Feeling accomplished

I mentioned before that part of my struggle as a new mom who happens to be staying at home is feeling like I'm not doing anything. I know I am nurturing a child and maintaining a household, but nobody seems to want to pay me for that. And for a very, very long time, I have not really been maintaining the household, just basically keeping the walls from falling down around us. There's a poem, "Song for a Fifth Child," that says "Quiet down cobwebs; Dust go to sleep! / I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep." 

I've tried to keep this stanza to heart as I watch dishes pile up, but I am starting to believe part of my recovery or sanity, if you will, has to be finding the time to keep a tidier house. I am using Pinterest to find chore schedules and tweak one to our house's needs, and I'm using an app called "Unf*ck Your Habitat" to motivate myself. 

I feel like a major mood booster at the end of the day is being able to say, I went on a walk, the baby tried a new food, we read three books, AND I organized the pantry, folded and put away three loads of laundry and tidied the kitchen and living rooms. 

I know some days are always going to be better than others, but I think taking pride in my household is important to keeping my head up.

I'm a Warrior Mom

The timing for the opportunity that just came into my life is almost too good to be true. Just as I was starting up this blog, it came to my attention that Postpartum Progress, a charity whose mission is to "improve the health and wellbeing of women and children by increasing awareness of postpartum depression and all other mental illnesses related to pregnancy and childbirth..." was looking for volunteers to be part of something called the Warrior Moms Battalion. 
More than 200 women across the United States have signed on to the Warrior Moms Battalion. Hopefully, we are going to spread awareness about PPD, but my personal hope is to reach out to mothers and families locally by starting a support group. I was browsing the Postpartum Progress website, and was shocked to discover there are no PPD support groups in all of downstate Illinois. Nowhere for moms like me to go, to know they aren't facing the battle alone - it seems ludicrous. One in seven women experience postpartum depression or anxiety, according to Postpartum Progress. I think there is a definite need for us to come together and help each other. 
Because I was lucky enough during my pregnancy to stumble onto a great group of moms online, I have seen firsthand the difference that a caring group of people can make, whether they are in your town or online. I know how important it is to have a supportive group of people standing with me as I experience the joys and trials of parenthood for the first time. 
It is so exciting to have this mission. I feel filled with purpose. My best friend just shared a quote on her Facebook: "Allow your passion to become your purpose and then it will become your profession." I feel like that is happening for me right now. 

How I knew I had PPD

The possibility of having postpartum depression was one of the many, many things I worried about during my pregnancy. I have a history of anxiety and - while not technically depression, I have been known to be fretful and melancholy.
In hindsight, I wish I'd mentioned the possibility to my doctor even sooner. I waited about 5 weeks, and by then I was crying all the time, impatient and snappish with my husband and frustrated with my daughter. I feel like I should have known something was off when I lost my cool over a completely innocuous comment made by my husband the day we came home from the hospital. My mother, stepfather, brother and nephew were all here to see the baby, and we arrived home late the night after the Raspberry was born. All my husband said was, "Where's her hat?" and I felt the (completely erroneous) weight of unspoken accusation behind it.
A really helpful resource for new moms who might think they have PPD is a website called Postpartum Progress. They have this list of symptoms of PPD and postpartum anxiety written so anyone can understand it, not just medical professionals.
The list really resonated with me and still does to some extent. At my pre-medicated worst, I wasn't eating, I was crying all the time, and I couldn't sleep even when the baby was asleep because I was on edge constantly, convinced she was going to wake up at any moment.
If you are having any of the symptoms on the list, please contact your doctor. Even if you're not sure, even if you feel guilty (which you shouldn't) please let your doctor know how you're feeling. Even though I'm not out of the woods just yet, things are immeasurably better now that I am taking some medicine to balance things out.
And as always, if you are feeling these things and just need someone to talk to, you can email me at ppdtbh@gmail.com. I'm here to listen.

Working, mom?

At age 17, I was taking orders over the phone and waiting tables at the most filth-encrusted Pizza Hut in central Indiana. I slid on the black headset with unwieldy battery pack at McDonalds one summer, where I rinsed dishes until the early morning hours. I made sandwiches and lattes, wrote business stories and took shaky video in a Kentucky courtroom. I spent one miserable month trying to sell warranties to surly Best Buy customers so I could make rent my senior year of college.

The point is, until Raspberry came along, I have always worked. I had to stop working 33 weeks into my pregnancy because of early labor, and my boss could never get me working from home approved.

I tried to return to work when the Raspberry was 6 weeks old, but my depression and guilt, along with an ill-timed nursing strike from my tiny human, made it clear to me then:  I needed to be at home with my baby so she could thrive and I could recover. 

She's almost 6 months old now and starting on solids. She still nurses quite often, but it's not every 45 minutes like it used to be. And our finances are looking grim.

I'm starting to put in applications for part-time work. I think if I can find something local, it will be all right to leave the raspberry with papa on his days off and go make us some make-those-ends-meet money. It's not only a financial necessity, I think it may help with my recovery as well. Days when we make it out of the house are always better than the days we stay cloistered. 

