Six months ago, my life changed dramatically from that of a self-absorbed goal-seeking machine to a father of baby premature triplets, born at 27 weeks gestation. They were all very tiny, born at two pounds or under (less than a kilo) and we had a long, difficult ride to get to the stable point where we are now.

Vaulting into parenthood means that it’s not just about me any longer. I now had to care for a wife and three special-needs children.

I had big dreams before that, about how cool it would be to be a professional triathlete / musician / novelist / blogger / professor, but once the children came along, it became a priority to maintain my status at my day job with its generous paycheck, benefits, and family health insurance plan.

If I didn’t have health insurance, we’d be bankrupt already. The doctor’s bills have easily totaled over a million dollars for operations and extended stays in the hospital. It was four months in the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit before my first child even came home.

There are a number of important realizations that came out of my experiences during these first six months. As with all great challenges, the lessons are spectacular. I’ve meditated long and hard in moments where I gazed into my children’s eyes during midnight feeds as to what this all meant. At first, I was a bit resentful that everything had to go on hold for the next untold number of years, but one night it finally hit me…I just needed to give myself a break and reassess my priorities.

It shouldn’t have to take an event such as birthing a small brood to make one reassess their life. Really, these lessons are easily applicable to any person’s life, whether you have children or not, if you take a few moments to understand and apply them.

Lesson #1. Less is generally more

But too much less is bad. Subtracting every material object from one’s home means, inevitably, a fair amount of sitting around twiddling one’s thumbs. It also means having to hit up your family, friends or neighbors each time you need a tool that was culled from your minimalist household. You don’t want your children growing up in rampant consumerism, nor completely devoid of any stimulation. When they go off to school, they are going to get assaulted by consumerism, by distraction.

The best approach is balance. It’s important that they have a taste of that beforehand and learn from you what the family’s priorities are.

Lesson #2. Life principals are more important than goals

Having financial goals, career goals, fitness goals, diet goals etc. all going on at the same time means less time for anything else, namely spending time with your family. With three babies there is not much time for me to do anything except care for their basic needs.

So, rather than a goal of losing thirty pounds by my next birthday, it’s best to adopt strong life principals such as eating till I’m only 80% full instead of enjoying the all-you-can-eat buffet, drinking only water and tea instead of the quick sugar high of soft drinks, spending five minutes to do some strength exercise or stretching instead of vegging out in front of the TV.

Lesson #3. Have a Goal (or Two)

Having said that, set a goal (not a dozen) for yourself. If you get one hour a day to work on a goal, then that is really something, but even ten minutes can help you make tremendous progress. The point of this is that you still have something that is exclusively yours, and not just for the sake of the brood.

Putting all of your goals on hold can lead to resentment and in times of stress, you don’t want to be using an argument with your children about how much you’ve sacrificed for them. You need to set your own challenges in life that you can overcome.

For me, my goal is writing and publishing a book, and giving myself 365 days to do it. Writing one page a day (200-300 words), each and every day, is a simple plan for achieving my goal.

lesson #4. Take Care of Yourself

This is a corollary to the previous tip. You’ll do your children no good if you don’t have the health and energy to take care of them. Additionally, they feed off your habits because you’re the greatest teacher that they have. So if you go through your day hunched over, tired, exasperated, they too will learn that this is how to approach life.

Of course, time is of the essence, so you may not have time to go jogging an hour a day, but you could do some cardio one day a week. Or spend a couple minutes outside, running or jumping rope. You can do wonders with just five to ten minutes of simple Yoga and stretching.

Feed your body properly and get adequate rest. The steps are not hard, but it does take some will to implement them on a daily basis.

This is the most difficult of the lessons for me to put into practice. It’s very easy to put health on the low end of the priority list. My children need me as they are growing up, and they need me to be healthy. Being unhealthy, or not being around at all is a tremendous burden for one’s family.

In order to prioritize this, I had to create a trigger to exercise and my preference is toward Yoga. If I tell myself that all I have to do is roll out the Yoga mat on the floor, then that becomes my trigger to sit down and do some poses.

Lesson #5. Keep Your Wits About You

When anger starts rising, that’s when it’s most important to mind the consequences. I can tell you that babies are stressful, and having multiple babies just compounds the situation. I’ve certainly been guilty of saying things out of frustration in the heat of the moment. But that’s when it’s most important to check your tongue, specifically before it escalates into something you can’t back down from.

