Hey youtube it's Lucie welcome back to my channel! If you can hear a baby crying in the distance,
it's because there's a baby crying in the distance and it's mine. But don't worry he's with his nanny
and he's being fed. If this is your first time coming to my channel I'm a new mom I'm 29 years
old and my son Milo is just about four months old. Thank you so much to Blueland for sponsoring
today's video I just got a ton of new beautiful cleaning supplies from them, so I'll share that
a bit later. The reason I really wanted to make this video is because I was the first of most
of my friends to have a baby and so I truly did not know at all what to expect. I thought I knew
just from following some people on Instagram and having a couple of friends and family members here
and there with babies, but I knew nothing. So, hopefully today's video can just shed
some light on what the reality is like when you have a newborn. Something I want to say up front
is that when people make expectation vs reality videos, you have to keep in mind that this is
their expectations versus their reality. Everyone's reality is different. What I'm
sharing with you today is just what I expected and then what actually is the case for me and my life.
So keep in mind if you don't have a baby, yet it's not like my reality is going to be your reality,
and of course, some people don't even want to have a baby. I just hope this video is entertaining and
insightful. Let's get into it. You might have watched the video that I made with my husband
Michael back when i was pregnant and it was all about how we knew we were ready to have a baby.
If you haven't seen that, I will link it for you up here and you can go watch that first.
What I will say is that I thought I was ready. I was excited, Michael and I were at a good place
in our relationship, and that's why we decided we were ready to start trying. Looking back on that,
there's no way I could have possibly known what was about to come. What I want to share
is that motherhood is such a journey and I've only been in it for four months, but there are
lots of highs, and lots of lows. It's just kind of a constant roller coaster. I don't want this
video to scare anyone I'm just trying to share the truth. I'm going to start with a positive here.
I expected to love my son, I knew that I was so excited to meet him. I expected that it was
going to feel amazing to look at him. The reality is that I couldn't possibly fathom just how much
I was going to love this human. I look into his eyes and I absolutely melt every time he smiles.
I can't explain how it feels when I wake up first thing in the morning. I'm so,
so excited to go into his room and see him. At the end of the day I am so sad that I have to
put him in the bed and leave him and walk out of his room, because all I want to do is spend 24-7
with him. It's just insane, Michael and I look at him and we think, this is half me and half you. It
feels like a magical Harry Potter situation that we just created a human out of thin air. When we
look at him our lives, we feel totally complete. I remember being so over pregnancy by the end and I
felt so excited to be postpartum because I thought nothing can be worse than the way I'm feeling
right now. The reality is that my postpartum body was not much more enjoyable than my pregnancy
body. I had a pretty easy vaginal birth but I still had a first degree tear on the inside.
Additionally, I had some pain and a rash on my back from the epidural. I also felt like my boobs
had a lot of weird pain and sensations from having the milk come in and starting the breastfeeding
process. On top of that, it was just so much more care and energy that needed to go into my body.
I was now wearing pads because I was bleeding for another few weeks. I also was wearing nipple pads
all day because of my leaking boobs. The end of pregnancy, no matter how difficult it seemed. was
actually easier than the first few weeks of being postpartum. I kind of just envisioned what my home
would feel like with a baby and I remember feeling like it was going to be this apartment that I live
in with a baby. The reality is that when we came home from the hospital, every single zone of
our apartment felt entirely different. I honestly felt like we moved to a new apartment. Our office,
which used to be the space that Michael and I did our work in, became a temporary storage space for
dirty laundry and all the baby supplies that we weren't ready to use yet. We were both on parental
leave so we didn't use that for work anymore. Our living room, which used to be this clean pristine
living space, all of a sudden was strewn with burp cloths, bouncers, and swings, and it's pretty much
a huge mess at the end of every day. The kitchen which used to be a very clean and tidy zone became
a holding station for pump parts and bottles. All of a sudden there were drying racks everywhere and
stuff just on the counter all the time. Our bedroom, which used to be our private clean space,
all of a sudden became a pumping station for me. I set up this little nursing cart next to my bed for
when I pump overnight, and I have a cooler next to the bed. There's towels on the bed and it's just
completely different from how it used to be. Then the nursery, which before milo was born felt like
this empty clean beautiful space, all of a sudden became a twister tornado. Our apartment foyer,
which used to just be a clean entry space, is now a parking lot for strollers. Our home has just
become so much messier than it used to be. This is where Blueland comes in. It's been a lot harder
than I thought it would be to not use single-use plastic products with a baby. I recently learned
that an estimated 5 billion plastic hand soap and cleaning bottles are thrown away each year,
and each bottle can be made up of more than 90% water, which is a total lose-lose situation for
the planet. With Blueland you just buy the bottles once. They look like this
and then you can reuse them and refill them forever. You just fill up the bottles with
warm water and then you drop in one of the spray cleaner tablets. They have glass cleaner, bathroom
cleaner and multi-surface cleaner. The tablets come in these little compostable paper packages.
