What is Life Like With a Newborn Baby?
Life with a newborn is dramatically different than life before a baby! We all have heard this, but what exactly does it mean? Now that my little girl is no longer a newborn (5 months already? How?!), I thought I’d share what I learned from that unique stage of life.
As always, this is what worked for us and what I learned along the way. Take what works for you and leave what doesn’t. And please remember that I’m not a medical professional or child development specialist; consult with your own care providers with medical questions and make sure you do what works for your family!
Taking things slowly
“Slow” was my word that I chose for 2023, and boy is it accurate! Each stage feels like it passes very slowly when I’m in it (though in hindsight, they seem lightning-fast). But there was a slowness I had to intentionally choose, too. I had to choose to move slowly through my days, to pause and reflect, to really pay attention to what was happening.
I think we’ve all heard it said that “the days are long, but the years are short,” and I’m certainly not going to refute that. I had to really fight the internal desire to look ahead to future stages, to when my daughter would be able to sleep longer, play by herself, sleep in her own room, eat solids, grab her own toys…take your pick with what I was waiting for. But I knew that I didn’t want to waste the early days wishing for time to move faster because I could never get that time back.
It’s only been a couple of months since we officially exited the newborn stage, and there are things I miss about it, things I can’t get back. I’m so grateful for the time I got to spend just holding our little squish and savoring that snuggle time when it’s all we really had.
Postpartum life is tough. Your body is healing, you’re not getting much sleep, there’s a tiny human who’s dependent on you for literally everything, and it seems like all you do is change diapers, feed the baby, and pray the baby will sleep. It’s natural to wish things would improve. But I encourage you to take a few moments every day to just savor the sweetness of this stage, to cherish the simplicity of it. You don’t have to entertain the baby; your presence is enough. You don’t have to clean your house; it can wait. You don’t have to get all dressed up because there’s no one to impress and nowhere to go.
Give thanks for something in the midst of this season. For your baby’s sleepy smiles, their newborn scent, the way their itty-bitty fingers grasp yours with superhuman strength. That’s enough for now. Don’t rush their growth or your own.
Ask for help and be willing to receive it
I’m naturally someone who prides herself on being self-sufficient. I like things done my way, and it’s most efficient if I do them. But I quickly realized when we brought our daughter home from the hospital that I had 0% margin to do any household tasks. All of my energy was going toward caring for our little girl.
The way I see it is this: It was my job to do what only I could do, and I could delegate the rest. The only job that only I could do is be this little girl’s mama. Everything else, despite the fact that I typically was the one to do it, and the misplaced notion that I knew how to do it “best,” could be done by someone else. Of course, that required loosening the reins a bit and letting things not be done exactly the way I would do them, but in the end, did they get done? Yes. Did I have to be the one to do them? No. And that was a worthwhile trade-off so I could 1) feed the baby, 2) snuggle with the baby, or 3) try to nap.
This required me being willing to both ask for and receive help. My mom, sister, and two best friends were the absolute most gracious people in this season. Every time they came over, they either brought food or offered to, and they did household chores in addition to holding the baby and allowing me to rest. Sometimes it was their idea to switch the laundry (that I had forgotten all about since the last time one of them visited), and sometimes I asked for their help in prepping food to have on hand for dinner. They washed my dirty dishes, put away my laundry, and swept my kitchen floor.
My church also organized a meal train after asking me what would be helpful. Honestly, we could have managed to make our own food. But I cannot overstate how immensely helpful it was in those early days to not have to think about making dinner. It was one more thing off my plate, and it truly was a big relief.
It’s not easy for me to ask for help, but we weren’t meant to exist in a vacuum, keeping our heads down and doing our work (no matter what kind of work it is). We were meant to live in community. So when people offered to help, I tried my darnedest to take them up on it. And then I tried really dang hard to not micromanage or correct them too much if they weren’t doing it “my way.” ;)
Start with the most basic things
When we brought our daughter home, our routine quickly became one of changing diapers, feeding the baby, and watching the baby sleep (or praying she would sleep). Outside of that, I tried to get into some semblance of a routine to take care of my healing body. I took sitz baths every night for the first couple of weeks, and I showered every morning. I brushed and flossed my teeth and washed my face. I tried to put on lotion every couple days or so. After the first few days, I also tried to change into different daytime clothes (even if they were lounge clothes that looked very similar to my pajamas) to give myself a sense of cleanliness and a distinct change from day to night. I tried to drink enough water and eat three meals a day plus a snack or two (I sometimes forgot about the snacking; time was a funny thing then). We were busy literally just caring for ourselves, essentially. And that was more than enough to try to do in a given day.
Adding one thing at a time
When you feel like you’ve begun to get the hang of keeping a small human alive, or when you’ve become wholly disgusted with living in filth (whichever comes first, for us it was the latter), choose one thing to start with. I’m going to say that again: choose ONE THING.
It’s tempting to want to jump into the deep end and resume handling all the things. I know I wanted to. But in an effort to not overwhelm myself, I forced myself to take on just one task at a time until I felt like I had room for more.
I personally started with cleaning the house because it was something I had previously done just once a week (whereas things like dinner and dishes had to be done daily). And it seemed weird to me to sit on the couch and watch someone else sweep our floors or dust. First, let me say that when people were helping me, it felt like I was often “doing nothing,” and there was guilt associated with that. In retrospect, I was recovering physically from giving birth, learning to nurse a baby, and trying to function as a human on significantly less sleep. I had to consciously choose not to worry about whether it made me feel lazy or not to watch other people doing chores in my house. But when I felt like I had recovered enough, I wanted to take back over the cleaning.
From there, I took back over the laundry. This was mostly because we got to a place where I felt like it was manageable (we had fully caught up with the small stockpile of pre-birth laundry and our baby wasn’t quite dirtying as many things as she previously had), but also because my hubby preferred for us to do our own laundry rather than outsource it to others. Laundry also can be done in stages, which is helpful when your day revolves around an infant’s feeding and napping routine.
Eventually, I started making more dinners, too. At the beginning, they were incredibly simple (either frozen meals I had prepped or food my parents had bought for us), which was a gift unto itself. But as we grew accustomed to our new life, I felt like I could branch out a little and make slightly more time-consuming things as needed. I tried to batch cook breakfasts and meal prep when people were visiting so that someone could still hold the baby and keep an eye on her while I was in the kitchen.