Great Expectations

Holy shit. Rufus, Sebastien and I survived our first trip to the market without a chaperone. After I fed Sebastien this morning - while Dave fed me...no seriously, he sat right there and fed me potatoes and scrambled eggs while I fed Sebastien...

Yes you are reading this correctly. This is the man that suffered me learning how to drive standard (while I was pregnant), works his tail off in a hot kitchen all day, puts up with my moody rants and babbles, and gets up super early to be Sebastien's butler so I can get a couple hours of real sleep. Then cooks me breakfast AND feeds it to me before going to work. Yes I know I'm lucky. Yes, I still complain sometimes.

Anyhow, while I was at the market, I had an encounter with a girl who was pregnant with her first kid. She saw Sebastien sleeping like an angel in his car seat, which I had propped up in the shopping cart (safe, or no?), and she immediately got goo goo faced and smiley over him. The look of pure excitement and anticipation was all over her body language...and all I could do was smile and say, CONGRATULATIONS!!! Yayeeee!...as my voice trailed off...

I should have told her how hard it gets. How lonely you can feel sometimes. How your plans and romantic notions about motherhood will be gutted by the reality that you have no idea what you are doing. How even though you'll have more help than you'd feel comfortable asking for, you'll still want to crumble into a million pieces if it means you can sleep for 20 extra minutes between each feeding. How you will reach a new level of exhaustion everyday, and then top it a hundred times over the next. How labor and delivery are the easiest part. But who wants to hear that? Who wants to SAY that? To a stranger. Who's pregnant and hormonal. And goo goo faced over your 5 1/2 week old sleeping angel. Not I.

Then again, I wish someone had told me. Just like that - in the raw. Even though I probably wouldn't have believed it...


There's no better preparation for your first child than your first child.


And they say it gets easier. For me, like most things people tell me, I'll believe it when I see it.