As we approach my baby girl’s 6-month birthday, I’ve been reflecting on the things I’ve learned over the past six months.

Becoming a parent, there is definitely a very steep learning curve. You are forced to jump right in and must quickly learn the practical skills: changing diapers, feeding baby, calming baby, changing their clothes, unclogging a stuffy nose, checking their temperature, etc… You also quickly learn to do things one-handed and much faster than you used to because you have to squeeze all of your chores into your baby’s quick 30-minute nap each afternoon. If you weren’t already a pro at multitasking, you must quickly learn to juggle twenty tasks at once.  (If you can learn to blow dry your hair on the toilet while painting your toenails and talking on the phone to your mother-in-law, then you can stop reading here!) But, I think the biggest thing I’ve learned in the past 6 months is how to trust my own instincts.

It’s only natural when raising a baby to seek out other people’s opinions. You figure, why not benefit from the experience and wisdom of others from the “village,” so to speak? Opinions on every topic are so easy to come by and are thrown at you left and right from so many sources: your friends and family, the internet, magazines, other parents you trust, books, blogs, etc… So many of those opinions are so convincing and yet for every topic, you can find a million different opinions, many of which are contradictory. Many of the opinions are also quite extreme.

Opinions are definitely useful and it’s helpful to do your own research, but when it comes down to making parenting decisions for your baby, the most important thing is to trust your own instincts. Even if five of your closest friends are mothers, whose parenting style you trust and seek to emulate, tell you the same thing about sleep training or starting solids or how to discipline your toddler, if what they tell you doesn’t sit well, or makes you feel uneasy, it’s so important to go with your instinct and do what feels right to you.  Unless there’s some legitimate medical concern (in which case, you should consult your pediatrician), chances are most of the decisions you make will not significantly harm your baby, and there’s no reason you can’t change your mind down the road.  As long as you trust your instinct, chances are things will be okay!

Was it hard for you to learn to trust your own instincts?

Plus, more from The Bump:

The Most Important Parenting Lesson I’ve Learned So Far

5 Lessons Learned from Our First Trip to the ER

Mom’s Intuition vs. Doctor Diagnosis

It’s hard to believe my baby girl, Julia, is 3 months old today.

I thoroughly enjoyed the 12 weeks that I had off from work to stay home with her, but our wallets would simply not allow us to live on my husband’s income alone, so as of yesterday, I am officially a working mother.  I am also breastfeeding, and would like to continue to do so exclusively until Julia is at least a year old.  After two days back at work I can already tell that working and breastfeeding is a big commitment, but it’s one I am willing to make for the sake of my baby.

Before coming back to work, I made it clear to my employer that I was planning on breastfeeding and that I was going to need some accommodations and concessions to help allow me to do that.  Luckily, there is a federal law that protects breastfeeding mothers and requires employers to provide them with a reasonable amount of time and a comfortable place, that is not a bathroom, to pump breastmilk.

There are two things that have made this transition go as smoothly as possible.

First, having a Lactation Consultant available who I can contact day or night with questions or concerns about breastfeeding.  She has made herself available by phone or text message to answer any questions I have.  She was very helpful in the early days of breastfeeding when I had questions about latching on, proper positioning, and how often to feed the baby, and she has been equally helpful the past few days as I transition to being a working mother and to nursing only part-time while pumping the rest of the time.

The second thing that has been helpful has been talking to my employer about creative options that make working and breastfeeding a little easier.  There are creative solutions that you and your employer can come up with that will help your breastfeeding relationship with your baby.  Maybe you can work longer hours but take a long break in the middle of the day to go breastfeed the baby at lunch time.  Maybe you can work shorter hours and skip your lunch break (or eat lunch at your desk) so that you don’t have to pump at work as many times.  Most employers are generally open to creative solutions when you can think of them!  After two days I can tell that it’s going to be very time-consuming but it’s worth every ounce that my baby can get!

How do you balance work and breastfeeding?

Plus, more from The Bump:

Top 10 Breastfeeding Tips for New Moms

Best Buys for Breastfeeding Moms

11 Things You Didn’t Know About Breastfeeding

Hello there!  My name is Anna and I am The Bump’s newest blogger!

I’m currently 27 years old and married to the love of my life, Ken, who is 28 years old. We’re currently expecting our first child, a girl, due October 23rd 2012 (doing the math, that means I’m currently 35 weeks pregnant!). I thought for my introductory post I would tell you a little bit about myself and our conception journey.  So here we go…

Who am I?

