My friend Amy gave me some great parenting advice: whatever stage you're in with your child, add the words right now to the end of the story. As in: my baby is having trouble nursing right now. My little one isn't sleeping through the night right now. My toddler has crazy tantrums right now. And you're smart to add it to the good stuff and the hard stuff. Because all of it's always changing and it helps not to get too attached to labels and results. Turns out this is much easier done in theory. Case in point:

Louis tortures me by hating to take naps...(wait for it)...right now. 

Yet (MOTHER OF ALL THAT'S HOLY) he's actually day-sleeping right now so I'm on borrowed time as I write this. Being extremely nap-determined today, I bent over his swing for twenty solid minutes and shush shush shushed so fervently I got woozy and almost passed out but IT WORKED, Y'ALL, so here I am trying to hurry a blog post.

It was a rough morning. I've been bringing Louis into bed to nurse around dawn and even though this requires about 27 pillows to make it not uncomfortable, at the very least it lets us remain prone a little while longer and if I'm lucky, we can both doze for a spell. (Surprising parenting tidbit #472: I've gotten really good at nodding off while someone sucks on a nipple. Who knew?) This morning while he was intermittently eating, he was thrashing about, doing lots of punching and kicking and pulling off the boob while his needle-sharp fingernails kept busting out of his pajama's hand covers. God bless the kid, he was scratching me something fierce and kept kicking me square in the C-Section. Giving up on any more sleep, I reluctantly climbed out of bed and took him to nurse in a chair, hoping the change of posture would help. Freaking exhausted, I frustratedly took him in my arms and assumed the position. He stopped wiggling, looked up at me with his twinkly eyes and dimple-smiled for a full five minutes. And just like that, when I come to a breaking point and think I can't do it, I'm bolstered with such overwhelming feelings of love and pride to be this awesome kid's mom. Turns out a burp cloth makes a good kleenex in a pinch.

I'll say it again (and probably keep saying it): I have such newfound respect for moms. Holy shit. I never realized how hard it is. It is nonstop 24/7. Your heart lives outside your body and your body is not your own anymore. It carries and holds and rocks and feeds and shushes and gets punched and kicked and tugged at. And time is not your own anymore either. When Louis's taking a (rare) nap, I have a constant low-grade anxiety about how I should spend the precious time. Shower? Laundry? Bill pay? Or something more spirit-nourishing like writing or meditating or exercising? Also, it could be 15 minutes or 2 hours so it's impossible to budget. Yesterday Louis's grandparents came over to visit and give me a couple hours to myself. By the time they arrived I was desperate for a break (again, zero naps), yet overcome with indecision on how to spend it. I finally decided on a nearby hike and then could barely tear myself away from him when I had the chance. I cried for the entire first half hour feeling like I was gonna miss out, felt blissfully child-free for six whole minutes, and then spent the hurried thirty-minute walk back to my car feeling like I was missing my right arm. I couldn't get home fast enough. Of course he was fine. Me, on the other hand? Oy. I've never been called to be in the moment more. And I'm learning that is truly the only way to have peace. God, help me do it.

Mommy is a little cuckoo right now.
Mommy is figuring it out right now.
Mommy is enjoying addressing herself in the third person right now.

xoxo,
mommy

27 Things My Sleeping Newborn Sounds Like in The Middle of The Night While I Lie There Praying He Doesn't Wake Up

A loose fan belt

A dragon with a head cold

A crappy ventriloquist

A rusty accordion

An injured pterodactyl

An entire family of raccoons

The grape lady

A haunted house's door

Anything needing WD-40

A constipated bird

A constipated grandpa

A constipated pirate

Little Richard

James Brown

Donald Duck

Gollum

Gizmo

Q*bert

Chewbacca

A peanut in a vise

A ticklish horse

A swarm of bees

A donkey that's tired of carrying your shit

A basket of angry snakes

A broken radiator

An ancient tomb being pried open with a crowbar

A stolen car peeling out of a gravel parking lot

xoxo
jolie

the new normal/oatmeal chocolate "breakfast" cookies

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!