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Self Care for the New Mama (and anyone else who may need it!)

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***Originally Posted 2/11/15. Sorry if this gets emailed to you as a duplicate. Only 3 more repeat posts after this and I’m all caught up for new blogging!***

There are plenty of times as a new mama when I do not feel my most beautiful. Naively, I once thought that the amount of TV shows or films that portray parents being spit up on or other bodily fluids getting on them from their baby was grossly exaggerating and that if I was very careful then I could avoid that fate in real life. Turns out, the only thing that’s exaggerated is the parental reaction… because if you have a baby with any sort of reflux or digestive problems, then after a while, you just accept the giant amount of spit up in your hair or down your shirt.

For those HIMYM fans out there… that “confetti” moment is no joke…

I also swore up and down when I was pregnant that I would never be that mom who forgot to take a shower. And that brilliant plan worked great the first four months when my husband was working the night shift and was home mornings to watch the baby while I did my normal morning routine, but now that he leaves the house at 5:30AM and little guy is still getting up around 5:15AM… (which does not mix well with directing until 10 or 11pm…) there are definitely days where I just resign myself to try again tomorrow. Continue reading →

What to REALLY Expect When You’re Expecting

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***Originally posted 1/23/15***

So this article from Scary Mommy popped up on a friend’s Facebook wall today and it made me really want to write this post about my own experience with pregnancy. I thought I knew “what to expect” when it came to pregnancy. Not just the societal ideals and pop culture memes, but on a more thought out level because not only had I read the entire What to Expect When You’re Expecting book before I was even thinking about having children, I read it in service of working on my graduate thesis

In case you can’t see, that’s a paper fetus from when I played pregnan Helena… Photo by Woods Pierce from All’s Well That Ends Well directed by Linden Kueck

which dealt with staging pregnancy and pregnant characters in Shakespeare and how that highlights some gender issues we have as a society. I knew a lot of facts, but really:

Continue reading →