Moving, Sleep Training, and Body Changes

I’m learning it is possible to love something with everything in me, and find it incredibly challenging at the same time. 

And that thing is motherhood.

I’ve been in my feels lately because Dallin recently started his new job. In a new state. So I am officially a stay at home mom. Which has been my life goal, so it’s interesting to be here now. It feels… different than I imagined. It’s hard. It’s hard to fill my days with productive and happy things. It’s hard to feel like I’m doing everything right. It’s hard to feel like I don’t have that tight group of friends I desire. It’s hard not to think too much about how easy my life was before having a baby. Because I don’t want my life before I had a baby. I want this life. It’s just different. 

Moving With a Newborn 

While I was pregnant and Dallin was unemployed, we began helping his parents renovate their basement into an apartment. It was a really fun and fulfilling way for us to spend our days, and acted as an avenue for distraction from the depressing job market. The intention in the beginning was just to help out his parents, make a little money on the side, and be able to pick up and move when a job came our way. As the months went on, paying rent on our Provo house became less practical with only having a small income from our side hustles and Dallin’s freelance projects. It felt like there was no finish line in sight. Dallin’s parents were angels in our lives, as they offered to let us stay in the newly renovated basement apartment until we found a job that took us elsewhere. I have to admit, in the beginning, it was a hard transition going from our quaint, perfectly decorated brick house abounding with with natural light to their basement. But it made financial sense, and living so close to family with a newborn on the way was a privilege I couldn’t say no to. 

My one stipulation with moving into the basement was that I wanted us to fully unpack and fully
decorate, no matter if we were living there for two months or two years. I didn’t want to feel like we were in an extended limbo-phase, and I knew I would not be able to bring a baby home to a half-unpacked home. So we completely unpacked, and I decorated to my heart’s content. And days after the basement was finished, I gave birth to baby Nora! I was thankful she could come home to a love-filled, cute and cozy basement apartment— even if there was no natural light. 

Fast forward two months, I get a message from a friend I met my freshman year of college, and have rarely talked to since. She informed me there was a job opening at the company her husband worked at. Dallin applied, was interviewed virtually, then flown out to interview in person, then was offered the job days later. The catch? We had three weeks to move from Utah to Washington, find housing, pack up our life, and do it all with a newborn baby. Once again, our family and friends were vital in making this happen. 

I felt a very strong connection to the basement, even for the short amount of time we lived there. I had welcomed my first daughter into that house. I was carried down those stairs when I couldn’t walk after giving birth. I heated up countless freezer meals my angel of a mother made for me in that microwave. I sat by the Christmas tree in that living room in the wee hours of the morning with my tiny newborn baby. So leaving the basement so soon, and so quick, was really hard for me. Somehow I get attached to spaces really quickly!

I did a lot of baby-wearing during these three weeks of packing. As I tetris-packed books, carefully organized my plants into boxes, and vacuum packed way too many bags of clothes, my baby girl was strapped to my chest the whole time. 

To make matters even more complicated, I have had problems with both of my wrists for the past year. I can’t weight-bear anything on them, and sometimes even bending them sends aching pain along the circumference of my wrist. I started going to physical therapy, then was being seen by a sports medicine doctor, and it was eventually determined that I had a ganglion cyst on each wrist. I was anxious to get this all figured out while on our Utah insurance, so I ended up having two MRIs done the week we were moving, and then a follow up appointment where my wrist was repeatedly stabbed with a needle to destroy the cyst. Quite painful. So not only was I trying to move our entire house in three weeks while being two months postpartum and carrying a small baby— I was doing it with wrist braces on both hands. Okay enough of the pity-party, you get the point. It was hard. 

So then, the day before our moving day, was a Sunday, and we decided to have Eleanor’s baby blessing— which is when the father shares the baby’s name for the church records, and gives them spiritual and temporal blessings. Additionally on that day, Dallins’ parents were giving their mission farewell talks in church, and having a party to celebrate their departure. Lots of family came into town to support both events, and it doubled as an opportunity to say goodbye to our friends and family. This day was the peak of my stress levels throughout the whole moving process. I was set to fly out at 7am the next morning with Eleanor, and our house was yet to be completely packed, my wrists hurt, I was sad to leave all my friends in Utah, and nervous to move to Washington. I cried a lot that day, and had the overwhelming sense of just wanting to fast forward my life by two weeks to when everything had settled down. 

My mom gave me her plane ticket to fly from UT—> WA, and she took my place in making the 10 hour trek by car. I flew with my dad and sister back to the comfort of my childhood home, and my mom and Dallin caravanned to our new rental house in Tri-Cities, WA. On my drive to the rental house, Nora was screaming her face off, so I pulled over to feed her. I got a call from Dallin expressing that something was wrong at our rental house. It smelled like cats. Or dogs. Maybe both. You see, we signed onto this rental house without having seen it, but were promised multiple times that it would be professionally cleaned before our arrival—carpets and all. Spoiler alert— don’t trust property management companies. It wasn’t cleaned. Even as I sit here now, a little too close to the carpet, I’m getting wafts of feline. We spend the next couple nights in a hotel and a friend’s house while the carpets were cleaned, but to no avail. I take back my previous statement about highest stress levels… that first night at our new rental house takes the cake. Sitting in the living room that was stuffed to the brim with every single one of our belongings (because the carpeted rooms were being cleaned) now smelling of wet cat (due to the rain), wondering how I would ever be happy here… THAT was the peak of my stress levels. And tears. 

