Reflections on the First Year, Part 1

I can't believe how quickly we are approaching my daughter's 1st birthday! This year has passed by so fast. Although I wrote about many of these experiences and the feelings that I had when I started this blog over 8 months ago, I wanted to take some time to refelct on them again a year later...

Due Date Approaching (Dec. 15th, 2009)...
A year ago today I was 10 days away from my due date. I remember feeling huge and tired of being pregnant, but anxious and excited to meet our baby (and find out the gender). I was definitely apprehensive about my upcoming labour and delivery (because I had no idea what it was going to be like...no books can prepare you) and I was looking forward to, but a little worried about breast-feeding. It was a very emotional time.

Due Date Passed...
As I passed my due date, all of these feelings grew more intense. Waiting was really hard. Then we had a decision to make. It was a couple of days before Christmas and I was almost a week overdue. We had the option of continuing to wait, which meant that we would have to make regular trips to the hospital on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and so on to check the baby's vitals and make sure everything was fine. Or, we could go in and try Cervidil (a cervical ripening agent in the form of a tampon-like insert) and hope that labour would start on its own. This was a really hard decision to make because I was adamant about having a natural birth and if we decided to go with the Cervidil and it didn't work, we would be headed down a potentially unnatural path with no option of going back. My husband and I talked at length about our options and I shed more than a few tears. In the end we opted to go with the Cervidil and luckily, my water broke the next morning and I was able to have my all-natural birth!

Baby's First Christmas...
Last Christmas is a complete blur. I really wanted to be home for Christmas so we left the hospital in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, exactly 24 hours after Lilah was born. It was a nerve-racking drive home. I don't remember much about Christmas Day because I was so exhausted! Those first few days were definitely rough and I am so thankful that we were staying with my parents and that I had my mom there to help me out and provide support. My husband was AMAZING too! I made it through the early days of breastfeeding and the engorgement, the labour recovery and the sleeplessness and I have nothing but positive, happy memories about all of those early experiences. I feel incredibly lucky that I made it through labour and delivery and the first few weeks post-partum without any problems.

Sleeplessness...
We didn't get a lot sleep in those early days and I haven't had a full night's sleep to this day. Yes, my daughter is still waking twice in the night to nurse. I won't say that it wouldn't be nice to sleep through the night, but I made the choice to breastfeed knowing full well that it is completely normal for breastfed babies to continue to nurse in the night for several years (if one was to choose to breastfeed for that long) unless they are trained otherwise. I was never really keen on the idea of using sleep training to get her to give up the night feeds although there were a couple of nights several months ago when I did let her cry it out in an effort to get her to drop a couple of her night feedings (she was averaging 3-4 night feedings well into the second half of her first year which I no longer felt was necessary). I was hoping that she would be sleeping though the night by her 1st birthday, but without implementing more sleep training, that just isn't going to happen. I am currently debating trying to get her to drop one more feeding before her birthday so that I am only nursing her once a night, but have yet to find the right time to do that given that I am still working a couple of days a week and we will soon be travelling for the holidays and she will be sleeping in a strange room for several weeks. People ask me how I do it, but it is so normal now that it really doesn't bother me. I get enough sleep, I am able to go to work, I have energy and I am able to function like a relatively normal person so I guess I don't really have a lot of motivation to train her to sleep thorough the night and I could care less about the social pressures that say babies should be sleeping through the night by a certain age. I am doing what is right and works for Lilah and I and that is all that matters. I have a happy, healthy, thriving baby girl...what more could I ask for.

To be continued...

Funny Video (Why I Can't Make Mom Friends)

I wanted to share this funny video I watched a couple a days ago on another parenting blog that I follow. It made me laugh really hard! This video represents the extreme version of what it really feels like sometimes when talking to other moms (and it made me wonder if I sound like one of these women sometimes too...LOL!) I did see glimpses of myself in each of them at different point in the video, but overall, I would like to think that I fall somewhere in the middle regarding most of the issues that are discussed. Check it out for a good laugh!

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7148143/?ref=nf