Modern Mrs. Darcy 2020 Reading Challenge

My reading life has definitely taken a nosedive since Bert was born. It's no secret I love to read and I love the library. But since Bert has been born, it's taken me about three times as long to finish a book as it used to. I'll admit it: sometimes it's just easier to turn on Netflix when I'm breastfeeding him as opposed to picking up a book. I'm still reading, it's just verrrrrrry slooooooooowly.

I've never been into journaling about the books I read, but I absolutely LOVE the app Litsy because it allows me to track what I read as well as (my favorite part) keep a list of all the books I want to read, all organized in one place. Can't beat that! Because I do love super organized things, and I'm always looking for new things to read, I am excited to once again this year be taking part in the Modern Mrs. Darcy 2020 Reading Challenge. I've participated to some extent in these challenges in the past, and I've always enjoyed them. I haven't been able to participate the past couple of years due to a lot of life upheaval, but I think I'm ready to jump back in this year and do my best to take on some new reading challenges!

This year's challenge list can be found here. I just remembered to find the challenge yesterday, so I spent some time making a list of some ideas I have for books for each category. I thought I'd share some ideas of mine here, and I'd love to hear any feedback on other suggestions as well! I should go ahead and mention now that the point is try and read books you've never read before (with one category exception -- you'll see which one), so I'm going to be bold here in sharing books I've never read. Some of them might be surprising! (These categories don't have to be tackled in any particular order. There are 12 books in the challenge, one for each month of 2020.) *Each book is hyperlinked so you can check it out if you want!

Category 1: A Book Published the Decade You Were Born

I was born in the '80s, but I decided to concentrate specifically on the year I was born, 1984, which was apparently not a bad year for books!

My Ideas:
1. The Unbearable Lightness of Being 
2. The House on Mango Street
3. The Witches of Eastwick

Category 2: A Debut Novel 

It doesn't have to debut this year, just be someone's first book.

My Ideas:
1. Conversations With Friends
2. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
3. The Woman in the Window

Category 3: Recommended by a Source You Trust

Well, seeing as I'm doing this challenge, I trust Modern Mrs. Darcy! Here are a few from a summer list she did a couple years back.

My Ideas:
1. The Queen of Hearts
2. The Perfect Couple
3. Not That I Could Tell

Category 4: A Book By a Local Author

I live in the Atlanta metro area, and so do a lot of authors apparently! No shortage for me here.

My Ideas:
1. Never Have I Ever
2. Sunset Beach
3. The Favorite Daughter

Category 5: A Book Outside My Comfort Zone

Generally, Sci Fi is outside of my comfort zone, so I'm going to give it a try!

My Ideas:
1. Station Eleven
2. The Long Walk
3. The Circle

Category 6: A Book in Translation

There is a great selection of these out there!

My Ideas:
1. Beartown
2. Things We Lost in the Fire
3. Go Went Gone

Category 7: A Book Nominated for an Award in 2020

This list is to be determined! I did note that the Newbery Award and Honor books are named on January 27 this year, so it is likely that I will read one of those for this category!

Category 8: A Re-Read

There is one book I've been dying to re-read since my parents brought me a box that contained a lot of my old books when I moved. And that book is

My Idea:
1. Kristy's Great Idea



Category 9: A Classic You Didn't Read in School

If there's any list you could make fun of me for, it's this one. Please be gentle!

My Ideas:
1. A Separate Peace
2. In Cold Blood
3. Atlas Shrugged

Category 10: Three Books by the Same Author

So this category counts for books 10, 11, and 12. After some thinking, I've decided to read three books by Roald Dahl! The three I hope to read are

My Ideas:
1. The BFG
2. The Witches
3. Tales of the Unexpected 

So there you have it! Chances are I'll be adding all these books to my "want to read" list so I'll read them all at some point in my life. Because I'm starting this challenge mid-way through January, I plan to read my re-read, Kristy's Great Idea, for this month. 

I'll be documenting this reading challenge (I hope!) on this blog, Instagram (follow me @happilykrafter), and Litsy (follow me @HappilyEverKrafter). And, even though I said I'm not really a book journaler, I am going to try and use this very simple journal Joe got me last year. If nothing else, it's pretty to look at! Let me know if you'd like to join me or if you have some other great book ideas! Happy reading!

____

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase a book through this page, I may receive a small commission. All the thoughts shared here are my own.

