I am a new mom and I wanted to chronicle my time with my daughter. I wish that I had started this earlier. Magdalena (aka Maggie) is 5 1/2 months old now (the picture to the left is from day 2 however). She is so much fun, but she is also a lot of work. So far the things that I didn't expect about being a parent are 1) that I would not be able to go back to work. We waited too long to try and get Maggie to take a bottle and now she won't take anything but the real thing. We decided that her future health and mental abilities were more important than me going back to work, so I will continue to breastfeed her. I am hoping that I will soon be able to start an online business so that I can continue to be home with her. 2) That exhaustion could be so complete. Luckily, this part is over but I have yet to get my sleep schedule back to normal. Hence the reason that I am starting this blog after midnight. She is asleep, but my schedule has not returned to normal. Babies will adjust to any schedule you give them, and unfortunately I started bringing Maggie into bed with me and sleeping until around 11 in the morning. So, she now sleeps from 10 or 11 at night until 10 or 11 in the morning, not straight through, but that is when she doesn't wake up except to eat. So, we are going to be working on altering that schedule. I'll let you know how it goes. 3) That such joy could come from a smile and a laugh. You hear people talking about how first reward of parenting is the smile, but you don't have close to an understanding of that until it happens. Maggie is a very smiley girl and it is so infectious. She can bring light anywhere. The laugh,
though, is even more rewarding. It really lets me know that I can make this wonderful creature happy. A few times I have gotten her laughing for a minute or so and it's wonderful. 4) That is would be so hard to keep up the housework. I want so much for the house to be clean and baby proofed. She is going to be crawling any second now and I want to be ready. She isn't very happy when I put her down though. She will only stay happy in her swing or rolling around on a blanket for so long. I need to enlist the help of others to hold her while I get stuff done around the house. The only problem with this is that most of the people I know work. It's hard to find someone to help out. When my husband is home, I want to hang out with him, not clean. He helps out some, but there is just so much to do. All of these things make me feel bad that I didn't help out more when people I know had babies. I wish that I had known how hard the first few weeks are. I am going to try hard to make sure that those I know that have babies in the future have my help. My family was wonderful when I had Maggie. They really made sure that I had the help I needed.