What motherhood is for me

I've now been a mum to baby Cody for exactly 2 months. The toughest weeks are over and I am finally feeling more like my old pre-baby self with a few minor differences. I'll list just a few of these differences that basically sum up what motherhood is to me.

Motherhood is

getting to know what being really exhausted is. I heard other parents talk about it and I thought I knew what it felt like but I now know that the level of exhaustion I experienced in the first 4 weeks of motherhood are definitely not what I had imagined B.C. (before Cody!)

Motherhood is

Waking up by a crying baby 2 to 3 times a night for an hour to an hour and a half long feeds.

Motherhood is

never taking a shower in a room alone. Baby is always there just in case he starts crying which he obviously will since how long can you look at toiletries before you get bored? I am always making sure to take a shower daily even if it means leaving bubs crying for 5 minutes. This is the only me time I sometimes get in a day and I always feel better when I am fresh and clean.

Motherhood is

being pooped on while changing nappies.

Motherhood is

being peed on while changing nappies. Are you seeing a trend here?

Motherhood is

being barfed on but not taking a shower until the day after.

Motherhood is

leaking from everywhere all the time. 

Motherhood is

not having breakfast until 11 am even though you've been away since 5:30 am.

Motherhood is

looking at your destroyed body: saggy belly, stretch marks, leaking boobs and all; and still be amazed of what your body has achieved. I built a tiny perfect human being. At the same time feel sad that it will take me ages to go back to what I looked B.C. I know it will take time but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to feel a bit sad about it.

Motherhood is

feeling guilty that your body is not producing enough milk to feed your little one so you go to countless doctor and lactation consultant visits where strangers prod push and pull on your breasts to try and show you how you should do it. 

Motherhood is

knowing that breast is best but really knowing that a fed baby is best. I now decided to stop feeling guilty and I'm enjoying  symbiosis of breast and formula feeding. Bubba Cody is not going hungry anymore and I'm not shedding more tears on this.

Motherhood is

being scared knowing that you have a little human being that is completely dependent on you for a very long time, possibly for all your life.

Motherhood is

not having alone time with my husband anymore apart from a few stolen hours here and there, most of which spent speaking about the baby, sleeping or cleaning the house that seems to have been the point of origin of an earthquake.

Motherhood is

taking around 2 to 3 hours to be able to get ready to go out of home.

Motherhood is

seeing the baby smile at you and forgetting the tough times.

Motherhood is

 cuddling your bubs those extra 5 minutes before puttig him in his bed.

Motherhood is

falling in love with this little being a little bit extra everyday and not believing how this is possible but it just keeps happening everyday.

[Image Credits: Photos taken by Emmy van Ewijk]

Week by week

I've had an absence of a year from writing. It will be too long to write down all that happened in the last year, but to sum up most of year I've done a photo collage.

As you might have guessed this year I grew a little human being. The photos are taken at week by week interval from the time I was 5 weeks pregnant until I was 39 weeks pregnant. There's no 40 weeks pregnant photo since our little boy joined us on the outside 2 days before his due date.

With the addition of the new life to the family I want to give this blog another new life. It might be the wrong time to try and start writing again since I'm mostly busy with the little one. However I discovered that when he is feeding I can multi task and type on my phone or laptop!

Life changes with a country move

It's been more than 7 months since we packed all our belongings and moved to Australia. The initial months went by really quickly and you would expect that it would all slow down afterwards but it seems the months are still rolling by really quickly. We did fall into a routine (a fast paced one) which is quite different in a way to our previous life in the Netherlands. Many things have changed for us with this move but we're still the same couple of a few months ago.

These are 5 major changes to our life.

1. My birthday falls in summer
I'm a February baby, which up until this year meant that my birthday fell on one of the coldest weeks of the year. This year however I celebrated my birthday on a warm summer day with dinner served in the garden from a barbie (BBQ).

Enjoying Friday afternoon drinks.

A photo posted by Colette van Uffelen (@splashofcola) on Oct 30, 2014 at 10:20pm PDT

2. Aussie lingo
I'm still often baffled what some Australians are talking about but slowly I'm understanding the Aussie lingo and am now following most of the accents. Luckily the Melbournian accent is not a tough one. I can now talk about thongs without colleagues without being inappropriate. I drink coffee in the avro and am slowly discovering the differences between football and footy.

