.Old pro.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that our good friends Luis & Sayuri had their baby {Sebastian}, well after a planned heart surgery {he's okay now - very strong and healthy little boy} he finally got to leave the hospital and go home this week.
As every parent knows that first week home {whether it's the day after you give birth, a month after a hospital stay, or with a little one that's been adopted from far away} is a total mind trip. All of your expectations are turned on their heads, your plans go out the window, it's infinitely harder and better than you imagined, and you are dealing with all of the emotions and hormones that drop on you like a ton of bricks with little to no sleep. It's a doozy to say the least.
Today while my one year old was downstairs napping I was upstairs taking a much needed break {more on why this is much needed in a later blog} and indulging in some good guilty pleasure Facebook time. Sayuri popped on as well and I asked how things were going now that Sebastian is home and her parents have gone back to Peru {where Luis & Sayuri are from}. In a word...it's "hard".
She asked me how I dealt with the lack of sleep, how and when to get the baby to sleep at night, how and when to try a routine, etc and half way through my {very very long} answers I realized...wait a minute, I know what I'm talking about! I survived! Amelia isn't a little baby anymore and someone is asking ME for advice on such things! It's a shocking moment when you realize that someone isn't asking your advice based on what you've read but what you've experienced. It's nice. It feels like a badge of honor "I'm a mom and I got through it and so will you. Here's how..."!
After the obligatory answers about routines, feedings, etc I remembered to share advice that I only learned from experience but that I find more important than all of the others: take lots of photos and keep a journal/blog/diary because you cannot possibly fathom how fast they grow and how much both of you change and you are much too tired to ever be able to remember it all.
The whole thing made me a bit misty thinking about how far I have come as a person, how much Amelia has grown, and how much Cheyenne & I have developed as a couple in the last year. Thanks to this blog I was able to go back and read the posts that I made in the first few weeks of Amelia's life and little details came flooding back. I am so happy that I decided on a lark to create this blog - I've never been very good at journaling and I think if I hadn't the blog and the excuse of keeping my out-of-state family updated I would have lost those little details thanks to the pure exhaustion of being a parent for the first time.
So thank you to everyone who reads this for giving me a voice to write with - without it I wouldn't be able to look back on these past 19 months in such a tangible way and with such detail. Going back and reading the thoughts, worries, dreams that I had while pregnant and the joys of first "real" smiles, the hardships of that first week of sleep training, etc I really can see how far I have come and why someone would ask my advice on such an important topics as parenthood.