A Day In the Life...

I just read a wonderful post from Our Griswold about her life as a working momma of twins.  I don't want to link it because I can't remember if she's private or not!  So I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on my life as a working momma.  When I'm old and senile, I want to remember what it was like to be young and feel like you could take on the world :)

I start the day around 4:45 am. I roll groaningly jump out of bed with the first sound of my alarm.  Sparks continues to be amazed--even after 6 years of marriage--that I have never "snoozed" in my life.  I mentioned the other day that I don't even know how to snooze on the iPhone.  Shower, wash hair (well, every other day) and I mention washing hair because washing, prepping, and drying crazy curly hair (c-c-c-curly!) is a task in and of itself.  5:15, coffee pot beeps, big cup of coffee, get ready.  In kitchen by 5:55. Put away clean dishes, do a load of laundry and/or unload dishwasher, shove a bowl of oatmeal down my throat, feed dog, give dog medicine.

At 6:25, I'm upstairs in D's nursery, singing him the "rise and shine" song and waking up my lil muffin.  I HATE waking him up :( the only thing that makes it better is the huge smile I get when he rolls over.  Get D dressed, nurse D, get myself dressed, wash D's face (you would think I was killing him when I wash his face). Put D in carseat, take D out of carseat to change poopy diaper.  seriously, it's like carseat = poop time!  Get bottles/D's lunch out of fridge, pack D's bag, give puppy her treat, pack car, pack D. Out the door by 6:55.

Drop D off at "school," talk to D's teacher about how crazy I am that I packed him a tiny little container of applesauce as his treat for eating his carrots/corn/potatoes (freshly made, of course), give D a kiss, off to work.

Work, pump, work, pump, work, 7:30-2.  Pick D up (yay! I love this part! He holds his hands up to me and smiles!).  D nap, 2:30-3:30, on a good day.  During this time, I run around like a crazy woman washing bottles, washing pump parts, washing tupperware.  I make D's bottles and lunch for the next day, make my lunch, make coffee, and usually get maybe a load of laundry in or a batch of baby food made or dinner prepped before nap time is over.  I devote 3:30-bedtime to playing with D.  Hopefully with the cooler weather coming I'll be able to start running again, with D of course. That's the one thing I've given up to make life work, and I miss it like crazy. Sparky gets home around 5:45 and I usually hand D over to him for daddy play or swim time, before and after D's dinner.

6:00--dinner time for D (chicken, veggie, fruit for dessert), followed by 15 minutes of Baby First TV (love this channel).  During that 15 minutes, Sparks sits with D and I clean up the kitchen and do some dinner prep.  6:45, bath time, book, boob, bed. And I'm downstairs by 7:20.  Cook dinner (or Sparks cooks), eat dinner, do grad school work or grade papers until bedtime at 10, or whenever I pass out on the couch.  And then we're up at 4:45 to start all over again.  Thank goodness D sleeps from 7:20-6:20 or I don't know how I'd get anything done.  I KNOW I am sooo blessed to have that.

This weekend, I'm leaving D for the first time! My future cousin-in-law's bachelorette party is in DC this weekend, and I'm going.  I'm still going strong with the breastfeeding, so my trusty pump will make its way there with me and hopefully I won't notice too much difference in my supply when I get home if I skip a pumping or two.  My goal is to EBF until early November and then wean D to just a morning/night feeding. Our cousin's wedding is in November and we'll be away from baby for 4 days and it's not logical that I can pump every feeding during that 4 days.  I LOVE bf'ing and I'll be sad to wean D, but I know that if we do truly want to start TTC again, I should at least start weaning him.  More on that another time :)

And of course, no post is complete without a picture of my almost-crawler.

You can't really tell, but his cold was in full swing in this picture

Post-Baby Bump...

As mentioned in my post the other day, I'm a lover of all things Kate and Wills, including little Prince George.  As I was catching up on my celebrity gossip, I saw this article about Kate's "post-baby" body and was just appalled that people were already discussing this, as if this girl doesn't have enough on her mind (oh, I don't know a newborn, millions of people watching her, just a typical day).  I honestly have wanted to write about this for a while but this was the impetus I needed, simply because the front page of that magazine was so appalling.  For those of you who saw Kate after Prince George's birth--and let's face it, unless you've been living under a rock, you've seen the photos--she flaunted her post-baby bump in a gorgeous dress. She looked so beautiful.  Finally, a celebrity who doesn't hide from the public for five months and then suddenly reappear looking flawless with a completely flat tummy.  (hello, Kim Kardashian--does anyone DOUBT this is why she hasn't been in the news lately?!)

Here's my story....I've always struggled with my weight.  In second grade, I had to go on a diet because I was pretty much a human garbage disposal.  Once I started playing soccer, I lost all that weight and maintained until college when I studied for a semester in Europe (and gained 35 pounds...studying gelato and pastries is hard work).  Since then, I've been on a roller coaster: I lost a lot of weight quickly on South Beach before my wedding, but gained that back.  I never really dieted again until 2011 when I was at my heaviest, so my BFF and I did weight watchers and I discovered Jillian Michaels' workout videos.  I was finally in great shape and so happy...then I got pregnant, miscarried, and began all of my surgeries and hormones.  It was hard to keep in shape during that time, and when I got pregnant with D, I was on uber hormones.  I also only wanted fast food tacos for the first trimester, and the thought of a vegetable that wasn't served in between tortillas grossed me out...so by 13 weeks, I had already gained 12+ pounds.  At the end of my pregnancy, I was up 40+ pounds, and only now--five months after D's birth--am I back to my pre-pregnancy weight. This is not to brag, nor is it glorious. Things have shifted around, I don't have the time or the energy to work out and tone back up, and it's a struggle every day to eat well in the minimal amount of time that I have to eat. 

Magazines are quick to flaunt the wonders of celebrities who lose their baby weight immediately and then look gorgeous on the red carpet, so when we "mere mortal women" have our babies, there's this sense of pressure to lose the weight NOW.  God forbid we wear something form-fitting and display our post-baby bump; bravo Duchess, bravo!!  Here's what people don't tell you about losing the post-baby weight.

It's HARD. You have to sleep and consume enough calories to keep up your supply to breastfeed.  When the baby sleeps, you rarely have enough time to nap or put the dishes away, much less pull out a workout video, work out, and then shower before baby wakes up.  Those nice healthy meals you're supposed to eat get harder and harder to make with a baby on your hip or screaming in a swing.  And most women can't even exercise until 6 weeks after baby is born.  This is reality.  Reality is NOT having a personal trainer, a nutritionist, and several nannies to watch the baby while you work out five times a day and have healthy meals delivered to you. 

There's so much pressure on women to look perfect right away, and I think it's so disheartening and demeaning that we focus on that rather than the miracle that just took place.  We put our bodies through the traumatic experience of giving birth to a human (in my case, an 8+ pound human)...let's focus on that for once rather than how big the post-baby bump is or how quickly we (or Kate) can lose the baby weight.  That's such a misplaced priority.