Today, friends, I watered my plants. “Watering the plants” has been on my to-do list since before Annabelle was born. Annabelle is 8 weeks old. I have not been able to get my act together and water these plants until just a few minutes ago. Now, this is not so much a victory for the plants (because, let’s be real, these plants are clearly dead at this point), but a sign that just maybe my life is regaining a bit of normalcy. Perhaps we are turning a corner and I’ll be able to do more things than just feed and change an infant.
You see, the thing I didn’t quite grasp about maternity leave, and about taking care of a tiny human in general, is that keeping said tiny human alive is incredibly time consuming. Yet, at the end of the day, you aren’t quite sure what you did. It isn’t like being at work, when you are constantly checking things off of your to-do list like some sort of corporate ninja.
This has been an adjustment for me. For the first month of Annabelle’s life I basically just fed and changed her and watched an obscene amount of TV. How much? Lets recap:
- Seasons 2-5 of Fringe
- Seasons 1-4 of The Good Wife
- Seasons 6-7 of the West Wing
- More than a little Gossip Girl
That is, by a conservative estimate, 214 episodes total. Which results in 160 HOURS of TV. All watched in one month. Before you call the mommy police on me, please know that newborns sleep like 36 hours a day. And Annabelle really preferred to do her sleeping on me. Turns out there are a limited amount of things you can accomplish with a sleeping infant on your chest. So TV watching became my pastime of choice.
Since we are already crunching numbers, let’s look at Annabelle’s life so far. Thanks to this app, we’ve been diligently tracking her every move. This tracking was necessary for the first week or two of life to make sure she was doing ok, but at this point it has just become a sick obsession. Of course, it allows me to look back at the past 8 weeks and realize how I’ve spent my time:
- 35 bottle attempts
- 392 diaper changes
- 7,245 minutes of nursing
And, actually, when you add it all up like this it does seem rather impressive. So what if I didn’t sew her Halloween outfit together from scratch? Or finish decorating her nursery. Or make dinner. Or clean the apartment. Or even get really into knitting. I kept a baby alive. And maybe, if today is any indication of things to come, moving forward I just might be able to keep a baby AND my plants alive. Fingers crossed.
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