Unsolicited Advice You Don't Care About.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a pretty tidy person. I don't think my house is sterile or anything, but I will admit it's pretty clean. There is always some dust somewhere, but I'd say overall the house is clean, and, more importantly to me I think, tidy. I really don't like having a ton of clutter around, and it's hard for me to sit still if there's something out of place. Sometimes Joe makes fun of me (although he's really tidy, too), but one of my favorite things to say is, "It is a slippery slope! One day you have a used paper towel left on the counter, and the next day you can't walk through your own living room!" I mean, I guess that might be a bit drastic (but is it though? IS IT?), but it's a principle that has worked well for me. In fact, students at Fatima used to know that the number one way to irritate me was to move something in the classroom and not move it back. I can't count the number of times I said to a student, "I don't go to your room and move your stuff! Quit moving my stuff!" (In case you're new, I had a really good relationship with these kids, and they knew it was funny. They felt at home in my room, but like a really tidy home where we all MOVED STUFF BACK.) Like I also said to them multiple times, "One minute you're turning the hand sanitizer pump around, and the next minute this whole room is in chaos!"

Now, you're probably sitting there reading this like -- does Anna know she has a problem? Like, she knows this is weird, right?

I mean, I guess a little? A little weird?

But I guess I didn't really realize how intense this all was until the other day when I pulled out the dustbuster, and Joe was like, "I'm going to make you a holster for that so you can pull it out like *imagine cowboy in the wild west motion.* Actually, better yet I'm going to make you a backpack so you can be like *imagine Ghostbusters pulling out their particle accelerators to trap ghosts motion*."

Apparently I use the dustbuster a lot. (And to think when Joe first suggested buying one last year, I was a little wary to spend the $35. HA! The dustbuster is my favorite weapon against dirt, dust, and dog hair! The 3Ds.)

I know we all have different thresholds for tidy-ness, just like we all have different gifts and different things that irritate us. I also know we all have various size homes, various amounts of time to clean our homes, and various amounts of children and pets who dirty up our homes. I certainly know that adding an infant to your home drastically increases the amount of stuff you have while drastically decreasing the amount of time you have to tidy. And because absolutely no one asked me or cares about this at all, I thought if I could give only four little suggestions as to how to take your house from zero to SOMEONE IS STOPPING BY IN THIRTY MINUTES -- or better yet, from zero to "I tidied up for twenty minutes and now I feel really peaceful and can enjoy this" -- it'd be this:

1. Get your dishes out of your sink and off your counter. An empty sink just looks super clean, and all you have to do is rinse a few dishes and put them in your dishwasher. You don't even have to run your dishwasher. Just get that stuff out of your sink and off your counter.

2. Empty your trashcans. Seriously, I promise you if you take out your trash and put a new trash bag in your trash can you will feel like a million bucks. And I don't just mean your kitchen trash can. In fact, I'd argue it's even more important to take the trash out of those little trash cans we all keep in our bathrooms. Emptying those bags takes minutes only, and your bathroom will look so clean!

3. Run the vacuum. Your coffee table may be covered in dust and your kids' toys might be all over the floor, but if you just vacuum (even around the toys! Don't even pick them up if you don't want to!), your house will look super clean. Even if you just halfway do it! Don't even bother to use any of the attachments to get behind the furniture or under the couch. Just do what you can see.

4. Tidy up your counters. Throw away the junk mail and old newspapers. Put those plastic Target bags wherever you keep them. Toss that pencil, that coupon, and that set of keys you're still trying to figure out opens what into that junk drawer we ALL have.

Like I said before, my house is always covered in some state in dirt, dust, and dog hair, but I have found that if I do the above four things it is life changing to me in terms of my mental health and peace of mind. Perhaps a future blog post will be coming on: how to declutter in one simple step! (Spoiler alert: get rid of stuff. Or ask me! I'll help you!)

And if you're ever in the market to get me a gift, I will always happily accept bleach wipes, Febreze, and Swiffer Wet Jet pads! :)

Our son and our dogs. Or as I like to call them, the ninjas. They are very skilled in the stealth art of depositing dirt, dog hair, dust, and clutter while being equally skilled in having no hand in cleaning it all up! Great at naps, though.

A Reminder.

Joe recently won an award at his company's national meeting. He wasn't expecting it at all, and several hundred people from across the nation heard his name called. He won an award for being the best at his job out of all of the people who do the same job he does in different parts of the country. Needless to say, Bert and I are very proud of him. He works really hard, and I am so glad that he was recognized for what he does. (The only way I found out about this is Joe texted me from the meeting and said, "I have something funny to tell you later." Then he called that night and said, "Do you want to hear something funny?" and told me he won an award. I was like, "How is this funny?!" Knowing Joe was going to tell absolutely no one else about this, I took the liberty of texting his parents and my parents because I thought they should know too!)

