BAWWAB

you guys, I DID IT.

i made it through the first day of back-at-work-with-a-baby.  that’s BAWWAB, for short.

there was much anticipation leading up to said event, but I survived, and I am happy to have knocked down day one. thanks for all the love, by the way. it felt wonderful to know that there were people rooting for me. i’m making all this sound like a major event, but it kind of is…so i’m gonna go ahead and throw myself confetti and describe said event.

last night, i ran around like the roadrunner with coyote hot on her trails, but with 20 things to check off the to-do list for things to get ready. when I finished, later than i wanted, i felt wane and a little bit like a heroine of a novel. i laid down next to k. who is sick, the kind of sick where you can’t breathe through your nose because it is somehow clogged and dripping at the same time, but who provided excellent body heat and i fell asleep quickly. unfortunately, i woke up in the middle of the night at 4:30AM…i’m pretty sure it’s because i was a ball of anxiety about the morning. and then i couldn’t go back to sleep, which is the worst. the worst! which reminds me - you know what else is the worst? clipping your baby’s fingernails and accidentally getting some skin. GAHD. that happened the other day and i felt a little bit like sobbing. i didn’t, but i felt like I might. right when it happened, she froze momentarily like whatheheckisthat, and then erupted into a shocked-sounding crying that was very wretched. i took picture of the tragedy and immediately sent to k. so that he could join me in being horrified at my lacking skills as a clipper of baby’s nails. wonderful man that he is, he didn't make me feel too bad about it.

this was before it got bloody... sob.

anyway. rabbit trail. so back to the morning: i woke up to my alarm at 6AM and proceeded to get myself ready, get the baby up, diaper changed, and nurse. then i did my morning pump, finished packing sloane’s bag for daycare, as well as the pump bag, my bag for work, including my lunch (that’s count em... three bags!), grabbed sloane’s paperwork for daycare, said goodbye to husband and made it out of the house with baby by 7:50AM. boomboompow. and i had a stomach ache the entire time. but leaving the daycare wasn’t so bad. it helped that she was asleep, otherwise, someone would have had to drag me out the door… i made it to the car, still more consumed by the frantic need to just make it to work on time, and then there i was, back at work.  just getting through the door felt like a big fat accomplishment. and you know? it kind of just felt like old times, nothing much had changed there and there were a few faces that i was genuinely glad to see again. there were a lot of ‘welcome back!’s, including one from the nice man who restocks the vending machine, and i was flattered he remembered. AAAND i got through my first pump…which is really one of the things i was dreading the most.

they had a room on the 5^th floor, for which i picked up a key from the receptionist up there, and it turned out to be a smallish room that used to be a small shower room so it is all kind of sterile and cold. and at first, i felt terribly awkward walking past the people who have their computers right in the next room and i was just imagining them looking up from their computers like, ‘WHAT is that whirling pumping noise?’ and feeling embarrassed when i had to walk past them, but it turned out that the room also has a fan that seems to block out the noise (seriously. can they come up with a pumping machine that doesn’t make so much noise??) and it was actually semi-relaxing. i still need to figure out how to best double-pump, but more about that another time.

it wasn’t until about 1:00PM that i started kind of feeling sick to my stomach missing sloane. that was probably the time when it became officially the longest i had been away from the baby and my body and mind started doing werid kinds of things, just missing her. i cried a wee bit at my desk, looked through all the photos of her on my phone, and felt tortured, until cotton-brain from sleepiness took over. it was probably also the adrenaline wearing off.

WHOOSH.

then the day was done.

and i felt this great relief. the kind of relief in realizing that i made it through the day not just by my sheer effort, because there was that too, but i was mostly carried through on the backs of prayers that people prayed for me specifically that day. this happens to me, and so does the realization, and thus, relief.

and fast forward to the reunion. 

it felt so dang good to have baby back in my arms again. 

she started crying when i walked in but as soon as i took her into my arms, she stopped crying, curled up against me and snuggled in. 

here she is. after her first day of daycare and she is passed out, hard. 
it was a big day for her, too. 

this isn't going to be easy, but at least after today i know that it's not impossible.

so far, and it hasn’t been that long so don’t take this as sound advice, it seems like the trick is to keep busy. it seemed like the times when i wasn’t keeping busy were the hardest.  but can we also posit that all this time away from her will make the times with her all that much sweeter? yes, let’s posit, and agree with that.