Things that suck about being post-partum

June is no longer an infant and it rules. I'm sure I'm going to look back on her infancy and get all teary-eyed and yearn for those days of yore. That's why I made this list:

Things that suck about being post-partum: 

My body proportions are completely out of whack.
Breastfeeding makes your boobs look huge (or maybe they just make my boobs look huge, I have no clue). For this reason, my enormous rack creates the illusion that I have a really tiny head. Whenever I look at myself in the mirror I see:

Yeah, GET REAL, Barbie! Unless you're Post-Partum Barbie or something. Then you're a little too real.

And not only do you have a huge rack and a shrunken head, you still have a big floppy pregnancy gut hanging off your midsection and a shitload of extra skin. Oh, and your feet grew a full size during pregnancy. So have fun looking like Pale Man.

"Aren't you glad you have your body back?" UM, NO. 

I don't have an excuse to get fat anymore.

I gained 35 pounds when I was pregnant, and the last 10 pounds I gained is what I like to call "Taco Weight." When I was pregnant, we didn't eat out very much at all. But every once in a while we would drive to our parents' houses in the Chicago suburbs for a visit, and with traffic the ride would take usually two hours or so -- which was an hour longer than my tolerance for not eating, so I'd insist we swing by Taco Bell for a "snack." Sure, it wasn't really healthy, but it's not like I wouldn't gain weight anyway, right? If I gained five pounds because of umbilical fluid, or five pounds because of two Chalupas, who would ever know the difference?

I had the baby five months ago, and now the difference is painfully clear. The weight you gain from growing a placenta and developing umbilical fluid -- that goes away. The weight you gain from eating Chalupas? That sticks around. On your ass. Probably forever, since I don't exercise. So now I'm fat and the worst part is that I can't even blame the baby. I'm fat because I eat Taco Bell, not because I'm pregnant. Baby's out. Taco Weight is still hanging around. The jig is up.

Also, Taco Bell meat looks like June's poop. So it's not even as enjoyable as it once was (lie).

Picture this inside a diaper. 

You get a monster period.
I don't want to get all graphic on this blog, and normally I wouldn't talk about my bodily functions and fluids because that's fucking disgusting, but I have to bust a myth here. When you give birth, you don't just push out the placenta and that's it. You bleed. For WEEKS. And it's not just some "spotting" like everyone is going to tell you beforehand -- you get a SIX-WEEK-LONG MONSTER PERIOD.

 What I didn't anticipate was having to wear ADULT DIAPERS until J was two weeks old, and then bleeding steadily for a month after that. Like, damn, enough already.

Like this. For six weeks. 

Some people I know only bled for a week or two. And by "people I know" I mean random bitches on WebMD.

You cry -- a lot.
Crying is probably my least favorite thing to do besides passing kidney stones. I've found that motherhood messes with your hormones in a major way, but at no time is it more intense than in the first two weeks of your baby's life. By some miracle I did not have postpartum depression, and yet I would start tearing up if my husband made fun of me for putting potato chips on my chicken salad sandwich. Everything makes you cry like a bitch. Baby smiles up at you? Cry like a bitch. Husband falls asleep while you stay up and nurse? Cry like a bitch. Milk stains all over your adult diapers? Cry like a bitch.

And God forbid you're ever exposed to something in the postpartum period that reminds you of your baby. On a trip to Target when June was still an infant, I made the colossal mistake of wandering through the book aisle. I saw a book that my mom used to read to me when I was little and I made the EVEN MORE COLOSSAL MISTAKE of opening it up and skimming through.

More like CRY LIKE A BITCH FOREVER

I literally panicked and ran home so I could watch my baby sleep before she GREW UP AND LEFT MOMMY FOREVER. This book is the saddest shit in the world and I have no idea why parents want to read this to their children -- as though the thought of them growing up and leaving home and never coming back to visit is something you want to drill into their subconscious every single night. Plus how can you even read this to your kids without sobbing uncontrollably? Because I sure can't. The baby grows up and becomes a man! He rocks his mother when she's super old! And then he sings the song to his own baby daughter! I CANT EVEN. 

"As long as I'm living my baby you'll WAHHHHHH..."

If I could even read this book long enough to deconstruct the thing, I would be really weirded out by the whole thing. This mom raises her son like a single parent -- the dad is never mentioned anywhere in the book -- and the son is pretty much a thankless turd throughout. He trashes her house and is loud and obnoxious and shit. Doesn't stop her from crawling in his bedroom when he's fifteen and rocking him like an infant. And this continues well into adulthood. She drives over to his house and climbs in his bedroom window and rocks him to sleep, WHEN HE'S FORTY. No wonder he moves away and doesn't come back home to visit until she calls him up and is like hey, I'm gonna die soon. It's a weird, weird family dynamic. I still cried. 