This made me think about the last time I was recognized at my job or for anything, really. Not that I have ever been some grand achiever, but I've won a couple of awards in my lifetime, for which I am proud and that meant a great deal to me for various reasons.

The more I kept thinking about it though, the more I realized, it's been a while. And I thought about people I know who have been recognized for things over the past couple of years: friends with job promotions, friends who are well known in the Huntington community for sitting on various boards and being involved in so many organizations. People whose names seem to be known by everyone, everywhere they go. And, because I am human, I began to get a little jealous. In the past year and a half, I have gone from being known in the community to being no one. No one knows me here in this giant metro area we now live in. (Except the children's librarians at our local library.) I have gone from being lifted up at my job by encouragement from my principal, colleagues, parents, and students to hearing nothing about my job performance ever. I stay at home with Bert all day and take care of him, try and help him develop correctly, read to him, play with him. I take care of our housework, errands, and bills. It's probably the hardest work I've ever done in many ways, but no one is handing out awards for that kind of stuff.* I know how selfish, self-centered, and whiny this all sounds, and I appreciate the compassion you show in reading my honest feelings without judgment.

However, in the midst of all of this, I was reminded of something that shifted my perspective back to where it should be. And that is

God will see.

I have written about this before, but I wrote about it before I moved, stopped teaching, and became a full-time mom. This sentence means a lot more to me now that I read it in the context of being home all day, caring for a child.

I don't mean to complain, just to share: there are days when Bert is fussy and there's dog hair everywhere and the hill of laundry has become a mountain and bills are due soon that I just want to collapse in frustration. It is at times like these that I pray for the courage and wisdom to whisper to myself, "God will see." Truly, I will spend day in and day out here alone with Bert, who can't sit up or talk, for an undetermined amount of time doing so many little things all day long that only I know about. But that's not completely true, is it? Because Someone else sees too. When I think of this, I get tears in my eyes because those three little words are powerful enough to shift my perspective and change my heart.

If I had to guess, I'd say there are a lot of people out there who work so hard at so many things day in and day out and rarely (if ever) hear any recognition or congratulations or appreciation. Man, it's hard, isn't it? But to my friends who work outside the home: God sees when you refill the pot of coffee in your office kitchen. God sees when you offer to help a coworker with a task. God sees when you pick up the paper towels that someone else threw on the floor of the office bathroom. God sees when a boss, customer, or colleague is rude or hurtful to you and you respond in kindness anyway. He sees. And to my stay at home parent friends: God sees when you lovingly change your baby's diaper even though you just changed it less than 10 minutes ago. God sees when you spend all day wiping spit off your baby's mouth and chin. God sees when you read your child book after book even though you're starving and haven't gone to the bathroom in hours. He sees.

Keeping this in mind won't make every day perfect, but what I pray it will do for all of us is to help lighten our load a little bit and help keep us humble as we all do the work we're called to do.

*I just want to be clear that Joe is vocally appreciative, daily, of what I do for our family. This in no way relates to him or his words and actions. 

2020 Vision

I hope you all have had a great holiday season and are having a wonderful start to the new year. If I could categorize our holiday season, one word I would have to use is busy. Of course, many people have busy holiday seasons, but ours seemed particularly tough this year as we navigated two 8-hour car rides to West Virginia (Thanksgiving and Christmas) with both our infant and our two dogs. Complicating matters was that Joe was out of town at his company's annual national meeting the week before Christmas, so I was home alone with Bert for an extended period of time, trying to get us all ready to travel.

First Christmas as a family of three!

Truly, we have been completely out of routine since before Thanksgiving. As much as we've enjoyed seeing our families and friends and celebrating a beautiful holiday season, we are also so happy to be home in our house, getting back in to regular life and cozy-ing up for the winter.

2019 was an extremely challenging year for our family. Of course, it was the best year ever in regards to the birth of our son, but moving to a new state and starting a new job was really, really hard on me and took a toll on my physical, mental, and spiritual health. We also bought our first house, had our first baby, and dealt with our son's post-birth health complications. This time last year I spent every non-school hour in bed, dealing with the sickness that often comes with the first trimester of pregnancy. So, in a lot of ways last year, we were just trying our best to survive. For a while we lived in what Jennifer Fulwiler calls "bare minimum mode" where you basically do the bare minimum it takes to survive. While there are seasons of life where this is exactly the place you should be in, I also know that it's important to not live in bare minimum mode.

