When I saw the topic for this month’s installment of our Real Talk with Real Moms series I’m pretty sure I actually laughed out loud. As a point of order, I have about zero tips for children and sleep these days, but surviving toddler sleep regression? That I can speak to! So buckle up. It’s about the get real.
Motherhood
It’s been a minute since I last shared a baby update and somewhere along the way my baby morphed into a toddler without my ever slowing down to acknowledge that fact. Friends, this motherhood journey never fails to amaze me with how beautiful and hard it can be, all at the same time. Our little girl is now a little over two and half years old, and over the last six months she has grown and matured so much that it’s actually pretty emotional for me. I’m the mom who cries regularly (read: many times a week) over everything from how much I love my kid to how quickly she’s growing to how smart she is to how much of a pain in the ass she can be some days. (Let’s be honest with each other on that, ok?) At two and a half she still stays home with me full-time save for busy shoot or prep days when she’s generally with a sitter. This fall she’ll be starting pre-k (more on that later) so I am feeling really emotional now that we’re in the final stretch of this time where it’s just been Mommy and Bébé conquering the world. So here we are, at two and a half, full of spunk, melting down a few times a day and as obsessed as ever with her daddy, her big brothers and her puppy Harper.
Today my sister is 27 weeks pregnant with her first baby, a little girl who is already loved so very much. I was pregnant myself at this time two years ago (Emerson turned 18 months a couple weeks ago), so naturally we’re talking a lot about babies these days, and the things you need for babies and all the crazy large and small ways that babies change your life. One thing that has come up more than once is Ash saying, “I have no clue what I’m doing!” And that honestly just makes me laugh. Because no one knows what they’re doing when they have a baby, am I right? I sometimes still don’t feel like I know what I’m doing and my baby has quickly morphed into a tiny toddler girl with an abundance of spitfire and sass. So today I’m joining up with my fellow mom friends to dish on finding confidence as a mom.
As soon as I found out I was pregnant, my thoughts almost immediately turned to childcare and how on earth this little babe of ours would get fed and diapered during the day while we were working. Almost as quickly, I knew that at least for the first year I wanted to try really hard to make it work without any kind of full time childcare. Call me crazy, but knowing she would be my first and my last all at the same time, I wanted to have that time with her and I thought I’d regret shipping her right off to daycare. Also, I was really really worried about the finances behind paying for childcare, which is where the “real talk” part of this conversation is about to come into play.