But alas. I’ve come to terms with my fate of living in a house that smells slightly of animals. I am happy with how I’ve decorated it, there is always a candle burning or room freshener plugged in. And in the famous words of Annie, “I think I’m gonna like it here!”

Sleeping

I’m not sure there's any aspect of motherhood and baby-care that comes with as many differing opinions as sleep training does. Scrolling through tiktok, I am bombarded with dozens of videos
claiming, “The secret to sleep training” and “How I got my 12 week old to sleep through the night” or “Why the Cry-It-Out method works,” versus “If you let your baby ‘cry it out’ you’re a terrible mom.” And the list goes on. Which is right? Who should I trust?

I suppose everyone ends up sleeping through the night at some point. Whether it’s at 12 weeks old or 2 years old, somehow we all figure out our circadian rhythm and how to get through the night without a snack. Sleep training pretty much just determines how you want to spend the next two years of your life. How important is sleep to me? How important is “self soothing” to me? How important is it that my daughter feels her needs are attended to?

For now, I kind of change what I do everyday— which is probably the worst option out of all of them. Some days I set a timer for two minutes and see if she can figure out how to put herself to sleep. Some days I use the dinky black out shades I bought for $12 to give her the “optimal sleep environment.” Others I forgo the swaddle and lay in my bed with my daughter for the entirety of her nap. And maybe that’s why she’s having a hard time staying asleep. But you know what? I don’t feel tied down to a strict schedule, we love the few routines we have set up, and I feel like I am really soaking in this stage of her existence. 

I’ve consumed so much content and information about this topic, and I’ve decided the one philosophy I want to live by and instill in baby Nora, is that she is not an inconvenience to me. Her needs to sleep, eat, and be cuddled are not a disruption in my life. She is my life. So I will come when she cries. I will feed her when she’s hungry, and let her fall asleep on my boob if need be. And bring her in my bed in the dead of night when we are both exhausted. And if somewhere along the way she starts sleeping through the night and taking consistent naps, I’ll be a happy gal.

When I was pregnant, and Dallin and I were discussing and predicting the ways in which our life would change when we welcomed a baby, we kept repeating the mantra “Your baby is entering YOUR life, you are not entering theirs.” Or something like that. “Live your life and take your
baby with you.” You get the gist. We were committed to living by this belief. We were not going to let a little human get in the way of our “normal lives.” We were going to go camping, travel to Europe, and enjoy day outings while toting around our new baby. The problem lies in that I am a different person now. I am a mother. My mind and body are not my own anymore. I am constantly thinking about Eleanor. My boobs leaking milk is a reminder that my body changed for her. Our schedule is somewhat dictated by her, despite our previous intentions of avoiding that. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to return to the time where I could bring in all the groceries in one trip, not need to wash my spit up and poop-saturated bed sheets every other day, and scramble to get everything done on my to-do list during the rare occasion she sleeps for more than an hour by herself. But for now, my life is most definitely being controlled by a tiny, ten-pound human.

My Body

Being pregnant made me feel very womanly. I felt like it was a rite of passage I had entered that made me truly a woman. I liked how my body looked being pregnant—despite the drastic changes—because it made me feel mature and womanlike. The welcome changes brought along with them this unfamiliar feeling of feminism. The curve of my belly, the swelling of my breasts, and the widening of my hips were such stark differences from my previously flat frame that I have been insecure about for the entirety of my teenage and adult life. I was excited to have a protruding bump somewhere on my body, because I certainly wasn’t getting it from my boobs or butt. 

But then my belly gifted me the most beautiful baby, and left behind deep, purple stretch marks, loose skin, and an even flatter butt than I previously possessed. As my energy levels and abilities returned back to my pre-pregnant self, I kept waiting for my body to look the same too. Although its only been three months, I guess I thought the “bounce back” would look different. 

I love the sentiment that, “I don’t want my pre-pregnancy body back because that body hadn’t birthed my baby.” But believing that doesn’t really make it easier to look in the mirror and see something you’re not happy with. 

I think positive self talk is one of the most influential aspects of self confidence. I want my daughter to hear me talk kindly and gratefully about my body. I want to believe my husband when he tells me he loves my body just the way it is. And the only way to do all of this is to just start. I want to just start telling myself I am beautiful. I want to just start being grateful that the stretch marks and extra pooch are symbols of the hardest thing I have ever done. And I want to stop comparing everything to what used to be.