The first year of motherhood is a real rollercoaster, both emotionally and physically. There are a lot of things you can prepare for. If you’re like me, you might prepare every single list of items you need, pack your hospital and nappy bags, set up a perfect nursery, researched classes and groups to join, and read a few parenting books. But I have asked my community of followers on Facebook and Instagram, plus thrown in a few of my own ideas, about what are the surprising things that you won’t find in the parenting books. Here are some of the common answers:
Your baby might never sleep in your perfect interior designed nursery.
Guilty! For my first baby, I created this amazing little nursery full of everything she would need. I had all her clothes organised, the cot and change table set up, I bought decorative items to hang on the wall, and cute little baby toys. We also bought a co-sleeper bassinet, thinking that she would sleep in there for the first few months then move to her nursery. Well, it turns out she didn’t sleep in the nursery for over 12 months. With my second baby he used his nursery even less! We had a cot set up and he only slept in it a hand full of times, for very short periods. I liked to sleep with my babies close and I loved co-sleeping with them. It made night feeds and night wakings so much easier. They were close, and I could do the night feeds in bed without even properly waking up. It was bliss! So my beautifully designed nurseries kind of went to waste… But I still loved the way I decorated them!
Your body might be a little crazy.
Postpartum bodies are weird. I won’t go into too much detail here, but leaking from every part of your body might give you a bit of a visual image…
Check out our postpartum essentials page for some things to help
Some babies don’t EVER want to be put down.
There is always a gadget for everything (that you don’t need to buy)
It seems there is a gadget for everything, and there is always someone trying to sell you something. Most of the time, you don’t need it! People have been having babies forever, and they raised their children without the gadgets. You really don’t need an electronic baby shoosher, or a bath thermometer, or a special nightlight that has the temperature on it. There will also be plenty of people selling baby sleep programs, routines, and plenty of other things that you really don’t need to spend money on.
Mum guilt is real
This was one of the most common answers among Facebook and Instagram followers. Mums feel guilt when returning to work, and feel guilt for not returning soon enough. We feel guilt for staying home with sick kids, but guilt for taking time off work. We feel guilt for sitting on the couch instead of doing fun activities, and guilt for not buying every single new gadget for our babies. We feel guilt for just about everything, and there really isn’t a need! No parent is perfect, and we can’t possibly be perfect all of the time. We do our best every day and that makes all of us amazing mums.
Leaving baby for the first time is really hard
I remember leaving my baby with my parents for the first time to attend a concert – I had bought the tickets before she was born. Oh. My. God. I cried the whole way to the concert and probably half way through it. It was so hard to leave her! And then when she started daycare, I had all those emotions again! The feelings of sadness and guilt at leaving the baby for the first time can be so overwhelming.
You will be VERY protective of your baby
I found myself not wanting anyone to touch my newborn. I wanted to keep her close to me at all times. And it seemed like every person who we met wanted to hold her. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the germs that she could catch, plus I wanted to keep her all to myself. I resorted to wearing her in the baby carrier frequently to avoid germs and other people trying to pick her up.
Babies and children get sick ALL. THE. TIME.
This might have been the most shocking thing to me. If you send your children to daycare or if they are around other children at playgroups, classes, or with family, they will get sick a lot. I recently read that it is normal for children under school age to have 6 – 12 viral illnesses a year. I’ll say that again: 6 – 12 viral illnesses a year! So you can expect your children to be sick a lot, and unfortunately they often pass them between the whole family.
You might lose sleep over lost sleep
It seems everyone knows that babies wake a lot overnight. But it always seemed to me like many mums saw baby sleep as a competition, and the first mum to get her baby to “sleep through the night” is the winner of some imaginary prize. It is normal for babies to keep waking through the night all throughout their first year and into the toddler years. They usually go quickly back to sleep with a feed, and there is no need to stress about purchasing expensive sleep training programs to stop this. After stressing a lot about baby sleep with my first baby, the second time around I just relax about sleep and embrace whatever happens.
The mental load
The mental load of motherhood is all about all the things you need to be constantly thinking about. It’s like an endless conversation in your head reminding you of all the things you need to do. It is a lot. It’s constantly telling you things like; buying clothing in the next size up, what are you going to make for dinner, what time is baby’s next sleep/feed/bath, appointment dates, developmental milestones, daycare enrolments, shopping lists, and everything else that is involved with being a mum. It seems every mother has this, and the only solution we have is to share the load with someone else.
But you love your baby more than anything else in the world.
There are a lot of things in the first few years of motherhood that are really crazy and difficult, but we absolutely love our babies and it is all worth it. We would do it again in a heartbeat for them. So try to embrace all the crazy things that happen to you, your body and your baby. It’s not always easy but it is always worth it!
What is something no one ever told you about motherhood? Let us know in the comments.
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