A Little Bit of Wisdom

I answered a question on Quora, “What is it like to have an epidural” and thought I’d share it here:

I am glad that it was available to me, but if I have another child I will try not to have an epidural. It was necessary in my situation so I don’t regret choosing it, but I do believe that it contributed to the fact that my labor ended in an emergency C-section. more…

My husband pointed out a blog post about breastfeeding on Ask Moxie in which she was asking readers to comment with their “it gets better” stories. A while back, I began writing a series of posts on my adventures in breastfeeding, but haven’t made much progress lately. The comment I made on Moxie’s blog summarizes it probably as concisely as I ever will. Devoid of details that I’ll hopefully add in future posts, here is my “it gets better” post about breastfeeding: more…

Last week my playgroup had a playdate with a discussion about juggling and self-care. I wasn’t able to attend because I was juggling an appointment with my therapist into my schedule so I could do some self-care. The plan was to read an article about balance before the playdate in order to fuel the discussion.

I wanted to participate in the talk despite being unable to attend so I wrote an email with some of my thoughts. Well, it ended up more like a blog post. I share it here with minimal edits: more…

I put a lot of thought into how to be a happy mom. I’ve been seeing a therapist regularly for years to work on my tendency towards anxiety and depression. I had made a lot of progress. So much so that she told me at one point that she thought we could consider stopping my therapy if I weren’t about to become a mother. more…

Am I happy being a work-at-home mom (the term I prefer to stay-at-home mom)? It is by far the most stressful job I’ve ever had and I do have a difficult time with the constant vigilance. more…

One of the benefits of being a new parent is learning to trust my momstinct. No, I haven’t developed a new smell after becoming a mom (at least, if I have, no one has told me so). That’s what I call my mommy instinct. It’s amazing how dead on it can be.

Back when Siddhartha was almost seven months old, he got sick for the first time. As is often the case, it started in the middle of the night. more…

This week my son will be nine months old. Somehow, nine months became a major milestone to me. Now, Siddhartha is a grown up infant, almost a toddler. Soon he’ll be walking and he’ll say his first word. (If he hasn’t already. We’re still unsure whether he understands that it means something when he says, “hi”.)

In his first few months, the minutes felt like hours, the hours, like days. When people say that they grow up so fast, they fail to mention that you have to get past those first few months first. At that time, we wanted nothing more than for our son to be older. We were insecure, sleep deprived and we felt panicked. Also, he cried. A lot. more…

Time for cramming more microblogging into a full blog post! I’m thankful that my slightly younger self was able to take the time to make quick updates to Facebook so I can look back on the first couple weeks of my son’s life. It’s just a snapshot, but it brings back memories and allows me to elaborate now, while I still remember some details. more…

I swear in front of my kid. When I knock something over I say “$h1t!” and the other day I’m pretty sure I even dropped the f-bomb. At this age (4.5 months), I don’t think it’s something to be too concerned about. It will be a long while before he’s repeating what I say and it’s not like those words actually hurt anything.

It’s so easy to view a baby of this age as something like a pet. I know that sounds awful to admit, but they have so much in common at this point. They communicate with you through cries and body language, they depend on you for most of their needs and although they can interpret tone of voice, they don’t know exactly what you’re saying to them.

Well, last week I was delighted to discover that Sidd is picking up on more than I thought he could at this point. more…

I wrote this post a while back and never posted it for some reason. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood to argue with folks who would inevitably disagree with me? Maybe I felt it was incomplete somehow? Or perhaps my perfectionism was getting in the way, as it often does, and I was sure I could improve it somehow.

Re-reading it today I realized that it’s an important opinion to express and I think I already clearly expressed how I feel in what I had previously written. So in the interest, once again, of keeping my perfectionism and subsequent procrastination at bay, I give you my opinion…

May 24
On the light rail today I overheard a man explaining his child support situation to a friend. He started by explaining that he has been paying child support for years. That’s good, I guess. The least he could do, really. But he then continued to complain about how crazy the mother of his child is for expecting him to dish out more after he came into an inheritance. more…