motherhood and me

i have been reading lots of blogs lately that are very honest about motherhood and that it is not all rosey. from all of the monthly updates on emma taylor you might think that she is the best baby in the world. that however is not the case. i have been wanting to somehow write all of this down (now that i am out of the thick of it and can think clearly) so that i can 1. be encouraging to anyone who is a first time mom and 2. remember it when the next one comes. although now i would agree that emma taylor has a great personality and demeanor it took a while to get to this point.

before we had emma taylor, people would always ask if we were ready. our response was always that we were ready to have no clue what we were doing. the one thing i was most worried about when having a newborn was the lack of sleep. i found out that God truly gives you grace and the strength when you need it the most. i was lucky for emma taylor to never have night mixed up with day but that still doesn't mean it was easy. it is so hard to get up several times a night, feed a baby, and get them back to sleep. that would be a process of 1-1 1/2 hrs, and then in 2 hours you would have to do it all again. i cried a lot for the first month. i am NOT generally an emotional person so to cry that much was very hard (as it would for anyone). dealing with all of this plus recovering from labor (which was hard...she was a 9 lb baby!) was more than i could imagine i would have to deal with. after 2 weeks emma taylor came out of the sleep all the time phase which some people say their kids come out of at 3 months!

at six weeks was my breaking point. emma taylor was dealing with gas issues, and she wouldn't sleep which means she just cried. i ended up calling up one of the moms from the youth group that we volunteer with and asked if i could go to her house. i felt so vulnerable showing up at her house in tears with a baby that i didn't know what to do with, but God is faithful and turned that into a mentoring relationship that is so so encouraging to me.

once the gassy, fussy, crying all the time phase was over it seemed to be uphill. however, that does not mean it was easy. we are used to order and being in control. with a newborn you are not in control...i followed the ideas of the baby whisperer or baby wise and although it helped, she still was not predictable on how long she napped (if she napped) or how long between feedings she would go. i had to remind myself that she was a person who needed grace too. she was not a robot.

i have learned that i am not a newborn person. i loved her so much but did not like the phase. maybe its because i like order but once she got to be 5 months it seemed so much easier. 5 months in retrospect sounds like such a long time, but i don't remember it being that long. she truly is in such a fun stage right now. she LOVES people and attention. i can't even count the number of people who come up and talk to her while we are at the grocery store, and luckily she loves every minute of it.

so motherhood has grown on me. i guess it has had to. i am not a natural at it, but i guess most people probably aren't. i know there will be lots of challenges ahead, but i hold fast in knowing that God is faithful to meet us where we are and sustain us when we need it.