Lesson #6. Practice Gratitude

This is perhaps the most important lesson of all.

Raising children is a series of beautiful highs and challenging lows. Remember, there are blessings all around you, regardless of your circumstances.

My wife and I went through four years of tests, frustrations and doubts followed by expensive fertility treatments before we were blessed with our triplets. We are very grateful for the entire process.

I make sure that I take time every night to write down five things that I am grateful for.

This started as a paper journal, then evolved into using the IPhone app, Gratitude, and is now grown into publicly declaring over at My Gratitude Log online. Five minutes, to write down five things is all you need. This practice alone is so enlightening that it will change your life.

In conclusion, I don’t really know what the next six months will bring, nor the next eighteen years after that, but I do know that there will be new challenges and even greater rewards and it is with this in mind that I embrace whatever the future may bring.

About the Author: For more articles on simplifying your life and opening up resources to develop what really matters in your life, check out Charley’s blog – You, Simplified. To see pictures and read about the triplets, head on over to Scribe for the Tribe.

Image by PhotograTree

Being a parent is one of the most important tasks that we have in life. It is the time when you stop living for yourself and start giving all your energy to the most wonderful precious sweet adorable smart beautiful and the most loved person in this world – your child. It is especially true for mothers because we tend to give everything we’ve got to our babies. It does not matter if this baby is 2 months old or 22 years old. It is still the baby that we love more than anything else in this world.

When you start giving all you’ve got to your child you drain the well inside of you. If you do not take care of the creek that supplies water for this well then very soon you will realize that your well is dry and there is nothing you can give.

This is a mother’s burnout. The time when we feel that the whole world has stopped and there is nothing we can accomplish in it. It is the time when we realize that somebody has disappeared. That somebody is the true you, the person you’ve been before you started giving everything to your kids and before you gave up your life.

I do not want my girls to remember me as a stressed out always busy mom. I want them to remember me as a person, an example that they want to follow in life. (My mom is always the best example for me. I appreciate very much the fact that she is my best girlfriend and that I can share everything with her.)

How do you avoid mother’s burnout? How do you balance mommy duties and the time that you can devote to yourself?

Recently I came across a very interesting book The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal by Renee Trudeau. This book is one of the best that I have read in the past few months. At first I thought that it will be one of these books that talk a lot about theory but never give you any practical advice. It is definitely quite the opposite. The book is filled with stories of moms of different ages and you feel that you are actually talking to them. You hear about their experiences and how they find balance in their lives.

Here are a few strategies from the book that I found most helpful in avoiding mother’s burnout:

1. Go on a date with YOU. You need YOUR time as much as your children or your partner do. Take this time and try to connect with the person inside of you. Do not think about shopping, cooking, work or any other routines. Do something amazing and unexpected. Try a new workout, go to the park and just sit under the tree, have a glass of wine at a wine bar or do anything else that your soul is craving. Deep down each of us knows what we really want. Use this knowledge to explore that part of you that you’ve been hiding from the entire world.
2. Use the “Good is Good Enough” Principle. There is no point to be general managers of the universe. You do not have to be the best in everything and you do not need everybody around you to be the best. Just enjoy who you are and who your children are. Every time that you are trying too hard to be the best mama just stop and repeat this mantra “Good Is Good Enough.”
3. Take time for your self-care. Self care on all levels (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual) is not just pampering, it is a vital necessity that will keep your inner well full at all times. Do not think that you are not worth it, because YOU ARE. You are a person with needs and desires as well as your children and your partner are. Even though you want to give more to your family you are still an equal part of this family. You need to care about yourself as much as you do about your children and your partner.
4. Let yourself be creative. Creativity expresses our inner world. Through creativity we can solve the problems that are boiling inside of us, we can accomplish something in this world and we can show our close ones how much we love them. Some of us find writing or painting creative while others can express themselves by solving difficult puzzles or writing computer programs. What are your creative ways?
5. Do not be afraid to use support. Do not try to be self-reliant and independent at all times. If your family members offer to babysit for you or to bring a supper then go for it. If you need emotional support then call your best friends and talk to them. You do not have to look strong at all times; moms are just humans after all.
6. Be adventurous and try something new as often as possible. New experiences open your mind and help you see ordinary thing in a new light. You can go sky-diving or try a Thai restaurant and you will notice the difference in you.
7. Set your priorities. There is only so much we can do and there is only so much we can accomplish no matter how hard we try. If you want to be a good mom, have a great career and still experience deep life balance then it is probably not possible. You always have to choose one over another. If you set your life priorities then you will be able to make the right choices without the feeling of guilt.
8. Nurture your relationship. You and your husband are partners in this world and in the difficult process of raising kids. If you want to feel balanced and happy then you have to take care of your relationship. Your marriage is a living organism that needs time, space, love and attention. Just because you have kids you do not have to forget about your marriage.
9. Breathe. Sometimes we can feel that we do everything right but sometimes we feel like we are flying by the seat of our pants. This is just part of the journey of motherhood. Accept it and breathe.

