Welcome to the Mommyhood!

Becoming a mother is quite a trek into unchartered territory. You just don't yet know the good spots to take baby, or the secrets of soothing/amusing/nurturing baby, and sometimes you just feel like the new kid on the block with no friends yet and a whole lot of bags and boxes to unpack, but no idea of where to put your stuff.

I feel like I just moved in to a whole new neighborhood, in a new town, and possibly a foreign country. And I am just starting to try and get my bearings.

I am excited about making new friends, discovering new people/places/things, and getting a better handle on my surroundings and situation. Simply by having a baby I have joined this new club, but I don't really know many of its members yet, and getting to meet other new (or seasoned) mothers is a lot like dating again, only with less cocktails. At least for now.

I do have friends that are parents, but most of the ones I have known for a while live pretty far away. Although they have welcomed me to the mommyhood, it is certainly a long walk to get to their houses.

I am not really one of those girls whose friends already had babies, and I only know a few ladies who are mommies, and those relationships are relatively new. So I will have to find new ways to meet cool moms and build relationships with the ones I have already met so that Madee and I have people to play with.

I can't wait until Jess has her baby. It has been so cool to go through our pregnancies together, even though they were so different, and though I am sure our babies and our mothering experience will also be unique, it is nice to have a sister I can relate to on this level. Somebody who faces similar challenges as what I am going through, and has to figure out all this stuff too.

In fact without her I would feel a little more lonely in this whole process.
I wonder if I should throw a "babywarming" party with the new moms I have met, because I have lots of questions about the upcoming months and they have just been through those stages of development or are tackling them now, so they have some pretty valuable information to impart.

And real human interaction beats reading Parents Magazine any day.