(Diary) 3 Lessons in 30 Days as a Mom

Sleep isn't the issue...

Welcome to my diary. These are entires I wrote during my own pregnancy. What you’re about to read is unfiltered, unedited, and perhaps a bit uncanny. But these are my raw feelings written in real-time. Everyone’s perspective and journey is different. This is mine.

Dear friend,

Jen Glantz here.

I’m in my second month of being a new mom.

This morning, someone asked us how it’s been going. Adam said it best:

It’s hard to notice change. It’s hard to even tell how much the baby has grown because we spend every second with her.

He’s so right. If we don’t completely stop time and pay attention to the little details, we miss them. The only way to measure change, growth, and even success is to count backward.

More than 30-days ago, I didn’t even know if I could get through the fears of giving birth. I really didn’t know if I could be a mom.

But now, here I am. I’m doing it. I’ve done it. I have a newborn and I’ve been her mom for a month.

Are we experts? Are we superstar parents?

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that we know more now than we ever have before.

When I take the time to see that, I can’t help but feel:

Proud…scared still..but proud to be a mom.

Ps. Know someone who would enjoy reading this?

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Some quick things I loved this week:

❤️ Products that I fell in love with this week:

• After a month of trying a ton of different diaper brands, we love Kudos the best. I found them on Shark Tank and they are the only brand Gemma doesn’t leak through - plus they are “natural” - so no chlorine, cotton, and have two absorption layers. I reached out to share my praise and they wanted to offer my readers a discount code: GLANTZ10 for 10% off.

• My feeding journey has been quite the adventure that i’m going to share soon. But as of now, I’m exclusively pumping and supplementing with formula. I’m using Bobbie and really love them - the baby does too. Natural ingredients that mimic breast milk. They also wanted to offer up a discount code: XO-JENGLANTZ10 for 10% off.

  These aren’t paid partnerships and I don’t make money if you use the code - I just really love them!

❤️ Heard this quote today and wanted to share it. It’s on setting boundaries - which is something you need to master as a new mom because you’re exhausted, healing, and don’t need extra stuff floating into your life:

No is a complete sentence. You don’t need to explain yourself.

❤️ I’ve been spending time spilling my thoughts on TikTok. Watch some of that fun stuff right here!

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3 Lessons in 30 Days as a Mom

Lesson #1:

You are the only one who is allowed to judge how you’re doing as a new mom. Not your friends, your family, a random mom in a Facebook group, or a person you haven’t seen since high school who is sliding into your DMs telling you what not to do.

Just you. Only you.

However, if you’re a tough judge, like I am, you might be super hard on yourself. You might even have an entire week where you live inside a cloud of guilt and feel like the world’s biggest failure. But as you emerge from that fog, you will realize that you’re doing the best you can and while it might not feel like perfection, one day you will look back and be amazed by all that you did, every single day.

Lesson #2:

The biggest challenges of having a newborn are the unexpected ones.

It’s not sleep.

You won’t sleep - but you already know that, you expect that.

It’s everything else that blindsides you.

It’s figuring out how to give a newborn a bath, how to feed a newborn if breastfeeding didn’t go as planned, and even how to soothe the baby when she’s crying.

Pro tip: have the pediatricians number on hand and find one who offers late-night virtual appointments. Also befriend other new moms. These two things really come in handy.

Lesson #3:

Realize you’re experiencing a brand new kind of love. Most relationships are built on getting to know a person through hours of conversation. Not this one. This type of love is built on sounds, eye contact, quality time, endless amounts of care, and just so many other things.

It reminds you that deep love is patient, unconditional, rare, and special.