There is much more than these 9 strategies in the The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal. My book has bookmarks and post-its on every other page because I found so many inspiring quotes, stories and pieces of advice there.

I also believe that this is not just a book for Moms. It is a book for Dads and for people who want to bring more balance into their lives. It is an inspiring book that can change the way you look at the world and the way you see yourself in this world. You can read this book and start sharing your knowledge with the people around you, people who you care about and who also want to live a balanced life.

You can read more about the book and about Renee Trudeau on her website ReneeTrudeau.com If you want to dig deeper into the book then you can buy it here. I hope that this book will help you get closer to your personal inner balance.

Keep it balanced!

Image by brittanyculver

It seems that being productive and being a parent are two things that do not go together well. Kids need our attention at all times (especially babies and toddlers) and they do not understand the statement “Mommy/Daddy needs to work now to pay for our life” or “Mommy/Daddy has to do some work around the house. I cannot play with you right now.” The best case scenario is your child will get fussy and cranky then won’t let you do anything. The worst case scenario is they will get into trouble and get hurt right at the moment when I take 2 minutes to put some clothes in the washer (this is the worst thing that has happened to me so far). It feels that being productive is just not worth all the trouble.

This experience has allowed me to discover a few practical tips that work for my family and that let me and my husband (he works from home too) be productive and get things done without going crazy. Here they are, 10 tips that literally save my life and I hope that they can be helpful to you too:

