New Mom Diary
New Mom Diary Vol. VI: The One-Year Mark
Daphne passed her first birthday a few weeks back. The milestone provides a good opportunity for some reflection, even if it is a bit arbitrary. (As a milestone it carries far less importance than, for example, when she started sleeping through the night, or began eating solid food, or takes her first step -- that last one is still somewhere in the future.) A year ago, time was moving much more slowly. For one thing, each day was a round-the-clock process, punctuated, in roughly three-hour increments, by feedings and burpings. We used to count Daphne's age in weeks. Now that she has passed a year, there are forums where she is not even the youngest person in consideration anymore -- she now attends a weekly class for the 12- to 18-month-old cohort, having completed the 3- to 12-month curriculum. And time has definitely sped up. A year ago weeks felt like months, but now the months are flying by. I've been back at work nearly a year, and can honestly say it feels like I never left. Even my days of visiting the lactation room, which ended just about 6 months ago, feel like a distant memory. Normalcy has returned, except that my life feels so much crazier now. While a year ago I would have defined myself chiefly as a "new mother," today I would definitely first consider myself a "working mother." I do not suffer from guilt about not staying home with Daphne -- my mother worked full-time while I was growing up, and so the arrangement feels natural to me. I appreciate having a stimulating job and having a significant focus outside of the home (though I love it when anyone asks about Daphne during the work day.) The hardest parts are saying goodbye to her before business trips, which I must take occasionally, and sometimes being too exhausted after particular days to be able to devote myself to her fully before bedtime. Because I see Daphne only briefly in the morning, and for an hour or two before bedtime in the evenings, I treasure my weekends with her and shrink from any activities that keep me apart from her. I look forward to the basics, like picking out her clothes, pushing her on the swing, feeding her dinner, and giving her a bath. At the office I usually begin work by opening a digital picture of her on my computer screen, and flipping to it regularly throughout the day.
One of the strangest things that has started to happen is that people I know with children around Daphne's age are beginning to report that they are pregnant again. When my friend with a boy a month younger than Daphne announced her condition to me she noted, "if you had told me while I was in labor that I'd be pregnant again on A___'s first birthday, I'd have said you were crazy." At some point, my husband and I hope Daphne will be lucky enough to have a sibling. A year ago, practical consideration of this idea would have been unthinkable, whereas now it is probably just a little premature. In the meantime, we are keeping our eyes open for the next set of milestones -- evidence that Daphne knows her eyes from her nose, the aforementioned first steps, and an intentional utterance of the word "Mama."
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Product Review
Touch and Feel Series
These sturdy and inexpensive books contain about a dozen pages of colorful photographs that encourage baby to feel and explore.
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