What are your experiences with working or staying home with your children? What advice do you have? Please leave a comment below. 

Hi there

Hi there. You can call me Red. I am 27, the mother of a 5-month-old girl, and I have been diagnosed with postpartum depression. I was diagnosed around 8 weeks after my daughter, who I will refer to as Raspberry, was born. It's taken me this long to get my shit together and start blogging about it. 

I am medicated and doing pretty well at the moment. As long as I remember to take my meds, I don't have any issues, so I feel pretty lucky about that. I am, however, angry yet that PPD had to happen to me. PPD stole the early days of my child's life from me. I kept her alive, thank goodness, but it's a blur of anxiety, exhaustion, sadness, fear and guilt, when it should have been a time of great joy in my life. I should have been bonding with my baby and instead I felt like I was losing my mind. 

This is something I wrote while I was waiting for my medication to begin working. 

I have a healthy, beautiful child who loves me and gives me her smiles and giggles.  I have a home, and a loving partner, two cats and a dog. I may not have much of a job right now, but I have the skills to get one when I can.  I have friends and family who love and care about me.  so why do i feel like this?

My goal with this blog is to connect moms and families affected by postpartum depression. I want you to know you are not alone, because that was how I felt for a long time, despite the fact that I have friends and family who love me.

I can be reached at redppdtbh@gmail.com. If you feel alone, you can e-mail me. I will soon have it set up so I will get notifications when someone emails me. I am not a counselor, psychiatrist or psychologist. I am just a mom who wants you to know you're not the only one going through this. 

Pinterest sucked me in.

I finally got an invite to Pinterest, the virtual pin-board website where people can make lists of everything from exercise tips to dream cars. I have always been the kind of person who makes lists, so being able to make an extremely graphic representation of things I want, need or like is just really fun and addicting.
My most-perused (by me) board is the one named "New House Wishlist." We moved in January to a new house, a three-bedroom, 1-story house with a carport. The house is contract for deed, which means we'll eventually own it. We've done a lot of painting and ripping out carpet, but we're nowhere near done.
The point is Pinterest has a lot of fun, crafty ideas. One of the ones I wanted to do was this, pictured at left. I love to have little plants in the windows, and I thought this was a neat presentation.
One of the biggest events in Mt. Vernon every year is the Midwestern Herb and Garden Show, and it's this weekend. Today Dan and I went and got fudge, cookies, tea... and some plants, too. I got a "hen and chick," the small rosette-shaped succulent; some Greek oregano; basil; catnip; and lemon balm. I then took Dan on an impromptu supplies-gathering journey that began at the Dollar Tree. The DT had some bud vases in the style of these vases, but nothing in that size, so I headed to my favorite place to hate, Wal-Mart. I found some inexpensive vases in kind of a hurricane shade shape and decided I didn't want to dash all over town, and they'd do.
I had a package of "bowl decorations" my aunt- and uncle-in-law sent us in advance of our wedding I decided (at length - not that they weren't lovely, just I had it in my head I needed to do exactly what was in the picture) that could stand in for the rocks seen in the bottom of these little vases.
And so the lady with the black thumb got to work.I put the different decorations in the bottom of each vase, and then some kind of raffia-type material as a potting soil buffer. I put a little bit of potting soil in the vases, and then jammed the soil down with the end of a serving spoon. Finally, I potted, or "vased" the herbs, and tried to gently smoosh them down. I had too much of everything in the first one, so the plant is kind of overflowing.

This is me smooshing potting soil. This is also the first time I have tried to take pictures of myself doing something for the express purpose of blogging it, so there's that also.
Anyway, the original photo shows the vases with interesting paper wrapped around them, with the name of the plant on the paper. I got some vellum and wrote the name of the plant on the vellum, but with the curve of the vase, I wasn't sure how it would look. I decided to hot-glue the vellum to the vase so it wouldn't slide all over the place.
I took some pictures of the first one, and tried to tie some yarn around it, but it was kind of like a curvaceous woman wearing a shapeless dress. It looked blah, and if I tried to cinch the yarn at all, it crumpled, so I decided to forgo the paper altogether. That's what the little tags are for.
Here's what I ended up with:I think they're pretty. Hopefully I can keep the dang things alive.

Season's Greetings

I'm going to take photos of the animals I made for my nieces and nephews tomorrow. I will probably post them tomorrow too, the kiddos aren't really at blog-browsing age and my brothers don't subscribe here, as far as I know.
I've been keeping quite busy trying to get everything done. I'm on my last one, just sewing on some stubby little hippopotamus legs before I get started on a commissioned project that I can't mention.
I have a little more time now that I quit Facebook. You can't ever really quit Facebook, as they apparently hold on to your information until the rest of time, but I probably won't go back for a while. I took a break for several reasons, from my displeasure with the privacy of the site, to some negative experiences I had with friends, to the fact that I'm one of those people who gets an inferiority complex from looking at the facades of other peoples' perfect lives, then feeling bad for feeling bad about my life. To quote Joe Walsh, I can't complain but sometimes I still do.