1. Stop multi-tasking. It might sound tempting to work while you are watching over the kids but this is not a good idea. Children know when you are faking and when you are not genuine in your desire to play with them. I don’t know why but all children (at least the ones that I know of) get extremely fussy and cranky when you are trying to do something important and pretend that you are playing with them. If you have to play with your children then do it genuinely and enjoy every moment that you spend with them. When they are playing on their own or sleeping then you can use all your mental power to get things done.
2. Have fun breaks. Usually kids can play on their own for at least 20 minutes and after that they get bored. Schedule fun activities with your children at least every 20 minutes and do something exciting. Go out and play in the yard, have a tea break with your daughter’s favorite doll or teddy-bear, dance, or do any other activities that your children like to do. Your mind will have a break and your child will have something to look forward to.
3. Have a schedule. This is especially true for little babies. It’s important to establish a regiment that will be comfortable for your kids and that will help you plan your day accordingly. A lot of parents do not have this regiment and their kids go to bed only when the parents think that they are tired, they wake up at different times every morning and they are fed when they seem like they are hungry. Not only does it makes your life more complicated, it also makes your child unorganized and undisciplined. My girls always go to bed at the same time at night, they wake up at the same time in the morning, they have their nap at the same time every day and they eat at the same time as well. Parents are no different, they need to have schedule too. Plan what to do and when you need to do it and follow your plan. For example, my morning hours are devoted to exercise, I start fixing supper at the same time every day and I have a few hours set aside for productive work.
4. Define your goal for the day. It’s crucially important to know what you need to do. You can’t be productive if you cannot concentrate on one single most important thing that needs to be done during the day. In the morning define your goal for the day and use every opportunity to reach this goal by the evening.
5. Do things with your kids. Even though I do not recommend multi-tasking there are still some things that you can do while you are watching over your kids. The key is to do only fun things with your kids. I usually do 5-10 minute workouts when I play with my babies. They think that sit-ups and push-ups are funny and yoga poses are just hilarious for them. One day I let one of my girls pull the clothes out of the dryer while I was folding them and it was the best thing ever. Be creative, do not be afraid to improvise and let your children help you and have fun.
6. Devote certain hours to your kids only. Your children must feel that they are loved and that you are willing to spend time with them. Give your undivided time and attention to your kids and make it a rule in your house. For example, every evening you do things only with your kids (no work, no chores) or every Sunday is a family fun day. Your kids will be looking forward to this moment and they will let you get more things done at other times.
7. Hire some help. It’s a wide-spread misconception that if you work from home then you do not need to send your kids to daycare and do not need to hire a baby-sitter. If you are serious about what you are doing then you should definitely consider some help. I personally do not want to send my babies to daycare because they would pick up all kinds of viruses from other children and I am not even going to touch on the subject of how extremely expensive it is. Our neighbor’s daughter comes to babysit once or twice a week and she plays with our girls while my husband and I work. Some churches also offer Mother’s Mornings Out – it’s like a daycare but only for 2 or 3 hours a few times a week. Usually it’s pretty reasonable too. Even if you do not have the money you can team up with other mommies or some Mr. moms in your area and have a at-home-daycare once or twice a week.
8. Split responsibilities with your spouse. As I have already mentioned my husband and I work from home and that is why both of us need some free time to get things done. A few months ago we adopted a new strategy that has proven to be the most productive for us. Basically we divide our work week into daddy’s and mommy’s baby-duty days. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are my husband’s work days, and Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays are my work days. Even if you do not work from home you can still split responsibilities. When daddy goes to the gym he takes the kids to the gym daycare with him and when mommy goes out for a cup of tea with her friend she takes the children with her.
9. Use every minute of time wisely when your kids sleep. If your children are still taking their afternoon naps then this is a golden opportunity for you to get things done. My children take 1 two-hour nap every day and that’s the time when I can do things. Depending on your children’s schedule you can work at night after they are already in bed or early in the morning while they are still asleep. This is the reason why it’s so important to have your kids on schedule.
10. Be smart with your time. You need to use every minute of your free time effectively that is why you need to cut down on “cluttering” activities. Do not watch TV, limit web surfing, Twitter, Facebook and other social media, talk on the phone or send an emails, basically do only important things when you have free time. Even when you are playing with your children you can listen to a podcast or audio book and sometimes even read a book or a magazine. It’s not multi-tasking in my opinion. You are teaching your kids the importance of reading and listening.

I love being a parent and I love spending time with my kids. I am sure that you love being with your kids too and you do not have to make the choice of whether to get things done or be a good parent. You can have the best of both worlds by maximizing your productivity with simple changes in your life that I’ve described above. Let me know if these tips worked for you and I am more than ready to hear about how you stay a productive parent.

Keep it balanced!

Being a mom is a full-time job and you do not realize it until you get your first child (or two at once ). Sometimes it seems that being a mom is stressful enough and you just do not have time to do anything else especially take care of your body. A lot of women today use pregnancy as an excuse to stop exercising or to gain a ton of weight and whatever they see in the mirror they say “I just give 100% of me to my baby. I do not have time for my body.”
Don’t get trapped in this mindset. Being a mom is a great gift and a great opportunity to be proud of your body. And you can definitely make a few tiny steps that will bring your balanced body to you. If you want to know how then read my guest post The Balanced Body of a Balanced Mommy on a wonderful website Create a Balance.

I have noticed that many times my babies just want some attention and the only way they can ask for it is to cry. I like spending time with my babies but I also need to do some things around the house as well as eat sometimes and take care of myself. It’s very difficult to concentrate on something when my children are screaming, but still sometimes I just have to let them scream. It might sound cruel to some parents (somebody might even reproach me for this), but this is my approach to raising kids. I have already written a post Baby Screaming Part 1 – Why Is It so Difficult to Stand It? so feel free to read it in order to find out some interesting facts about why that screaming baby can make you want to pull your hair out.

I don’t know about other families, but in our family I am a little bit more patient than my husband and I can put up with our screaming children without getting irritated for a much longer period of time than he can. I think that most women are naturally more patient than men so that is why you must treat your husband with kid gloves when it comes to handling a screaming baby. My husband sometimes gets really irritated when our girls start screaming and he cannot soothe them. As a result, sometimes I end up having to calm down all three of them (Maybe men really are big children after all.)