Our 9 of 2019.

Joe and I got home from traveling December 30, so we spent New Year's Eve and Day in our new home. I'm glad we did so because by the time New Year's Eve rolled around, we had unpacked from our trip and started some laundry and were beginning to get the pieces of our lives back together. We decided we were not making any New Year's Resolutions. We have never really done this, and we're okay with it because it's easy for a person like me to miss a day of journaling/exercising/not eating cookies or whatever and then feel like a COMPLETELY HORRIBLE PERSON for failing that day. So, no good. Instead, after we went to Mass and put Bert to bed, we ate some appetizers and had a couple of drinks and made some goals for our family. Some things we'd like to work to accomplish in 2020. What really helped was we used this printout that allowed us to organize our goals by category. We feel really good about the manageable and measurable goals we came up with. We tried to be as realistic as possible. For example, while we'd like to take a neighborhood walk with Bert every night, we know that there are nights Joe will get home late, or it will be raining, or we just won't feel like it. So instead, our goal is to take two family walks per week. If we do more, GREAT! But we feel confident we can accomplish two. One important thing we decided was to check in with each other once a month to evaluate how our goals are going. I think that this will really help us stay on track and feel good about where our family is.

Our simple and cozy New Year's Eve.

One exciting goal for ourselves this year is we have decided to try and take on the 52 Hike Challenge. Joe LOVES the outdoors, and I like the outdoors, and we want our son to love being outside, too. So we've decided to take a family hike once per week in a new location each week. We use the term "hike" loosely because we have a 5-month-old son who cannot sit up, let alone walk, so he has to be pushed in a stroller. When he's able to sit up on his own, Joe will carry him in this really cool backpack his sister gave us when Bert was born. We are adapting this goal to fit our family, and we are excited to do it! We took our first family hike today, and we are so happy we spent a couple hours outdoors exploring somewhere new. 

Our first family hike of the year at the Gwinnett Environmental Heritage Center. Bert clearly had a blast.

I also used Jennifer Fulwiler's "Word of the Year" generator to get our family word for the year: Dream. I am really excited about this word because I've been telling Joe a bunch over the last year that we need to have more dreams for our family: places we'd like to go and things we'd like to do and accomplish over the course of our lives. (Basically, right now all we have is retire and follow College GameDay around to every location for the entire season. Which is an awesome goal, but it's the only one we've got!) I feel like this word was perfectly assigned to us this year. 

Our family's word for the year.

Along with our family goals, an individual goal I have this year is to be less judgmental of people and work harder to understand where they are coming from and what their motivations are. 

We were in bare minimum mode for a lot of 2019, but we are not there anymore. We are working as a family and as individuals to grow and learn and take care of our physical, mental, and spiritual health  so we can be better spouses, parents, children, and friends.

There is always excitement in the new year, but, for me at least, there is always a little fear too. Fear of the unknown and of what "might" happen. But I pray to understand that things will always happen, and that God did not give us a spirit of fear but of power, love, and self-control.

I pray that you and your family will have a blessed, joyful, healthy, and magic 2020.

Healing.

Bert turned four  months old Wednesday. As I mentioned the other day, where does the time go? In that same post, I published some photographs my good friend Maggie was kind enough to take of our family when we were in West Virginia for Thanksgiving.

This marks the third set of photographs Maggie has taken for us. She took our engagement photos in 2017, our wedding photos in 2018, and now our family photos in 2019. All three sets of these photos are beautiful, make me happy when I see them, and are blessings to us. However, the most recent set of family photos has one adjective associated with them that the other two don't have: they are healing.

If you read my post about the birth of Bert and my expectations of it versus the reality of the situation (found here), you might remember that the one thing that truly pushed me over the edge was that we didn't get any photos of Bert in the hospital. As I wrote:

"But on Tuesday afternoon, two days after Bert's birth, I was standing by his bassinet in our room looking at him as he was lying in between the jaundice lights with his sunglasses on. I believe we had just found out he failed another hearing test. Suddenly, the photographer popped in and said she heard we were checking out that day and did we want to schedule photos for Bert? I just looked at him, then looked at her and told her that our son had some health concerns and it just wouldn't be possible for him to do it. So she said she'd just cross us off her list and get to the other babies who were also scheduled to be discharged that day.

