In the 15 weeks of being a mum, last week was the toughest yet. It was the perfect storm of baby and new mum bullshit.
• Baby going through a leap and the first murmurings of teething, with a healthy dose of trapped wind, many many wake ups and long long hours taking her to settle at night. My normally very content, smiley girl reduced to a cranky, dribbly gremlin completely defiant to nap or keep food down.
• My husband, Dave starting a new job, working away from Wednesday morning to Thursday evening. Also this first week he had to take our family car to get there. Living fairly rurally, this left me trapped in the house with a high energy collie and grumpy cat, unable to even get emergency dog food when we ran out the day before the delivery arrived.
• Easter school holidays paused our normal weekly activities which would ordinarily get us out of the house and speaking to other real adult humans.
• Hormonal and tired AF. I barely slept longer than an hour at a time before I was summoned, most of the week. I was exhausted. The mental drain of being on call 24/7 when all I wanted was to be left on my own to eat nuggets and watch MAFSA.
• A surprise period. The bloody niagra falls kind. A surprise as I'm exclusively breastfeeding which would normally block menstruatal hormones, and I was unprepared with any sort of sanitary products that weren't post partum nappy pads. It was the least practical of timing’s.
• Dave’s quick transition from one job to another, and Easter bank holiday meant we'd not prepared properly. Fridge and cupboards full of condiments but lacking in actual food. Bin overflowing, chores already overdue attention. It felt like I was starting on the back foot.
At one point I unleashed my unslept new mum rage onto a poor unsuspecting Argos customer service rep, only to hang up my phone to remember the broken item in question was, in-fact, from Dunelm. Oops.
In trying to calm and sooth the baby's grizzles, I rather enthusiastically administered some calpol. It went everywhere. Out of her mouth, out of her nose, in her hair, trying to catch her breath coughing and spluttering like I'd tortured her for answers with a sticky, sweet waterboarding. Reader, she was not calm or soothed after this.
I rounded our 7 days of ick off by burning rice so spectacularly the pan now lives in the bin and the house is stained with the smell of acrid carbs. Im a fairly competent cook and cannot remember the last time I jeffed something up this much. That'll teach me for attempting something fancyish after the previous 6 days we'd had.
There were tears. There were tantrums. They were all mine. I was overwhelmed and my emergency snack hiding places were being thoroughly drained. It was pure survival mode and nothing else. Just getting through each hour felt like a triumph.
Monday evening, our 7 days of crap were over. And like some sort of gross symbolism, Freya let out one of the loudest and longest farts I've ever heard come out of her. Quite literally the winds of change. Her relief felt by us all.
And just like that, we're going into a new week better prepared, better slept and less gassy. Dave’s away 2 nights this week- from Tuesday afternoon until Thursday evening. But I'm not daunted, I feel ready. The fridge and cupboards are stocked, mainly with microwave rice. The baby is less cranky. I am now longer a hormonal hurricane. I've got the car, all our normal activities are running again and I've finally cracked sling wearing making it easier to go for walks. We've learnt our lessons from last week and we're ready to go!
I'll be honest, how I felt last week is what I imagined parenthood would be all the time. I feel very lucky this is my first real taste of the hot mess it can be.
I've written this, because we all have bad weeks. It'd be disingenuous only showing the posed pictures of cute baby adventures and not the clusterfuck it can be behind the scenes. When I next have a tough moment, be it hour, day, week or month, I want to be able to look back at this one and remember I've got through it before so can do it again. If you’re having a tough moment, deep breath, you’ve got this ❤️