Now it’s time to get on with talking about my ways of calming down a screaming baby. Of course, the first thing I usually do is to make sure everything is okay with my child: she is not hungry, not thirsty, she has burped after the feeding and has a clean diaper, she is lying in a comfortable position and she is not too hot or too cold. If everything is okay and I know that my baby is not sick then I am pretty sure that my girl is just fussy and I have to entertain her somehow.

1. My husband has discovered one magical trick about how to make my girls go to sleep after feeding time – he just turns them over on their stomachs. They just love this position! Of course we never let them sleep on their stomachs at night or when we are not around to check on them all the time. Also we started laying them on their stomachs only after they were two weeks old and they started to fall asleep in this position after they were one month old.

2. Our girls simply adore their car seats. Sometimes we have meals together with our girls sitting in their car seats while we are able to chew are food peacefully. In case they start crying we can rock them a little bit and then they are okay again.

3. Our babies love massages and exercise. Their most favorite exercise of all is what I call “running”. I take my girl’s feet in my hands and start moving them gently up and down (it looks like she is running when she lifts her knees to her stomach).

4. Of course we also love flying in the air and jumping around.

5. I think it’s funny, but my babies love a gentle pat on their bottoms.
   

6. Occasionally I can calm my babies down by reciting some nursing rhymes to them or singing songs (even though my singing abilities are far from being considered even decent).

7. I’d also like to say a few words about pacifiers and their effectiveness. I’ve read different opinions about them, but I personally didn’t even want to use them at first. I am still not a big fan of these deceptive things but sometimes there is no other way to get some peace and quiet besides using them.
   
   My girls don’t like them; they simply spit them out (smart babies). They can suck on them only when I am holding the pacifier in their mouths which is better than constant screaming but it’s still not the best choice for us. If you need some additional information about pacifiers in order to make your own decision about them then take some time to read this informative article I found: Pacifiers: Are they good for your baby?

   

8. A colorful mobile is also a very good form of entertainment for a baby so we got one for our girls. Here are several examples of great mobiles from our point of view:Fisher-Price Lil’ Laugh & Learn Sweet MoonDreams Mobile, Tiger Mobile, Miracles & Milestones – Mix & Match Musical Mobile
   
   

9. Our girls also like “white noise” such as the revving of a car engine (my husband is obsessed with downloading clips of muscle cars online), using the vacuum cleaner, hair dryer and so on. We also play various sounds of nature type music at night and they seem to like it.

10. We decided to purchase a Chicco Lullaby Play Yard- Explorer for our girls and they seem to love it. They like to play with the small stuffed animals hanging above them and listen to the melodies. This playcenter also has a vibrating function that is supposed to calm them down but it seems pretty useless.
    

    

Unfortunately, sometimes none of these methods work and then we have to look for new ones. The process of calming a baby down is full of creativity and sometimes the silliest ideas can make your baby really happy. My husband and I are constantly looking for new ideas and very often we have a lot of fun playing with our girls and discovering new things that they love because there is nothing better than seeing your baby happy and smiling.

I can’t say that my girls are too difficult (I am sure that some mothers face much bigger troubles with their kids than me), but there are two of them and that is exactly why it is so difficult to deal with them sometimes. Some days one of them will wake up and start crying which by now is no problem for me at all. I will take her in my arms and in just a few minutes will have her happy again. But there are those days when both my girls will decide to wake up screaming at the same time (its almost as if they have orchestrated this by themselves) and while I am trying to calm one of them down, another will continue screaming inconsolably. So this will result in constant ear piercing screams and constant irritation that makes me feel like my head is stuck inside of a drum at a rock concert.

I did a bit of research over the Internet about sound pressure levels and how they influence humans. It’s interesting to know that usually a baby scream equals about 115-130 decibels (for comparison, a voice in normal conversation is around 60 decibels, comfortable volume levels for a human ear are between 40 and 80 dB). Here is a chart showing how long a normal person should be exposed to different levels of volume on a daily basis in order to be healthy and well balanced both physically and emotionally. Note that daily exposure to sounds of 115 dB may pose serious health risks (hearing impairment, hypertension and annoyance). (According to the National Institute for Occupational Study and Health).

