The Magical Balance

The midwifes tell me that when a baby sleeps for a longer period, they pay you back with sleeping less at another time. I see it as a magical (and evil) balance. It means that if you have a great night with your baby and he sleeps for five hours in the night, hold back from rejoicing and thinking the silly bubba has turned a corner. Because the following hours or day he will pay you back.

In all fairness there is some logic to this. Babies need to wake up because they need to eat. If they din't wake up, they still need the same amount of calories each 24 hours. That doesn't mean having a bigger breakfast, baby's stomach is still no bigger than their tiny little fist. Silly babies might eat more but that is never the end of it. No sir-ee, when they eat more than their tummies can take, their tummies reject the extra and the extra ends up on mummy's shirt and shoulder.

And so the balance plays out. We get the good with the bad. I get a good baby at night, so the magical balance says I can get a screamy-mc-screamy baby during the day. But don't feel sorry for those parents who feel they have a difficult infant all the time, well the balance (and old wives tales) would predict that they get a great toddler.

I think the same goes for my mental health.

Having a baby is no easy business. After the little person exits your body, he leaves behind a wreck! It is not pretty place. My stomach is wobbly and scarred, my waist has gone, my thighs (which were too big to begin with) feel like they will never fit into a pair of pants that were not made for clown costume! Ew! The other side of the ew is the crazy brain craziness. The hormones get mixed with the sleep deprivation and turmoil ensues. When that plays with my long standing depression, my mood is expectedly a up and down roller coaster.

I am coming to learn that my mood has a magical balance as well. One good day equals one bad day and similar equations. Between Tiny Human and me, sometimes they balances mirror each other, sometimes they impact each other, other times there is no correlation - they follow their own pattern of balance.

In short...

Good Luck