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Rochester Local

Starting Over: Diapers, Spit Up, and Breastfeeding

starting over, boy mom, change, growing family, little boys, mom, mom of boys, new baby, new schedule, new season, third baby, third boy

Starting over. It’s a scary, yet hopeful thing no matter what the context is.  A new job, a new home, a new city–it all brings with it a measure of hope and a mountain of uncertainty.

We are about to welcome our 3rd boy and are going to be starting over in a sense. Our oldest is 6, and our middle is 3, so we’ve been out of the baby stage for a little while now. We’ll be starting over with the up-all-night, no sleep, newborn exhaustion. Starting over with diapers. Starting over with projectile spit-up, and up-the-back-out-the-neck blowouts.  Starting over with me being a food source for the next year. I tell ya what–nothing makes you appreciate/find solidarity with a pasture full of Holsteins like being a pumping mama.  We’ll be starting over with all the milestones: sleeping and feeding and sitting and teething and crawling. Going places won’t be as easy as it is now with 2 bigger, potty-trained boys, who can put their own shoes on (when they can find them). We’re going to have to reintroduce the diaper bag, and in some ways will be starting over with nap schedules.

 starting over, boy mom, change, growing family, little boys, mom, mom of boys, new baby, new schedule, new season, third baby, third boy

It’s a little (ok…a LOT) daunting to look at it like this, but at the same time it feels like a fresh slate. A brand new person will be joining our family. He will forever be a part of this wild pack of boys that fills our house with noise, legos, messes and love. He won’t be perfect, but that’s ok–he will fit right in with the rest of our imperfect crew.  I will still be the same, flawed mom that I am today.  Hopefully I am a little wiser than I was last time, and certainly more so than the first time around.  

My goal for this trip through the little years is not perfection–because we all know that is NEVER going to happen–but instead to enjoy the journey a little more. I tend to be too goal-oriented and too rigid with timelines, processes, and schedules. After (semi-)successfully enduring hundreds thousands of interruptions, changes to The Plan, rules gone out the window, detours, and roadblocks, I’m slowly learning to be a little less rigid.  <<What’s that sound, you ask?  Oh, just my family laughing at the idea of me becoming less rigid…>> Hopefully I will be able to be a little more laid-back and a lot more cognizant of the reality that every bit of this– every moment– is temporary. The phases that I put my head down and try to push through so fast are temporary. The frustrations, the cabin fever, the actual fevers, the living-in-survival-mode is all temporary.

So while starting over at anything- a new job, a new home, a new town, a new baby- is scary in a lot of ways, it can also be full of hope. Hope for new dreams and the chance to apply wisdom gained from previous “growth moments,” struggles, and failures.

And in truth, starting over is temporary. In time, it will feel just like it always had been that way. Just like a new job doesn’t stay new forever and a new house *definitely* doesn’t stay new (especially with a pack of little boys living in it), this New will meld into our days and nights. Soon we will hardly be able to remember what it was like before this newest little man joined our family.

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