Best Advice

I wanted to take a moment to share the best advice I was given when I was pregnant with my daughter. A good friend told me the following two things and I have tried to share them with others:
1) Don't be above anything. You may lay one set of "rules" out for yourself when expecting - how you think you are going to do things. When the time comes, don't be above anything. Try everything you can to have peace within yourself and your home. I can remember thinking of this when I let my daughter sleep in her carrier for the first two weeks of her life. It was the only way my husband and I could sleep. So I put her in the carrier right next to our bed, and it worked!!

2) Everything looks better in the daylight. When you have a new baby, the night times seem neverending. I can remember praying for 6am because then it seemed like someone else in the world was awake and I wasn't the only one. It is so hard in the middle of the night. It does end, quicker than you think - soon you will be sleeping (most nights) all of the way through again.

Life can be tough when you are recovering from birth. I always found it amazing that God laid such an enormous responsibility soley on women. What an honor. Here we are, having our bodies recover from uone of the most difficult things it will ever do ("cook" and then deliever another human) and if you are breastfeeding, then at night your spouse can only help out so much. Even if you aren't, they still can only do so much. My husband and I would rotate feedings, he would do one and then I would do the next. That way we could both get at least 2-3 hours of sleep at a time.

Having a child is one of the most exciting, but tiring things you will ever do. Like Angie noted, it goes so quickly. It might not feel like it during the difficult times, but truly, it does.

Thanks to everyone who has given so much advice - this is really helping ladies out there and I feel honored that you each would take the time to read this and respond! Let's keep it going!!