No one can prepare you for life with a newborn baby. Your first child won't even prepare you for your second child.
We tend to forget what it is really like.
We forget how absolutely tiring having a newborn can be and how entirely dependent they are on you. Breastfeeding alone is a very stressful activity, not to mention it has to happen every two to four hours and how dispirited you feel when you struggle with it. How dispirited you feel when you just changed a nappy and your baby gets all red-faced again. How powerless you feel when they are screaming and crying and you do not know how to make it better even after trying everything - winding, and massaging and feeding and changing and rocking and walking and nothing seems to help. How absolutely exhausted you are from the constant attentiveness, never getting more that two to four hours of sleep at a time, and constant anxiety of all the possible things that can go wrong.
And then, round about six to eight weeks, they smile. Not a I-have-a-cramp-and-will-burp-into-your-face smile, a real smile. They look straight at you, and smile. The most beautiful thing you will ever see. That smile. Then, once again, all is forgotten and that little seed in you mind starts to grow again - "maybe we can have another one?"
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