The normal babies, you know." 

One thing that I want to add to what I wrote at the time, now that some months have passed, is that the photographer's response to me was part of what hurt so badly. It just hit me one day a few weeks ago that that lady never told me she was sorry to hear that Bert wasn't well. She literally just acted like he was taking up time on her list and she was relieved to be able to cross him off so she could move on with her day. I'm sure she didn't mean to be hurtful, but, you know, it hurt.

As time as passed, the wound has gotten less painful. But there are still times that it pops up. Just the other day we received a lovely picture frame for Bert's baptism (thank you Daniel and Catherine!) and the stock photo in the frame showed a baby with angel wings lying peacefully with his eyes closed. Joe remarked that we could never get Bert to pose like that, and I agreed with him that right now our son could never do that, but I also gently reminded him that that picture was a newborn photo.

Along with Maggie's photos, we were blessed to have Joe's sister Caroline come and visit us. Although she is not a photographer by trade (she is a stylist and business owner in Nashville), you'd never know it by the beautiful photos she also took of Bert.

Because of Maggie and Carrie, something that really hurt my heart and weighed me down was healed. I can't put into words how grateful I am to both of them for their kindness and time.

Photo by Caroline -- September 2019 

Photo by Caroline -- September 2019

Photo by Caroline -- September 2019

Photo by Caroline -- September 2019

Photo by Caroline -- September 2019

Photo by Margaret Schaad Photography -- November 2019

Photo by Margaret Schaad Photography -- November 2019

Photo by Margaret Schaad Photography -- November 2019

Photo by Margaret Schaad Photography -- November 2019

Photo by Margaret Schaad Photography -- November 2019

Photo by Margaret Schaad Photography -- November 2019

Photo by Margaret Schaad Photography -- November 2019

Month Four.

It is hard to believe that it is already December and Advent is upon us. It's equally hard for me to believe that tomorrow Bert will be four months old. It's a cliche, but it is for a reason, that time flies. The time between Bert's birth in early August and now seems like it has gone by in a blur, but it also seems like so much time has passed. I can't figure out when we switched from short sleeve onesies to survive the heat to long sleeve fleece sleepers and coats when we go outside. It's never one day, it seems, but a series of moments: first you exchange your shorts for sweatpants, then you put away your flats and pull on your boots, then you find a cardigan, then your winter coat. A series of shifts so light they almost don't seem perceivable until you open your eyes one morning and realize you've turned your heat on and it's cold when you get out of the shower.

We have settled into a routine here, in a manner of speaking. I'm still very much baby-led: Bert eats when he's hungry and sleeps when he's tired, and in between we read, play, stretch, sing, go to the library, get our groceries, and run errands. We are blessed that Bert is mostly a cheerful, easygoing little fella. How his life started seems to have left no permanent mark on him, or, if it has, I pray that the mark it left is remembering how his parents never left him and how many people love him.

For myself, I am doing all right and try and take things day by day. I have not experienced the sadness and hopelessness that can accompany post-partum depression, but I have realized these last couple of months that my post-partum symptom is anger. I am quick to get angry and quick to stay angry, and I have a short temper. I really hold on to offenses and am unable to forgive and forget. The worst part is I'm the kind of person who, when I get angry about one thing, easily slides into recalling all the reasons I am angry until I am just one big ball of uncontrollable anger. I don't think this is my traditional behavior, but I have absolutely recognized it in myself these past weeks. I am not proud of it. I wish it weren't so. I do my best to control it, but sometimes (frequently) I fail miserably. I know it is taking a toll on Joe, and I'm sure it's taking a toll on my other family members and friends and probably randoms in the community that come into contact with me, too. Sometimes when I think about it I feel overwhelming guilt and quickly begin to beat myself up. The guilt compounds the anger, and I'm right back to where I started. I wish I could say that I'll start counting my blessings and realizing how lucky I am in life and that would take the anger away, but I know that it might not. So instead I'm trying to do those things while also taking life on a moment-by-moment basis and giving myself space and permission to mess up.

