Wow right? It simultaneously feels both like yesterday and forever ago that he joined us (very punctually) on his due date – Saturday, March 17th, 2012 at 1:15 am. What a trip the last year has been.
I do feel as though my world has been turned upside down – in both amazing and frustrating ways. In many ways, I don’t feel like the same person I was. I long for some parts of myself that seem to have gone missing, or are just temporarily buried under a pile of poopy diapers. I long for my free-time, for lazy weekend days cuddling with Adam until noon, for solitary afternoons spent wandering around New York with my camera, for spontaneity, for matinees, for reading The Week and New York Magazine cover to cover each week, for endless hours spent editing photos in Lightroom, for nights out eating, drinking and being merry without the next morning’s 5:30am wakeup looming over me.
I started to come up with a list of things I’ve learned during the past year as a new parent – #1 being:
Parenting is hard!
Then my friend Yvonne (check out her awesome new blog) sent me this article last night and I think it sums it all up quite nicely. I laughed out loud reading it:
How To Be a Perfect Parent in 5 Easy Steps… Or Probably Never by Una Lamarche of The Sassy Curmudgeon
Well said Miss Curmudgeon!
I’d add to that that I’ve learned:
To let myself off the hook: for lots of things… for everything. For responding to emails a week later, for wearing the same three pairs of maternity leggings everyday for a year and a half straight, for sleeping in said maternity leggings and then wearing them again the next day, for forgetting peoples’ birthdays, for showering a lot less, for leaving the house without brushing my hair, for taking months to send out thank you notes, for knowing literally NOTHING about current events, for making Theo oatmeal and peas for dinner because it’s the only thing I had in the house that was makeable in the five minutes before meltdown occurs… you get the picture.
also…
That my family is by far the most important thing to me in the entire world – no question. Nothing else matters as much. That’s a good thing to be clear on. It takes the pressure off regarding other areas of my life I feel foggy about (career confusion anyone?) - Whatevs… I’ll deal with that later. I’ve got this family thing down AOK. Goal achieved. I win.
In my last post I talked a bit about how boring and repetitive the day-to-day of motherhood can be…
But then there’s Theo (the reward!). And oh my god I love him so freaking much. And now I just want to do everything in the world for him.
Adam put a little video together of Theo’s first year… as you can see, despite all the lack of sleep, confusion, stress, pain, fear and feelings of total failure at times, this year has been oh so sweet.
I can now see how fast it’s all going to go.
Happy birthday my little man!