I was born and raised in San Francisco and I went to college in Baltimore. Ken (who is from Connecticut) and I met during my freshman orientation and we’ve been together ever since. We moved to New Orleans during the summer of 2008 for graduate school, and got married July 2009.  In June 2013 we’ll be moving back to Baltimore for at least three next the years and after that, who knows where life will take us!

Here’s a photo of us from our wedding day:

My scary diagnosis

From very early in our relationship, we talked about wanting to have children. Ken grew up as the middle of three boys, and I never had any siblings and always wanted them. We’d talked about wanting to have at least two children some day.

During the summer of 2010, I had abdominal surgery that was performed laparascopically. The surgery was completely unrelated to my reproductive capabilities, but during the surgery the surgeon decided to check things out since he was in there with a camera anyway. He noticed that my uterus looked a little funny, and he suggested that I take the photos he took to an OB/GYN to have them checked out. My OB took one look at the photos and said “Looks like you have a unicornuate uterus.”

Of course, the first thing I do after I hear big words like that from a doctor is to Google them — bad idea!  The statistics I read painted a horrible picture, and I became very discouraged. Would I ever be able to get pregnant? If I did get pregnant, would I ever be able to carry a pregnancy to term? There were all kinds of scary statistics about miscarriage, preterm labor, ruptured uteruses and premature birth.

I was scared, and Ken and I went through many emotions just processing this information. We started talking about “what if” situations — Would we adopt? Would we try IVF? Surrogacy? How far were we willing to go to have biological children of our own? I had several tests to see if my uterus was, in fact, a unicornuate uterus, and every test confirmed the same thing.

Deciding to try to conceive

Luckily, we’re young, so we had time. We decided we should probably start trying to conceive as soon as we thought we could handle it income-wise. In a perfect world, we probably would have waited a few more years after getting married, so that we could enjoy being a young married couple, but getting the news about my uterus made us feel as though we were in somewhat of a rush. We had no idea what types of difficulties and complications we’d face.

We figured that based on our jobs and income, the earliest possible time it would make sense to have a baby would be in October 2012, so we counted backwards and figured we could start trying in January 2012 at the very earliest. I had been on birth control since the time I turned 18 years old, so I decided to stop taking it in October 2011 to give my body a few months to regulate my menstrual cycle.

I started reading the Trying to Get Pregnant discussion board on The Bump, and from October through December, I also started charting my basal body temperature, so I’d have a better sense of what was going on with my body month-to-month. I started taking prenatal vitamins, and we met with my OB and a maternal and fetal medicine specialist in November 2011 to talk about how I could best prepare my body for getting pregnant, and to find out how pregnancy would be different for me than it would for someone with a “normal” uterus. Their advice was basically to try to relax, eat healthily, drink lots of water, continue to exercise, try not to stress about it, do a lot of “baby dancing” (yes, sex) and call them as soon as I had a positive pregnancy test.

The baby dance

My first menstrual cycle of the new year started on January 17th. I charted my temperature closely. I took my prenatal vitamin religiously and I even tried drinking raspberry leaf tea (which I’d heard could help!). We did the baby dance six days in a row during my “fertile window” (it helped that this was right around the same time as Mardi Gras in New Orleans — there were lots of parties going on!). I was expecting my period on Valentine’s day.

On February 11th, when I hadn’t felt PMS symptoms, I started to become hopeful. I wasn’t moody. I didn’t have any cramps. I hadn’t had any spotting. I hadn’t had any headaches. I didn’t feel like I was about to get my period. Despite all that I’d heard that said you shouldn’t take any pregnancy tests until several days after a missed period, I woke up on February 12th and decided to take a test.

Getting the good news

I peed on a stick and waited for what felt like six hours before I saw two lines on the test. I thought for sure it was a false positive, so I peed on another stick (this one was a digital test) and waited for six more hours before “pregnant” popped up on the screen.

I had a great plan in my mind to tell Ken that I was pregnant by wrapping up the pregnancy test inside of a onesie that said something like, “I love Daddy!” but at that moment, all plans evaporated into thin air. I ran into the other room and said (okay, I screamed), “I’M PREGNANT!”  Ken looked at me in disbelief for a few moments, and then said, “Okay. Now what?”

We immediately called our parents to tell them the news. Then we called Ken’s grandmother, all of our aunts and uncles, and some of our best friends. Initially, we thought we’d want to keep a pregnancy a secret but in that moment, we were too excited not to tell everybody. We rationalized our decision by saying that if anything were to happen, we would rather have the love and support of our family and friends than to have kept it a secret.

How long did it take you to get pregnant? How did you tell your friends and family members?