There's also a foaming hand soap and then there are also dishwasher tablets and laundry detergent
tablets. All of the packaging is honestly so beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. It's one
of the things in my house that I get complimented on most often when people come over. To be honest,
my new reality is having cleaning supplies like this out on the counter at all times so that I can
just grab and go. Right now you can get 20% off your first order if you go to blueland.com/lucie.
When you buy a kit, the bottles start at just $10 and they're meant to be reused forever with these
refill tablets that start at just $2. They smell really good, it all looks really pretty, and it's
not single-use plastic, so it makes me feel really happy. Once again that's 20 %off your first order
at blueland.com/lucie. I'm going to leave that on the screen for you. That's blueland.com/lucie my
name spelled l-u-c-i-e. Take a picture. I expected my work to entirely come to a halt. I thought that
I would be totally uninterested in keeping up my job and that all I would care about was this
child. The reality is that I actually became more interested and more excited to do my work.
Milo came three weeks early so when he was born I actually hadn't wrapped up all of my projects
and I spent a decent amount of time in those first few weeks while he was sleeping on the countertop
doing some work and answering emails and to be honest doing work actually made me feel better
in those times when I was feeling sad. It just made me feel like I was still myself.
I still had a little piece of Lucie in there. I actually became really motivated. I knew that I
could sort of expect to be tired. Everyone told me if you think you're tired now, during pregnancy,
just wait until the baby comes. The reality is that we were actually experiencing next level
exhaustion, something I had never felt in my life before. We had a baby nurse for the first
month of Milo's life and if you're interested in more on that I did a whole q&a on my Instagram so
definitely go check it out, it's in a highlight. But I feel really fortunate that we had that
nurse for our first month with a baby because she taught us so much and she was able to take
on all the night shifts so Michael and I could catch up on some sleep. When she left it hit us
like a train and Michael and I had no idea what we were in for those first few weeks on our own.
It was brutal. I think there are very few things in life that are worse than being sleep deprived.
It honestly just leaks into every element of your day. It makes you physically ill,
mentally ill, and just overall unwell. I expected breastfeeding to just be this simple
very easy and natural thing. I had seen tons of pictures of moms breastfeeding and a lot of times
they just have the baby looped under their arm and it seems so easy. No one really talked to me about
what breastfeeding would mean for my life and my schedule, but the reality is that the physical
and the mental demands of breastfeeding are rewarding, yet exhausting. There's
such a learning curve to the whole breastfeeding situation. I honestly think I'm going to make a
video that's all about breastfeeding and pumping because it's just top of mind for me right now,
and I do it every day. If you are interested in that i would highly recommend you follow me on
Tiktok because I've been sharing a lot of pumping content. I've been going live and pumping live,
and I really just have this goal to teach moms and soon to be moms and future moms all about
what pumping and breastfeeding is actually like because nobody shared this information with me
beforehand and I had no idea what to expect. I expected postpartum to be kind of like a party
with a baby. I had friends that had babies and I remember going over to visit their baby
for one hour was absolutely without a doubt the best hour of my entire day. So of course
I was envisioning that they got to have a 24-hour party with this baby every single day. The reality
is that postpartum, when Michael and I got home from the hospital we were a mess for a
good week to two weeks. It just feels really heavy and you expect it to be really jovial
and light-hearted and playful, but it's like this immense weight on you all of a sudden. Michael and
I spent a good portion of our first week home crying to one another, just sobbing emotions
pouring out. We asked each other a number of times what have we done? And keep in mind we planned to
have a baby. We wanted a baby, and even still once he came, we were very much like what is happening?
I had a pretty level pregnancy experience and when it came to postpartum I thought I would somehow
be exempt from getting the baby blues or from feeling extreme postpartum hormones but I was not.
Especially at night, when it got dark out and the sun was setting, I would just get so sad. It was
definitely not what I expected. I expected to have hundreds of family photos me, Michael and Milo
smiling together with these high quality beautiful family pictures. The reality is that we only have
photos on our phone of milo. Every so often one of us will take a photo of the other one with Milo
so there's some photos of milo and daddy, some photos of milo and mommy, and only once in a blue
moon when someone comes over and thinks oh let me take a family photo for you, that's the only real
time to get photos of the three of us. Otherwise it's just all Milo all the time. I thought that
I was going to be completely consumed with anxiety about whether the baby was continuing to breathe,
specifically overnight. Even during my pregnancy I noticed that I was feeling little pings of
that anxiety when I wouldn't feel him kick for short periods of time and I would try drinking
juice to induce the kicks and I was always pushing and poking and prodding at him to make sure he was
still alive and moving. I remember thinking when this thing's out of my body I'm just going to be
consumed all day with fear that he's going to stop breathing. The reality is that I'm really grateful
to say that I did not experience postpartum anxiety and I'm really happy to say that I
was able to trust that he would continue breathing when he was in his crib alone.
