Luke the mimic

Luke is starting to mimic sounds or motions that we make... tonight he was trying to imitate Ryan's growly-snarly noise.

Luke claps his hands

Luke showing off his hand-clapping skills! First time I was able to catch it on video.

Measuring progress... what have I done today?

One thing I'm learning as a new mom is that it's easy to feel like you haven't done anything, or done enough. It's easy to fall into the "to-do list" mindset of wanting to accomplish everything, but it's just impossible. I've read several blog entries lately, including a great one from a blog called New Mom Help, about thinking instead in terms of a "what have I done list."

Thinking like this reminds me that I can't do everything, but I can instead focus on doing what's important. It's nice to have everything clean and picked up and put away, but sometimes it doesn't all get done. But each task has lots of mini-tasks, and I can do the most important mini-tasks and feel like I have accomplished something.

In the past day or so, I've actually gotten a lot done. Sure, there is folded-up laundry on the table, and a baby bottle sitting in the living room, but I did manage to wash the cloth diapers (very important!) and put them away on the changing table, do another load of laundry and fold it up (it's not all put away yet, but I will get there), make the bed, get dressed (a biggie!), and Luke has been well cared for today (the most important of all).

If the only thing I do all day is feed and change Luke, then I've still accomplished a lot. We have a good stockpile of gDiapers, so if I don't manage to get to the laundry task and we run out of cloth diapers before I get them washed and dried, it's no big deal. If for some reason, I blew through two dozen cloth diapers and 120 gDiapers without stopping to do laundry, the grocery store is just next door and I can get some more.

Thinking in terms of what I have accomplished instead of what's left undone at the end of the day really helps to put things in better perspective.

Schedules

Just when I think Luke is getting on a regular schedule, he decides to break up his feedings into a million mini-meals and throw things off. But overall, things are starting to even out a little...

6:30 or 7am - wake up, diaper change, eat
8am - go back to bed
10:30am - wake up, diaper change, eat
11:30am - hang out in a lap while we watch the news
1 or 1:30pm - diaper change, eat
2:30pm - take a nap, if I'm lucky
4 or 4:30pm - wake up, diaper change, eat
5:30pm - get in the sling to walk the dogs
6pm - sleep in the sling while I make/eat something for dinner
7pm - wake up, diaper change, eat
8pm - hang out in my lap or nap for a while
10pm - wake up, diaper change, eat
11:30pm - bath/daddy time
12:30am - eat
1am - sleep for the longest stretch of the night!
6:30 or 7am - start all over again

I guess things are pretty regular for the most part, but I'm still getting used to his little peculiarities. Today he's just been a little off... I'll change his diaper and he'll want to eat, but then he'll only eat an ounce or two and then nod off and not want to eat anymore. Then an hour later, he'll wake up fussy and hungry, and finish the bottle, and then wake up an hour later wanting to eat again. So I feel like I've had a bottle in my hand all day, and not the nice, relaxing grown-up kind.

A month of learning

I've been off work for the past month, and have two more weeks to go before I am back at the daily grind (and Luke goes to day care). It's been a month of on the job learning, and some of the things I've learned are things that they either don't write about in the baby books, or don't underscore heavily enough.

• For the first week or two after going home from the hospital, you will forget to eat. Remind yourself, or you will turn into a monster very quickly.
• When they say that if you don't rest enough, you'll get mastitis and be miserable, THEY MEAN IT. They should put this in giant, bold letters in the What to Expect book. It should have its own chapter, because it's that miserable and should not be a footnote.
• We are cloth diapering at home, and the biggest thing I've discovered about this is that the poopiest diaper in the load will be the first new one after you've put a load in the washing machine.
• Also, cloth diapering is not as hard as everyone says it is, even with the washing and stuff, because it would take just as long to take out a full trash bag as it does to take the diapers out of the dryer and stack them up.
• The thing that you want the most about being a mom will probably be the thing that goes the most wrong. In my case, breastfeeding... more about that later.

I'm sure there are much more things to learn as we go along, but that's what's jumped out at me so far. It's only been a month... we have years of tidbits to pick up.