What being a parent has been like

I’d love to write some highly descriptive prose detailing life as a mom, but the job itself allows little time to write, to eat, to apply deodorant even. And so, you will have to do with this point-form list of what 6 weeks of being a mom has been like for me:
Being a parent sometimes means:
- Realizing that a full night’s sleep is a hazy concept I vaguely remember and may one day in the far, far future return to
- Learning to operating on sleep increments of 20 minutes to 3 hours throughout the night
- Learning, the hard way, to keep one diaper underneath her when removing the other, or else she’ll pee all over me and the change pad and her clothes
- Making breakfast, lunch and dinner with the use of one hand (the other is occupied holding the baby)
- Finding the nutritional value in frozen meals, meals from a box and meals in the form of replacement chocolate shakes
- Makeup routine goes from a leisurely 15 minutes staring at my own reflection to frantically applying some undereye concealer (to hide the sleepless night) while singing lullabies to the bored baby lying on the change table beside the mirror before she starts crying
- Taking naps with a beautiful baby girl curled up on my chest, smelling like baby and breathing her little baby breaths, drifting off with me making her little baby sounds
- Escaping the beauty of a shower by myself, the smell of lavender body wash and the feel of warm steam, to the blaring reality that my baby is screaming in hunger on the other side of the door while my poor husband tries to soothe her
- Choosing outfits based not on what suits me, what’s stylish or even what’s comfortable but based upon which make for easy nursing
- Switching outfits numerous times a day because I smell like milk she has spit back on my shirt or spit up on my pants
- Realizing that my baby has not read the baby behaviour books and does not know she is “supposed” to enjoy her soother and “supposed” to be sleeping at night in 4 or 5 hour increments
- If anyone else were to wake me numerous times from slumber crying that they were hungry, I would likely slug them. But this baby gets a free pass, night after night, because she is beautiful and dependent on my reciprocated love
- Getting immense joy and pride, equal to graduating university or finishing a race, from things as simple as her smile or her coos
- Living in Lululemon pants
- Remembering to shower only because the grease in my hair is too much to ignore, not because I remember how many days it’s been since my last one

Labels: baby, motherhood