TAKE CARE

All site content and material copyright Lu Hanessian, 2009. All rights reserved.

Photos by Lisa Trakis for WYSH, LLC.

You hear the advice over and over again. When baby sleeps, you sleep. When baby naps, you take a nap.

But, before you know it, you’re returning emails and calls, cleaning, making meals, maybe getting ahead on work, running errands. And...do you have other children? How do you ‘nap when baby naps’ if baby has siblings who would like the crusts cut off their sandwiches, to say nothing of the patient and wise conflict resolution you would really like to offer up in a moment of temporary sib crisis?

Do you know what exhausts us even more than lack of sleep?

Stress. Our worrying. Our focus on what might be “wrong.” Our lack of laughter. Our lack of energy. Our lack of exercise to blow off anxiety and boost that energy. The joy deprivation is worse than the sleep deprivation--hands down. We don’t feel the physical effects of it the way we do when we’ve been woken up every hour all night. But, the extra weight we carry is something we don’t even realize we’ve taken on and assumed like excess baggage.

When we feel stressed, we can begin to feel depressed. Overwhelmed. Anxious about our adequacy, our “right” choices, our child’s “normal” development versus the fears we harbor by playing comparison games with the Jones’s. Who is rolling over first or sleeping the night. Who is the “good” baby...

Psst, guess what? There is no such thing as a “good” baby! Every baby is good.

Every baby is a miracle.

To invest energy in stress and anxiety over the “right” how-to’s or whether your choices are wrong, is a shortcut to feeling drained and depleted.

Get perspective. Eat good food. Walk in the wind. Giggle with your kids. Let them tickle you. Let others love you. Help you. Read good books that take you places even for 15 minutes. Listen to music that fills you up. Dance in the living room without drawing the blinds. Really. You are on the most extraordinary journey of a lifetime.

Enjoy the ride. Detours and all.