You turn into a dairy cow.
I was lucky enough to successfully breastfeed June, and it's been incredibly gratifying to see her plump up, knowing that it was my body -- all mine! -- that nourished her to the pinnacle of health. That said, every time she latched on for the first three weeks I wanted to kill myself. Breastfeeding was an excruciating nightmare where I literally felt like my nips were on fire and I winced whenever she eyed my boobs. And the pain isn't the half of it.

This is what happens when you google "milk explosion." Trust -- this is not a milk explosion. You'll soon know what a real milk explosion is. 

Until your milk "regulates," you're going to be soaking wet every time you hear the baby cry. Or whenever you think about your baby. Or for no reason at all. I have no idea if this is something that happens with the first baby only, or if it lessens with every subsequent baby, but there came a time when I was so sore and leaking so much milk into my nursing bras that I literally just sat upstairs in the loft with no clothes on and watched Keeping up with the Kardashians and iced my boobs with bags of frozen vegetables. I don't even remember where the baby was.

So keep that in mind, future-self. When you get misty-eyed and baby-hungry, remember the boobs. Remember the nipple-fire and the lanolin cream and calling your lactation consultant like ten thousand times. Remember the NO SLEEP and the monster periods and wringing milk out of your yoga pants.

And then remember getting pregnant means having an excuse to eat tacos, and get pregnant anyway.





**No I'm not pregnant. 

Meth, milestones, and public breastfeeding

My husband and I are bona fide hermits, especially on the weekends. Our favorite pastime, second only to drinking beer/eating pizza, is finding new TV to watch on Instant Netflix. We're addicted, and even more so since we've discovered the mind-melting awesome that is Breaking Bad. Every night this week we've stayed up until midnight watching this damn show. And after every episode we kept saying, Just one more. Just one more hit! It's exactly like being addicted to meth. I'd imagine.

So that's pretty much what we've been doing all week. We finally finished the third season on Friday night, which meant we had no idea what to do with ourselves for the rest of the weekend since season 3 is the last season that streams on Netflix right now. Fortunately we have a child that needs to be changed and played with and occasionally fed, so that gave us something to do while we endured Breaking Bad withdrawal and racked our brains for something else to watch.

While we were tweaking like a couple of meth-heads, here's another thing that happened:

Oh hey Bruce Willis, what's up?

The baby is sitting up -- unassisted, for the most part! Four days ago she could hardly balance herself enough to sit upright for longer than a minute or two, and I had to supervise her constantly so she wouldn't fall forward on her face at a moment's notice. That was four days ago. Now she can sit on the floor and play with her toys like a real live little girl. Her favorite thing to do now is to sit in front of a spread of toys and pick them up one by one and lick them, so that's what she did while we found a movie to watch. 

(We ended up going with Bad Teacher, by the way, which was a terrible non-movie that tried entirely too hard. I guess they thought that vulgarity would be funny just for vulgarity's sake, and I'm not really sure why because this isn't Victorian England and hearing a grown woman say the world ballsack has no shock value to it anymore. Plus Cameron Diaz is starting to look like someone's mom, so we didn't really buy into her whole sexed-up, frat-boy persona.)

I still totally look 25, right? RIGHT YOU GUYS?!

We also made a special trip to grandma's house, went to the library, and ate at a new sushi restaurant in our town's business district. I took a picture of the food before I ate it so I can relive the memory anytime I want.

(Oh, and I actually fed the baby in public successfully for probably the first time ever. For the record, I cover up in public when I'm breastfeeding because I don't like strange grown men staring at my fun-bags. I would love one of those Michelle-Duggar style nursing covers, since whenever I try to discreetly feed my baby, she always manages to unlatch at the worst possible moment and reveal my boob to anyone who happens to be looking over at us. And since she has a habit of grunting and screaming if she doesn't get the boob in her mouth fast enough, she pretty much guarantees that everyone in our proximity will be looking over at us. Not cool, baby.