A baby scream can be identified as irritant type noise. It is difficult to find the best comparison of this noise with other noises that are classified and irritant noises but it is definitely something that is not pleasant for a normal person to listen to. There are no ways to measure noise but you can measure sound pressure that is produced by this noise. High sound pressures may lead to hearing loss if you are subjected to these sounds on a daily basis.

At first I could not understand how a single sound can damage your ear (I can’t think of a sound as something material – it’s not a hammer that can break your arm or leg and it’s not a knife that can cut your skin). I have decided to refresh my school anatomy knowledge about the ear and this is what I have found.

Each sound is actually a vibration in the air, quiet sounds can be compared to ripples on the water and loud sounds are more like tidal waves. These waves travel through the air and finally strike the eardrum which transmits the vibrations through a chain of ossicles (very tiny bones in the middle ear) to a fluid contained in a special snail-shaped tube, the cochlea. The walls of this tube are covered by minute hairs which continue to transmit the vibration. Low sounds (small waves) won’t travel far, while loud sounds will travel farther in the cochlea. The sound that we hear varies depending on which hairs vibrate. Very high sounds can damage the cochlea by damaging cochlea’s hair cells that respond to the sounds of that particular range and thereby reducing the ear’s ability to hear those frequencies in the future.

If your baby is not screaming enough to make you deaf (though being deaf might seem like a very good solution sometimes), then I am sure you will be pretty annoyed by this noise. Constant annoyance may result in permanent stress, depression, sleep disorders and cardiovascular problems.

This information does not mean that you can not spend time with a screaming baby, but it just shows why it is so difficult for any normal person to stand a baby screaming for a long period of time. After I found out about this information, I relaxed a little in regards to my previous thoughts of being a bad mother and realized that I am just a regular human being. Still if you do not want to risk your health the best solution is to make your baby scream less. If you ask me what you need for this, I will answer: patience, tenderness and lots of love.

My husband and I have already found several techniques how to calm our babies down and you can read about them in Baby Screaming Part 2 – How to Deal with It?

My doctor prohibited me from running as I had a high risk of miscarriage, but she said that walking quickly would be fine. She also assured me that stretching, light abs and leg workouts and breathing techniques would do me a lot of good. So I completely turned to Pilates with some elements of Yoga included.

Now that the birth of my twin girls is behind me I am very happy that I continued doing Pilates throughout my entire pregnancy. I can’t say that I am back to where I was before my pregnancy already, but I know that I look much better than I could have if I didn’t do anything at all. Due to the Pilates technique that I used my abs returned back to their former shape very quickly. To tell the truth I was terribly afraid that I will have some real problems with my muscles as I developed a really awful diastasis (in the late stages of pregnancy it was about 4 fingers wide). Two months after me delivery, I have already forgotten about my diastasis simply because of the fact that I kept working my abs up until a month before my children were born. My legs, hips and arms are toned too.

If you ask me why you should exercise while you are pregnant I can give you about a thousand reasons. But here I will stick only to the most important ones from my point of view

•  Exercise helps you to stay in a good mood.
• Workouts help your body to adjust to the increasing weight.
• Exercise keeps the extra weight off during pregnancy.
• Strong legs (obtained through constant workouts) will help you walk easily in the late stages of pregnancy (although I gained about 40 pounds during my pregnancy I didn’t have any problems with moving even the day before I delivered my babies)
• Workouts increase blood flow to your body and simultaneously allow your baby to receive more nutrients through the increased blood flow.
• If you are breathing correctly during your workouts, then your baby is also getting more oxygen through your blood.
• Usually fit women spend less time in labor and it’s easier for them to deliver their babies. (I spent about 90 minutes in labor and gave birth to my twins within 30 minutes.)
• If the body is used to exercise then it will be much easier to get back in shape after delivery.
• Exercise will help you fight prenatal and postnatal back pains.
• If you are attending special prenatal fitness classes, then you will get to know other moms-to-be with whom you can discuss a lot of pregnancy-related issues.

Exercise during pregnancy is a great way to tell your body and your unborn children “I love you!”

When I was reading about postpartum depression I never thought that it could happen to me. Thinking logically, how can you be depressed when you have at last given birth to your beloved baby (babies in my caseJ)? How can you cry when you are holding this little child in your hands? How can you be unhappy when your newborn is smiling at your for the first time?