Our pediatrician at one of our early visits said something to me that stuck with me. She said he's
a caveman. He knows how to keep himself alive. She kind of explained to me what would happen if he
spit up when he was sleeping on his back and if I didn't hear him scream what he would do and how he
would turn his head to the side and he would vomit out to the side and that he wouldn't choke on his
own spit up. That was a concern of mine early on. She sort of just calmed my fears very quickly by
telling me he's a caveman, he knows how to stay alive, and from that moment forward I have been
very calm about not checking on his breathing. We haven't used any sort of breathing monitors, we
didn't use the sock, we didn't use the belly band, I just trust that he knows how to stay alive.
At the end of my pregnancy I was just so over maternity clothes and I was so excited
to go back to my regular cute clothes that were in my closet. I remember looking at my outfits
thinking I can't wait to wear this again, I'm going to dress so cute. I'm just so excited for
this. The reality is that postpartum pretty much all I wore was sweats. The baby would spit up on
almost everything I wore, so I had no drive to wear anything that was cute. Also I didn't fit
into my pants anymore so I needed to buy all new jeans. A lot of the old clothes that I wore were
not really functional for nursing. Any sort of jumpsuit or anything that wasn't easy to get my
boob out was a no go. At the end of the day I just wanted to be comfortable, so all I could think
about was pulling the most comfortable sweatsuit out of my closet, putting it on, and basically
spending the whole day in pajamas. Another reality of the situation is that I actually still love my
maternity clothes because they're really the most comfortable and I'm wearing my maternity leggings
right now. Can't stop, won't stop! I had so many cute newborn outfits for Milo picked out.
I expected that I would wake up in the morning, I would go to his closet, I would pick out the
cutest outfit and I would dress him in all these adorable newborn outfits every single day. The
reality is that not only did milo grow out of his baby newborn outfits very quickly like he
did not fit into anything after about two weeks, in reality we only ever really put him in cute
fancy outfits when we're going somewhere for some sort of an event, which happens very rarely around
here. For the most part, he lives in pajamas. We have a few go-to outfits that he basically
just wears over and over again. I'm gonna preface this with some background about Milo's sleep. For
the first month of his life he slept in his room with the baby nurse and then when the baby nurse
left we tried him next to us in his mini crib in our room, because I know the recommendation is to
put the baby in your room. We absolutely could not sleep that way. He was a grunter, he was so loud
we could not get any sleep with him next to us. Our pediatrician at the one month visit told us
to put him in his own room and to just listen for him on the monitor. My expectation was that if my
baby was not right next to me in my room I wasn't going to hear him and if he cried in the middle
of the night I wouldn't be able to tend to him because I'd be in a deep sleep and I wouldn't hear
his cry from down the hall. The reality is that my brain has been entirely rewired and even if
Milo is down the hall and the doors are closed, if he makes a peep I can hear it. I have super sonic
audio abilities now just for my babies cry. I can be in the middle of the deepest sleep of my
life but if he makes a peep I wake up and hear it. Michael is still sleeping like a log next to me.
That also does translate into a bit of a phantom cry situation where sometimes I hear the cry
but he's not actually crying. That happens a lot in the shower. It often happens at night,
but I will say there is rarely a time when he's crying when I don't hear it. I expected that a
newborn would be so fragile and breakable and that every time I held him I would be nervous that I
was going to snap him in half. The reality is that you quickly learn that you're not going to break
the child. It's almost like when you get a new iphone and your first week or two with it you're
very gentle and you lay it down on the counter and you're scared to drop it and then by the next week
you're throwing it across the room and you don't care anymore because you realize it's fine. Not
that I've ever thrown Milo across the room, but I will say that I've gotten a lot less scared to
handle him and I can now pick him up, I can hold him under my arm and I just know I'm not going to
pull his arm out of his socket or break his leg. I honestly thought that once I had a baby everything
else in my life would stop mattering and the only thing that would matter would be this child.
I thought my work would become unimportant my friends would become secondary
every little stress and issue that was popping up would melt away and I would just care about
the child. The reality of the situation is that everything else in my life still matters. I still
care about my friends, I still care about my work, I still have goals and aspirations, and personal
things that I want to achieve, and just because I have a baby none of that has changed. I'm still
me guys. So if you're planning to have kids in the future I hope this video was useful to you.
If you're not planning to have kids, I just hope that you are entertained and I'm shocked that you
made it this far, but thank you for being here today. Thank you for coming back to my youtube
channel. Please drop a comment down below and let me know what other videos you want to see. I'm
really excited to keep making videos for you and to dive back into work, see you next time! Bye!