A post I wrote in September that never made it up

Take a deep breath, and whisper it.....I think it's getting easier. I read in a few places that at 3 months a switch just flicks, and I think it has. Suddenly he goes to sleep for the night at somewhere between 7pm and 9pm, and although he is waking up all the time for feeds, he goes straight back to sleep. So I have evenings again, and even more spectacularly I've learned that the best way to get him to sleep in the mornings is to pop him in the pram and go to the park. There, it seems necessary to imitate something of the morning routine of my other life, my long-distant, seems-like-a-hazy-memory life, and get out the coffee and book. Bliss!!

What's most relieving and rewarding for me is that it's not really about the physical improvements, the fact that we're getting there with the breastfeeding, and that his sleeping is getting more predictable. It's that I'm adjusting to the whole thing emotionally and developing both flexibility and resilience in quantities I didn't know I had. On the way to the park on Monday morning, a jogger passed me, and I had a moment of envy. But so, so quickly I found myself thinking well, I have the remnants of a mummy tummy unlike her lovely flat one, my hair has been finger-brushed only unlike her sleek lovely ponytail, I am wearing jeans which I think are now held together by various baby fluids, but I really, honestly, don't care, and wouldn't swap it. My new kind of freedom is about spending time with my baby; my new exercise is lumping him around; I've found a way to get in a window of time for reading on a bench - and I wouldn't swap any of this for being younger and thinner and less surrounded by obligations. Of course I do plan to be gorgeous one day, but given the choice now between a pound off me and a pound on my baby, there's no competition at all.