Head Above Water

I'm finally done treading water and have gotten my first gulps of fresh air. With Luca it was the first two weeks that were the hardest, with Sabina it was the first two months. I'm now 10 weeks in and it both feels like a blink of an eye and an eternity. Nothing else compares to the roller coaster of emotions that you feel in early babyhood. You have to recover from seeing your body go from large but acceptable with baby on board, to, large but empty, jelly-like and wrinkled. Then there's the vagina, I'll leave that one alone for now, but you can imagine the recovery. Boobs, 3 sizes bigger than normal, with baby constantly attached, which was incredibly painful at the start - somehow I forgot everything. And to top it all off you have this very needy little person and a very needy slightly bigger person who both cry a lot, eat a lot and poop a lot. Oh and then there's that very inconvenient thing about not sleeping. At least not more than a couple hours at a time. Have you ever based your day on trying to catch up on sleep? There's a lot of rushing through meals, conversations, and showers so that you can run to bed and try to get an hour in.

But I'm past all that. Well, most of it. I've lost the large, but still have the wrinkled pooch. The lady parts are doing well. Boobs are getting more breaks and have come down from a Pamela Anderson to a Scarlet Johannson. The little people are still needy, but my little baby lady is going to bed at 8 and only waking up once to eat. That's a game changer. It started right about the time when I had my first sleep-deprived freak out. It was my birthday and I hit a wall. I told Lorenzo, through a stream of tears, that I didn't think I could do it anymore. My post-pregnancy brain didn't know what "it" was exactly, but my tired, hunched over body new something had to change. I can still see Lorenzo's sympathetic look as he said, "Jaime, there's nothing we can do, it will get better but this is how it is right now." It's hard to believe that was more than a month ago. I have no complaints. She is a good, good baby. And when you've slept you love your kids more.