3. Crossfit
Up until a year ago I trained around once a week and if I got the opportunity (read husband not around) I would always prefer watching TV than getting my butt off the sofa and go to the gym. Something changed before moving to Australia when I was introduced to Crossfit (thanks Randy!). I finally found a sort of training/sport that was interesting me. When we moved to Melbourne I decided that I didn't want a gym subscription which is basically a waste of money so I became a member at a Crossfit box. It's been six months since I joined and I now train around 4 times a week and I love it! My life seems to be revolving around my training and for some it might sound like I'm obsessed about it. I see regular performance improvement and I look forward to the daily workouts. I still love sitting on the sofa but now I make sure to train first thing in the morning so that I can still relax in the evening. This means I now sleep really early.

At the #oxbox #crossfit

A photo posted by Colette van Uffelen (@splashofcola) on Jan 22, 2015 at 12:53am PST

4. Shopping at markets
It seems that there are food markets every few suburbs so now instead of shopping at a supermarket we get all our greens and meat from markets. In most cases we try to go local and if possible (read affordable) we're trying to go grass fed instead of grain fed meat and whenever possible go for organic items. The good thing of shopping at markets is that there is so much choice that we're often trying never tasted before seafood and different cuts of meat.

Dinner tonight - Blue swimmer crabs

A photo posted by Colette van Uffelen (@splashofcola) on Mar 1, 2015 at 3:50am PST

5. Eating Whole Foods
Our life is more healthy and fit here and with the above 2 changes in our life it meant that we also changed what we're eating on a day to day basis. We are trying to eat whole foods as much as possible and avoid using (very) processed food and refined sugars. Somehow this seems to count only between Monday and Friday morning. The weekend is a complete different story. I eat whatever I feel like because that is one benefit of training 4 times a week! And if all of you are thinking that we might be living on kale and spinach you are wrong! We often have eggs and bacon for breakfast and so much other delicious food.

In life you'll need ...

[Image Source: Quotes Porn (Twitter)]

A new year, a new job

The start of the new year meant that it was time to get back to work for me. I have now lost my daily freedom of waking up at 10am and doing whatever I felt like and replaced it with days in an office sitting behind a computer.

I've been waiting for this transition for sometime now and I'm very happy to be back at work but I do miss being out and around when the weather is lovely like today.

Luckily my office is on the 28th floor so I have a great view of Melbourne and if I ever feel stuck inside I just need to look over my monitors or else grab a coffee from one of the nearby coffee places.

Where shall I start?

Where shall I start? I'm now a married woman. I cannot even call us newly weds really anymore since it's been nearly 4 months already from the big day.

The wedding day was a wonderful day, hitting all the expected cliches.  It's like the time went faster than usual on the day and in a blink of the eye the day was over. I loved all the details of the day, the hours in which we were all preparing ourselves, seeing my niece playing around in her cute dress and then my sister helping me put my dress on, the ride to the wedding venue with my dad and the flower girls with all the cars honking at us! I think this was the point when it really hit me the importance of it all. I was quite emotional especially when we walked down the aisle, seeing my future husband waiting at the end of it. The ceremony was short and sweet, which was really needed in the warm Maltese summer evening and the party started soon afterwards. The hours passed by like minutes and I enjoyed every tiny detail even the small imperfections that I had been worrying for months about. It was lovely to see all my family and so many friends who flew to Malta just for our wedding.

So much planning happened in the year before that afterwards it felt strange not having to make all the wedding related decisions.

A lot has happened since. We travelled for a whole month in South America and when we came back we packed all our belongings and migrated to Melbourne in Australia. We've now been in Australia for over a month and we're having a great time.

I should be able to post more often now since I have a lot of free time until I start working again. But then again when such a long time passes between entries I feel that there is so much to write about that I feel overwhelmed and just postpone my writing.

Ten days until the big day

The countdown started long before the wedding day itself. Our engagement was pretty long and the numbers decreased slowly initially. Now things changed and the days are going by really fast.

Most preparations have been done and it's actually been quite relaxed these past few weeks on the wedding front. I know though that once we land in Malta in 3 days we will have the final rushing around the island to get every last thing done.

In only 10 days I will be walking down the aisle!