Sunday, July 5, 2009

Pooped

I am exhausted.  I'm not sure if you're aware of this but having a baby is utterly draining.  It's also magical, wonderful, meaningful, blah blah blah.  A common theme to mommyhood, however, is the exhaustion.  

I also have a new theory--you can follow all the advice the "experts" dole out in their best-selling books, however, no change will ever truly take place until you've hit that exhaustion wall.  For example--

1.  I had heard about co-sleeping--sleeping with your baby--but didn't think this was something I'd ever do.  In my experience, babies slept in cribs.  But it wasn't until Baby refused to sleep anywhere else but on me that I caved and began the new sleeping arrangement.  We were both exhausted and this was the solution.

2.  Then we both started to outgrow the co-sleeping arrangement.  Baby flailed around wildly and nursed all night so neither one of us was sleeping.  Then he clobbered my eye so bad that I had those 3 lovely trips to the eye Dr.  We were both exhausted, I was severely wounded and the solution was back to separate sleeping vessels. 

3.  I've never given The Boy formula.  He has thrived (and I mean thrived because he's bigger than 95% of all other babies his age) solely on breast milk.  And I've taken joy in this.  It's like a success amongst constant failure in this new job.  To each his own, I don't care what you feed your child, however, once I put in all that agonizing work to use my boobs to feed him, I was hooked and not willing to give formula.  But now that "exhaustion" word is popping up again and I think soon he will have his first helping of formula.  It won't replace the nursing but it will allow me 2 hours out for a pilates class while he is taken care of by his father.  We're both exhausted, my sanity is teetering so a little fake boob juice can hopefully be the solution.   

Dear god, I hope there is another mommy out there reading this.  If it's just my friends who are living the good life on an 8 month cruise in Hawaii then this post will be terribly boring.  My apologies, I'll blame it on exhaustion.  

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