Baby Blues

Some days I feel a lot like this...

I had a pretty intense few days of baby blues that I'm still trying to get over. Thursday was the worst... I felt like crying all the time, I did cry a lot, no energy, lethargic, and just an overall sense of weariness. It was probably the worst day I've had so far. I'm sure Alan was wondering who replaced his wife with this sobbing, crazy mess. No matter what I did I just couldn't pull myself out of it. It was a relief to finally go to bed and try again the next day.

Since Thursday, I've been trying to figure out the things that I can change or do everyday to make the baby blues pass. Here are the things I've come up with so far...

-Get out of the house. Go to the store, walk around campus, go to the playground, anything to get out. It helps that the weather is getting warmer, but we've still had some snow days were it is really hard to go anywhere, and those are the days I feel it the most.

-Get some physical exercise. Katie and I are pretty good about going out for walks, but there are still days that we can't get together. Alan and I have been finding time for our daily workouts and those seem to help.

-Put the scale away. We've been working out, I've been eating better, I feel better, and I even pulled out a smaller pair of jeans today, but the numbers are not moving. I was getting so fixated on the numbers and letting them dictate how I saw myself. I finally had to put the scale in a hard to access place and go back to my old way of measuring - how well my clothes fit.

-Keep the house organized. It makes a world of difference to have a clean living room. I fight a daily uphill battle with this one. Elsie can undo any work I do twice as fast as I can do it. But I've found that if I can limit the toys she's playing with and have a rule that toys/blocks/crayons need to be picked up before getting the next toy/block/whatever out, it is sometimes manageable.

-Have something in mind for dinner. I have recently redone how I plan out dinners, and it has been wonderful. No more getting to 5 o'clock with hungry bellies and then standing around in the kitchen arguing about what to eat. When there is a plan in place, if all else fails I can at least direct Alan to the kitchen with a recipe in hand and ingredients in the cupboards.

-Have a sounding board. Alan got to hear my sobbing tale of woe Thursday night. Half of it wasn't intelligible, and the other half was so trivial it shouldn't really matter. But it mattered to me on that no good rotten day, and Alan was there to listen to it and tell me it was going to be alright. I need those people like Alan and Katie to tell me when I'm going a little crazy and help me back onto the path of saneness.

I'm sure I will have a few more days like Thursday until my hormones finally even out. But when they come, it's nice to know that I at least have a battle plan for how to deal with them.