![\"Postpartum](\"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/postpartum-3-680x907.jpg\")
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When Daniel took this photo, I was just five days postpartum. We had gone to the pediatrician earlier that afternoon, our third time since arriving home from the hospital with James. Neither of us had slept the night before\u2014or any of the nights before, come to think of it. Instead, we sat on the floor of James\u2019 nursery and tried to comfort him as he wailed, looking at each other (crying at each other?) like, hey so maybe it wouldn\u2019t be the worst thing if we spent all our money on a night nurse. Five days into motherhood and I had become a person who considers a robe an outfit. <\/p>\n
I fed James while Daniel ran out to get Five Guys, rocked him until he fell into that deep yet fragile baby sleep, then put him down in his Rock n Play beside the dinner table. I was so happy he seemed to be getting some good rest after the night of no sleep. I cleaned up the kitchen for a little while, unintentionally clanging a dish in the sink, and was relieved to see I hadn\u2019t woken him. Daniel came home and closed the door with a bang\u2014again James stayed sleeping! It wasn\u2019t until I crinkled the foil on my burger that his eyes shot open. I picked him up, kissed and hugged him, and laid him over my shoulder, picking up my burger in the other hand. I looked up from my burger at Daniel, with his iPhone camera pointed directly at me, and attempted to verify that he was indeed interested in being murdered. And yes! He was. <\/p>\n
\u201cNo trust me this is amazing,\u201d he said. \u201cThink about us in 20 years looking back on this picture\u2014it\u2019ll be our favorite family photo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Will it though? <\/em><\/p>\n I had to laugh. Will I be glad to have the photographic record of me, 50+ pounds overweight, eating Five Guys in my underwear with my newborn son on my shoulder? Maybe he was right. Maybe James and Daniel and I would look back at this photo someday and just love it. Every family has these time capsule-type photos. I certainly do. And what an appropriate portrait of a first-time mom in the throes of newborn life. What a capture of the way I felt, the way I looked, the way I ate comfort food with one hand when he was born. <\/p>\n Admittedly, I don\u2019t exactly *love* sharing this photo. I\u2019m not happy with being this overweight again. But hey, this is where I\u2019m at. And I\u2019ve been here before, a number of times over the past 12 years. This time though, it\u2019s not terribly painful for me to come to terms with finding myself here again, wanting to feel better. Maybe that\u2019s because this body made my precious son, or because I\u2019m older, somewhat wiser, and a lot kinder. Or maybe it\u2019s because every time that I go through these changes, I learn more about myself and gain a little more compassion. <\/p>\n So this is it, my friends\u2014the start of a new weight loss journey. I\u2019m going to take it slow and have compassion for myself along the way, because it\u2019s never perfect and it\u2019s never as linear as I hope. I\u2019ll be sharing more when I figure out what exactly I\u2019ll be doing and hopefully will update with my progress.<\/p>\n Can you relate? How did you handle postpartum weight loss?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Daniel took this photo, I was just five days postpartum. We had gone to the pediatrician earlier that afternoon, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":16483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[998],"tags":[1176,1178,788],"class_list":["post-16481","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weight-loss","tag-motherhood","tag-postpartum","tag-weight-loss"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"postpartum](\"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/postpartum-2-680x907.jpg\")
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