life in a hot kitchen

7/16/22

If I’m eating and not doing something else or otherwise multitasking, I feel guilty/impractical. like it seems to be a huge “waste” of time to just sit and eat and enjoy the food, as i used to pre-baby, because things to be done are always surrounding me now.

7/17/22

being a new mom is like: if you can’t take the heat… you still can’t leave the kitchen. You can either kill yourself, or adapt to life in a hot kitchen.

7/18/22

sometimes I have so many things to do and so little time to do them, and such brain fog, that I actually have to, in my mind, talk myself through each task in order to make my body move: it sounds in my mind like, “turn on the lamp, turn on the sound machine, go scrub your face, go brush your teeth, etc.” like I need a voice telling me what to do or else I would be lost – I need a verbal coach to instruct the details of every day tasks to myself, or else I can’t get my body to move.

I also can’t really, as I used to, plan out things in my mind to do the most efficiently – I just always feel rushed to complete every task as soon as it comes to mind, so I think I am doing some things just really illogically in terms of efficiency, but it’s the only way I get things done nowadays, it’s just to do them as soon as I think of them, or else I would just be sitting around planning forever because of how slow my brain is moving.

seems like he’s entering his cutest phase yet. He is talking with you and on his own babbling, and they sound like real sentences, but they are all nonsense words. and the tone of his voice sounds like he’s giving orders, lol. Here and there, he will repeat a “real” word, right after you say it. And he still says mama and dada a lot. Still staying at parents’ during the week so they can help, it’s working out well in that they’re helping me a lot, but i feel bad sometimes cause i know it’s extra stress for them. as soon as i can get my energy up, i will try to handle him on my own… 

7/20/22

biting people sometimes now. He’ll attach himself to you really close so his face is smashed into you, then bite down. Bit mom’s thigh the other week, last week he bit the back of my arm, and then my shoulder, and this week he bit the top of my thigh. His other front tooth is still coming in so that the one that came in first is full size, and this new one is about half the size, which looks really funny when he smiles.

I don’t think I ever really feared for my mental health until I had a baby. Besides the hopelessness I felt at the beginning (which has abated as I’ve gotten used to the baby/routine more and gotten more help by staying at parents), there is the anxiety always that he is not being treated the absolute best he could be by whoever is caring for him at the moment (whether it be my parents, my husband, or myself), and even nightmarish irrational fears, like I know he is sleeping behind me right now and I just saw him, but what if the next time I turn my head to check, he is gone? Or has somehow suffocated to death silently right next to me? I second, third, and fourth guess myself and my conversations with others, reading over text conversations, afraid I said something mean by accident.…I think a lot of it though, is because I’m still not sleeping the night – I think this contributes a lot to the bad feelings.

7/23/22

i think kids have a fire. and i think there are so many things they could see or hear or otherwise experience that could put the fire out- even just by a look you give them, or a tone of voice- they sense everything. i feel that one of my responsibilities to Hunter is to protect his innocent fire. And should i see it weakening one day, to have come to know him so well that i know how to feed it.