like to do. These aren't even the fancy, enriching ones in my fantasies, just the dumb things that I can see. And they drive me nuts. Water that saggy plant, recycle those ancient magazines, get to that stack of taxes, fold that dusty pile of laundry. The neat-freak in me needs to take a long vacation. Most likely for the next 18 years.

No wonder moms are so good at multi-tasking. For reals: I am hooked up to the breast pump as I write this. I want to take a picture of it so bad but am afraid that instead of making you laugh, I would scar most of your eyeballs. (Poor David has seen too much.)

In good news, despite my growing list of To Dos, here are ten ways in which I've managed to adjust to this new normal so far. If I do say so myself, I have acquired some mad new baby skillz, yo:

1. I can type and text with one hand like a boss.

2. Picking up pacifiers with my feet? In the dark? No biggie.

3. Time me: I fall asleep in 9 seconds flat.

4. I can compile a stack of tax paperwork without getting poop on even one 1099.

5. I can disappear stains like a Vegas magician.

6. I've learned to scale back my beauty routine to the austerity level of a monastic.

7. I have swiftly stopped spit-up in a single bound before it's spewed onto the couch, a computer, and down my ample cleavage.

8. I have contained and harnessed said cleavage. (<------------ giant feat)

9. I not only welcome but find supreme delight in being farted on.

10. I discovered there are cookies (COOKIES!) for the express* purpose of producing heaps of breast milk.

*see what I did there?

Listen up. Let's just call these Breakfast Cookies because trust me on this: a.) you will definitely want to eat them for breakfast, and b.) you will FREAK PEOPLE OUT if you offer them a Lactation Cookie. Your normally sweet-toothed, cookie-loving husband will whiten and flinch like you are offering him sardines on a turd. The truth is they are really delicious morsels that just happen to make you squirt milk. If you are male and/or not lactating in the first place, they are just oatmeal cookies with chocolate. Nobody needs to know. Deal?

"Breakfast" Cookies (that also happen to help with lactation)
recipe adapted from bellybelly.com
makes 14-16 cookies

2 T flax meal
2 T water
1 stick butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
2 t vanilla
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 t baking powder
1 t cinnamon
2 T brewers yeast
1/2  t fine sea salt
1-1/2 cups rolled oats
3/4 cup good dark chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350F. Combine the flax meal with the water. Stir well and set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and brown sugar together for five minutes, until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla and mix well, scraping down the sides occasionally. Add the flax/water mixture and mix again. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, brewers yeast and salt. Add these dry ingredients to the wet little-by-little, stirring until just incorporated. Add the oats and chocolate and stir to combine. Drop on parchment-lined baking sheets by the tablespoonful and bake for 12-14 minutes, until lightly golden on top. Cool on racks.

Extra credit: if you make these cookies from start to finish with one hand while holding an infant in the other, they are guaranteed to quadruple your breast milk output.

With love from the four of us,
Jolie, Louis and Jolie's boobs

P.S. It only took me 3 weeks to write this post. Good times!

the agony and the ecstasy

Greetings from Baby Central:)

For almost a month now I've been meaning to write when I have a moment but then said moment winds up being so fleeting between nursing and napping and procuring coffee and (God willing) sneaking in a shower. As I've been riding the wave of this early baby time (more like trying not to drown), I've been attempting to gather my thoughts about it. I don't know how I could ever be concise about what this experience means to me so far. It's a million fragmented thoughts and feelings swimming around inside my brain and heart. At this point, I can definitively say this: It's the hardest and most glorious thing I've ever done in my entire life. And also this: Whoever designs baby clothes with BUTTONS is a thoughtless asshole.

This new motherhood thing involves so many simultaneous extremes that to process even one of them is impossible. There's the profound, heartbreaking miracle that this little guy is here after all these months (years!), and the recovery from the huge mental, emotional and physical experience of childbirth. There's the ragged and thrilling haze of the hospital stay, and the sobering realization that you are suddenly and completely responsible for a helpless, tiny human. Pepper in some profuse hormone-balancing night sweats, someone sucking your virgin nipples raw every two hours around the clock, and then top it all off with a massively heaping dose of sleep deprivation. It's like first love, finals week, base jumping, jet lag, boot camp, seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, and being awake during your own open heart surgery. You want to grit your teeth and get through it and simultaneously savor every second.

When you're about to become a parent, the party line is either Oh My God, It's Nonstop Bliss! or Get Ready, Your Life Is Over! The problem is each of those clichés individually does a disservice to both the experience and the new mother. In my sleepy, overwhelmed haze (even while consciously knowing it's all being lived through the filters of sleepless nights and haywire hormones), I cried to my own mom this week about all of it. After yearning for so long to get pregnant, I thought that every single second should be utter bliss, that I was an ingrate if a moment felt impossibly difficult. She lovingly comforted me. "Oh darling, all that you're feeling is crazy and okay and totally normal," she said. "Welcome to the agony and ecstasy of motherhood."

I get it now. The pain and the bliss aren't mutually exclusive. They intermingle into something that has its own unique label, its own custom blend, moment to moment.

You know what is pure ecstasy in this moment? This gorgeous little four-week-old face, baby clothes that feature snaps, and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

xoxo
jolie

three things that are one week old today

1. This guy:

Our Louis ("Louie") Rocket Pagani was born on New Year's Eve at 6:00pm!

8 lbs.
14 oz.
22 inches long

We are so smitten and in a dreamy, hazy bliss over here. More to come.

xoxo
Love,
Jolie

P.S.
2. My outfit
3. My fervent and loving return to caffeine