I don't agree, however, that because I'm nursing I should retreat to a dark corner or something. Sometimes that's what I do because that's what makes me comfortable personally, but I'm so over the notion that I'm supposed to remove myself from society completely and feed her in a bathroom or something. And yes, there are people who totally think that's what needs to happen, like the owner of this shop in Dekalb, IL who kicked a nursing mother out of his store because she was breastfeeding, calling it a "disgrace." Seriously. I'm willing to bet this homeboy isn't going to kick someone out of his store who happens to be wearing a low-cut shirt or a push-up bra, but nursing mothers are "obscene" and his "rights" are being infringed on, and God, and the Bible. Makes total sense. I so desperately wish I would have been nursing at the time of this protest so I could have joined these ladies and owned this guy with his non-logic.

And for the record, I have fed June in a bathroom before -- but only because we were in Mass at the time and I'm a total breastfeeding novice. For the first few months of breastfeeding at least there is screaming and crying and finagling and re-arranging and milk squirting everywhere, and I felt like it was just a common courtesy to do that somewhere other than a quiet church. But I still hated it. Feeding a baby next to a toilet is effing disgusting, and I would pray to the baby Jesus that there weren't poo particles floating around infecting my child with E-Coli. My point is that choosing to breastfeed is cost-friendly, emotionally beneficial, nutritious, and it's been proven to reduce the risk of about a million diseases, including SIDS. Mothers need to not be shamed into thinking it's unnatural or deviant or that it's on par with taking a shit.

That's my spiel, as the Jews say.)

Anyway. Right now I just drank a bunch of caffeinated iced tea, so I'm all hopped up and queuing up a bunch of songs on a YouTube playlist (that's what poor people do, instead of buying them off of iTunes). My music playlist right now is wack. I have no discerning palette whatsoever, so I literally just listen to anything that sounds catchy. Right now on my YouTube channel I'm listening to a compilation of the White Stripes, Beyonce, and a bunch of random shit (like this song by Enya). I used to listen to this song all the time when I was five or six. On the weekends I would steal this CD from my mom and blast it in our living room and run around in circles pretending I was a ballerina. As though ballerinas just run around waving their arms in the air and yelling the lyrics to "Orinoco Flow."

LET ME SAIL, LET ME SAIL, LET ME CRASH UPON YOUR SHORE

And that was the weekend.

Solids and poo and what "they" don't tell you

Last week we started June on solid foods. Girlfriend was watching us eat, grabbing for our food, and stuffing everything in her mouth. She was ready.

Carrots!

Luckily, and after a lot of hard work on everyone's part, we were able to breastfeed exclusively for five months before she had one bite of solid food. If it were up to me, I would breastfeed for the first two years, because it costs nothing and I'm really lazy.

That's one thing "they" don't tell you -- or maybe everyone knows this and I'm just stupid: I thought until you choose to give your babies solid foods, moms could just breastfeed exclusively for as long as they wanted. That's why when I'd see those videos on Tyra about moms breastfeeding their kids until they were 12 and 13 (or 6, 7, 8) I'd go "huhhwhuhh? Don't they get really hungry all the time? Wouldn't they just constantly nurse to get full? How do they survive off just milk?"

Derp.

No, actually, that's not how it works. Apparently you're supposed to wait for your baby to show signs of "readiness" in starting solids, and they can be ready anywhere after 4 months or so (and some moms/babies start even earlier). If you delay starting solids past the age of "readiness," your baby may develop oral-motor delay and need help from a behavior specialist to learn how to solid-feed. I know this because I spent 20 minutes on WebMD and I'm perfectly qualified to give medical advice.

So, anyway, we started her on solids and it was so, so fun.

These pictures are so high-quality because my brother took them, not I. 

And then the next morning, when I went to change her diaper, it was not so much fun anymore.

Another thing that "they" don't tell you -- breastfed poo is like a sweet dream. It's practically nothing. It doesn't smell. When we'd go to empty her diaper pail (on the days where we'd use disposables) it would smell like butter-popcorn. Absolutely not a lie. It's like a fart in a rose garden. Or something. Cleaning up poo is never awesome, but when it hardly smells and is water-soluble, it's not that bad.

(Oh and apparently there's another type of poo called "meconium," which is like sticky, black tar that comes out when the baby is first-born and sometimes in utero. I was lucky enough to miss the meconium stage completely -- and by "lucky" I mean I was totally passed out from the fentanyl the nurses gave me to stitch up my episiotomy. Totally dodged that bullet, amirite?!)

When you start solid foods, it's a whole 'nother ball game. That shit is vile. And there's so much more of it, for some reason. So far it's the same color and consistency, but according to the interwebs, that's supposed to change soon, too. Not like it could get any grosser. Right?

.... Right?