With its ups and downs, becoming a parent is an incredible gift, and will without a doubt be the biggest game changer of your life. Your daily life thus far has been about feeding, resting, challenging, and fulfilling yourself, and then all at once every thought and concern is entirely redirected to nurturing this tiny new life in your arms. And let me tell you something else, taking care of a newborn (or two) is the most mentally, emotionally, and physically draining thing you will every experience in your life. Here are something things that I learned along the way that helped me to survive and thrive as a new mother.
- Take care of yourself. As a mother your top priority is taking care of your child, and in the midst of doing so sometimes your own needs are sacrificially thrown to the wayside. The point is not to make a habit of it. If you continually wear yourself thin eventually there will be nothing left to give. You are without a doubt what’s best for your child, and you should do what you can to give them the finest version of you. When structuring your day, make time for self-maintenance. For me, nutritious eating, exercise, (some-what near) adequate sleep, and getting dressed is the recipe for the best of me on a daily basis. Fitting this time in requires planning, time management, and discipline. Taking care of young children you are regularly faced with challenging situations. By taking care of yourself, you’re setting yourself up for success to handle the daily challenges of motherhood. You still will make mistakes, not because your a bad mom, but because we’re humans and that’s what we do. But from my experience if you take care of yourself you’re facing these challenges much better than the irritable-you would and are able to quickly catch mistakes and learn to improve your mental readiness for the next time. and trust me, there will be a next time.
- Make a routine and stick to it. From day one we have kept our kids on a strict schedule. Not because we are parenting gurus (definitely not), but because pretty much every multiples baby book I read said that if you don’t keep your twins on the same schedule, you will die. Okay they didn’t really say that, but to me when weighing the options of spending 17 hours a day nursing or dying, the latter seemed more appealing. And do you know what’s worse than keeping up with a newborn schedule? Keeping up with two newborn’s separate schedules. So, same schedule it was for our brood. I have never felt more like a drill sergeant than I did as a new mother 4 months in. But the truth is, the strict schedule put us all at ease. I think a lot of the anxieties and frustrations as a new parent come from the unknowns. When you keep everything on a routine, you know what is going to happen and when it will happen (trips to urgent care excluded). This also helped me a lot in managing when I had me-time and being able to fit in when I could work out, eat, shower, and get dressed. The strictest that I was in the schedule was in the morning, and I couldn’t be more thankful to past-me for holding to this. Because early mornings are my time to get ready for the day, I decided that the boys would not get out of their cribs in the morning until 7 am when it was time for them to have milk. If they cried before that I would swiftly go in, offer a pacifier or check to see if they needed a diaper change, then quickly leave the room. They picked up on this pretty quickly, and now if they wake up a bit earlier than 7 AM they know to just sit and play in their cribs and that I will be in shortly with their bottles. Having a routine also made it easier on everyone when we had family and babysitters come to watch the boys because I could give an accurate schedule and instructions.
- Online shopping IS the best thing since sliced bread. Even if you aren’t a parent, this is applicable to all. If you don’t have an Amazon Prime account yet you need to get one. Go through your weekly grocery and household shopping lists and anything that isn’t a strict food product needs to get put on the Amazon shopping list. If you optimize utilization of the subscription, $100 a year is an absolute steal. I used to buy toilet paper, paper towels, cleaning products during my regular grocery trips. Add diapers to the mix, and I’m pretty sure I’d have to have 2 carts at least to get my loot to the car, and who knows how many trips to get everything in to the house. When the boys were still pretty small I would take them with me to the grocery store. One rode in the cart, and the other got a ride in the baby carrier on the mom express. This system worked fine until we got to the point when my back felt like it was going to break from carrying a baby around the store for 45 minutes. Then online grocery shopping came into my life. I go on my local grocery store’s extremely user-friendly app to do the shopping shopping and submit my order, their staff go around the store to shop my order (doing a better job at selecting produce than me to boot), then I drive up to the parking garage, press a button and they quickly bring my groceries down to load in my car, and off I go. All this for a grand total of $149 a year for unlimited service. When you buy groceries 1-2 times a week, this subscription pays for itself in less than a month. The main lesson here is to buy everything, and I mean everything, that you can online. In parenthood time is one of the most valuable assets, and this is one of the biggest ways that I have created efficiencies in our family’s schedule.
- Whatever you think you’re capable of, double it. When I was pregnant with the boys I was constantly at a loss for how I was going to take care of not just one, but TWO babies. For a person that literally needed to ask the nurse to show me and my equally unprepared partner how to apply a diaper to a baby, I was very certain that we were both way in over our heads. After the first night at home with the boys (which was so exciting, no one got any sleep 😉 ) we were off to a pretty good start. The boys were nursing and napping well and on schedule, and I was starting to feel more and more like their mom and not just the babysitter. Then low and behold, just as the boys turned a month old and we were all getting a hang of it, my truly dearest decided it was the right time for him to tear his Achilles’ Tendon, effectively putting him on the injured reserve list and unable to walk for about six months. There I was caretaker for one adult, two newborns, and my beloved Max, our golden retriever. Max was the least helpless of the bunch, but as always was my constant, loyal companion through it all. I think because this massive load of responsibility was placed at my feet I was able to just go into survival mode and power through it all. With the boys on a regular 3-hour schedule, I was really on the clock 24/7. I would sleep a few hours at night and then still wake up early to run because Max needed to go out and if I ran I could get both our workouts in. I am almost happy that I didn’t know I was going to have to do this beforehand, because I think I would have told myself repeatedly that I couldn’t do it, which I had done with the prospect of just taking care of the boys. Looking back on it, I’m still amazed that I was able to make it all work and stay functioning myself. Would I wish the experience on anyone? Never in a million years. But I’m chalking it up to a character building experience that really showed me that we are capable of doing so much more than we think.
- Trust your instincts. I read my fair share of baby books before the boys arrived, and go back to them occasionally to freshen up on the toddler sections. But the extent of pre-natal and childrearing advice out there is just overwhelming and some of it so ridiculous that you really need take everything that your read with a grain of salt. When sifting through the bottomless pit of parental how to’s, I recommend utilizing Sherlock Holmes’ theory of the useful mind attic. The infamously brilliant literary detective explains in “A Study in Scarlet” that he does his best to forget irrelevant information that could otherwise cloud his judgment. Just as Holmes keeps his mind attic clear of all the clutter of useless information, only retain advice and information on parenting that will be useful in problem solving and decision making, allowing you to apply your instincts to the many difficult situations you’ll find yourself in as a new mother. When I had the boys I felt so unprepared because I didn’t think I knew enough about what to do and I didn’t think I had the wherewithal to do it. What you don’t truly find out until you’re actually a mom is how strong maternal instincts are, and you need to trust them. Find a couple of good baby books that are informative and that you can learn the basics from, but be careful not to overload. The most important voice to have in your head is your own.