However, I turned out to be completely lost. I was in despair and I didn’t know what to do. The first several days of my motherhood were filled with sorrow and sadness. When I arrived home from the hospital things only got worse. I had some responsibilities around the house, I had to take care of myself, but the babies of course didn’t care at all about all my needs. They were waking up constantly it seemed, they were always hungry and of course crying incessantly. I feel ashamed to write this following sentence but I feel that it has to be said. When I evaluated the situation, I was not sure if I really loved my babies enough and felt that I was robbed of my own life. Now my entire life seemed to be devoted to these two almost constantly crying creatures. At some moments I felt as though I was not even a human any more, but some kind of a milk producing factory. I had to wake up, change diapers, feed the first girl, and then rock her to sleep. By the time I was done with the first daughter the second one woke up and I had to repeat the same thing all over again. Then I had several minutes to go to the bathroom, eat something and after that repeat the whole process once again. I could not even think about the idea of doing anything fun or interesting during this time and to add to that of course was the endless sleepless night that seemed to be driving me out of my mind. When my girls were 10 days old my depression reached its highest point. I spent two days crying. I had all kind of thoughts in my mind such as: I am a bad mother, I am a bad wife, I will not be attractive to my husband any more, I don’t love my babies as I am supposed to, I will never have any time for myself again, I am too selfish thinking about all this and so on.

Well enough about my problems at this point because I am sure everyone has gotten a clear picture of what I was going through. So now it is time to talk about what helped me to overcome these problems.

- First of all - my husband. From the very first moments of our babies’ lives, he started playing with them and he was really happy spending time with both of them. Their crying never seemed to bother him at all and he was always happy to spend every single moment with them that he could. When I had these bouts of crying, he calmed me down and he was always beside me when I needed him.

- My mom helped me a lot too. She helped with the children in the evening after work. She also helped to do some work around the house which really made things a lot easier and of course she supported me in every way possible.

- I have now made a rule for myself – devote at least some time during the day to myself. My appearance has changed a lot and of course I want to return to my former shape as soon as possible. The first thing that I am working on is my stomach (No big surprise I know). It really looks terrible now (at least that’s what I think about it). So I made a rule to spend at least 15-30 minutes a day doing different exercises for my abs and for my back.

- Before my delivery, I had enough time to work at home and could easily finish everything that I needed to. Now I can hardly find time to check my email in the morning. I have not found a way to get back to my work yet but I also understood one thing – my work will always be waiting for me, but my children won’t. It is much more important to forget about all the boring business stuff and spend time with my girls who need me every day and every minute and who will grow up too soon.

- Some days are of course easier, some days are more difficult. But I have to live through all of them. I’ve been thinking of a way to help me get through all of these days and I’ve decided that the perfect solution would be to jot down my thoughts, worries and joys. It clears out my mind and helps me stay balanced. My diary is actually my blog. It contains everything I am thinking about and everything I am concerned about.

- The first weeks with the children seem very tiresome. I have to be with them constantly or almost constantly. Many doctors recommend going out with your child when you have to buy groceries or do some other shopping. It is easy to do with one child, but it is almost impossible to do with two of them. My husband and I agreed that every day each of us will have some “personal free time”. Sometimes it might be only 15 minutes, but still it helps a lot. We go out to buy groceries, to do some shopping or to participate in some other everyday routines.

- I think that one of the reasons that cause postpartum depression is lack of sleep. I am trying to sleep as much as possible, though I am not doing a very good job at it. Sleeping about 5 hours a day is definitely not enough. If I find some time I try to sleep during the daytime. I have also found out that it is one of the best ways to calm my children down. As soon as I lay down with them they fall asleep immediately.

- My body has changed and of course now I need some new clothes. Going to the store still seems almost impossible, so I do almost all of my shopping online. It’s convenient and I can do it even with my babies. And I can still feel like I am a woman instead of some milk producing factory.

- It is always good to spend some time with my beloved husband. Doing things from our “pre-delivery” lifestyle helps us to relax a bit. Watching a video clip together or a short movie, having meals together, cooking together – these things really help us get used to our new life.

- Now I try not to stress myself about different household routines. I know that I have people who will help me and I do not have to prove everybody that I am a jack of all trades. Now I am a mother and the rest is much less important. This thought alone completely wipes out any form of depression that is trying to creep into my mind.