I think that because I was fortunate to recover physically pretty quickly from Bert's birth that I really didn't and haven't given myself time to fully recover in other ways. I know Bert is four months old now, but on the other hand Bert is only four months old. And this also corresponds with the holiday season which brings its own stress. I know in America it seems we give mothers three months to get it together, but I promise you that it's not possible. At the end of three months, at least in our case over here, it seems I finally got into a semblance of a routine and caught up on life and just now am becoming able to tackle my own mental and emotional health and coming to terms with the fact that I had a baby. And I'm not teaching this year after all I went through to become a teacher. And all my friends and family live 500 miles away. And I've got laundry to do and a house to clean and groceries to buy and dinners to make. And am I a good mother and I'm still Joe's wife not just a mom and oh my gosh did we forget about the dogs because they're our family too and I'm pretty sure there's a Palmetto bug over there and how do I always forget to buy nail polish remover and holy crap Christmas cards.

Some of you may be reading this and rolling your eyes and internally chastising me for being a complainer. You may be thinking that so many people have it so much harder than I do, and man, you'd be so right. As I said before I do try to remember how fortunate I am, but sometimes I really come up short. So sometimes all I can do is share how I am honestly feeling and continue to pray for the grace and strength to do better.

Whatever you're struggling with this season, I'd be happy to pray for you. One thing I have learned for sure is that everyone (E V E R Y O N E) has something they're worried about, that is causing them stress, or that is exhausting them. Maybe your particular battle and mine are two different battles. Perhaps you're praying for the very thing that I have. Perhaps you don't even know why you're so tired or angry or upset. But remember: we all carry weight differently. Your burden might seem easy to carry to someone else, but you carry it differently. And that's okay.

Some beautiful photos of our family recently captured by the practically-perfect-in-every-way Maggie!

In the Morning

I just learned this morning that today is World Mental Health Day. Honestly, I wish every day were World Mental Health Day, as I think that we would all be a lot better off if we considered our mental health as important as our physical health. I think we would all be a lot better off if we treated mental illnesses as seriously as we treat physical illnesses like cancer. I think we would all be a lot better off if we felt as comfortable saying "I have an appointment with my therapist" as we do saying "I have an appointment with my dentist." I've written about mental health before, most recently concerning Bert's birth here.

After finding out about today being devoted to mental health, I thought it would be a perfect time to write about something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and that's what advice I would give a new mom. Let me say first that there is NO END to the amount of information out there that is available to new moms. Let me rephrase that and say: pretty much there is NO END to the amount of people out there who feel the need to tell you what you should be doing or should not be doing or questioning you or your methods. Truly, your mother, mother-in-law, neighbor, best friend, that lady at church, that woman at moms' group, granny in the grocery store, blogger on the internet (ahem), and random dude without kids "but I have two nephews!" (<-- true story) all have opinions about what you should do or not do.

And to that I say, Blessed are they who keep their mouths shut, for they will be able to visit baby Bert. :)

(I should also say at this time that the person in my life who is likely most qualified to give advice but who has truly kept her mouth shut unless explicitly asked for her input is my mom. Maybe I'll write more about that later since I have really appreciated that.)

The two best pieces of advice I have gotten are from my good friends and fellow moms of littles, Maggie and Catherine:

Maggie -- You are your baby's mom, and you know what's best.
Catherine -- Don't read anything on the internet.

So, with that in mind, I am going to tell you my advice for new moms whose babies aren't mine, and I'm going to do it here on the internet haha. But in all truthfulness, if asked for my input, and with today being World Mental Health Day, this is what I would tell any new mom:

Things always look better in the morning. 

My hardest times mentally so far as a mother have been during overnight feedings with Bert. I'm awake and alone, I am completely exhausted, it's dark, I have no one to talk to. Those things create the perfect conditions in which a storm of anger, doubt, and depression brews. When I think back over the past two months of mothering Bert to the times I've felt most hopeless, angry, and sad, they have mostly all been while breastfeeding him at 2:30 a.m., 3:45 a.m. or 5:15 a.m. Those are the times when I've thought to myself that I can't do this, that I'm a terrible mother, and that I am just so upset and sad. Those are the times when the anger inside me gets stirred up to a point that I just want to scream.

I do think it's important to deal with the underlying causes of those feelings and to talk to someone who can help. (I do.) But I would also say that in the morning when the sun is up and I've showered and had a coffee, those feelings that I had overnight seem so much more manageable. Even if the next night it all happens again -- and those feelings are very real -- I can tell myself that everything so far points to things feeling more manageable in the morning. And that gives me hope.

So if you are a new mom -- or honestly, any kind of person because I think this could really apply to anyone -- that is the advice I would give you: Things always look better in the morning.

That, and you are your baby's mom, and you know what's best, so don't read anything on the internet. :)

When you find yourself freaking out, picture Bert looking at you like this. "As if!"