Two Weeks In: Life with a Baby

Hi all! I’m back from my just-had-a-baby social media hiatus. Actually I’ve been taking a hiatus from a lot of things – sleeping, eating healthily, wearing pants – and especially from being zerowaste. The first few weeks have been a whirlwind of trying to keep this tiny floppy person alive, and sometimes you just need to prioritize.

The week before he was born, we went on a very different grocery shopping trip than usual. We filled our cart with premade meals, Gatorade, diapers, wipes, baby oil and powder and various medicines. Plastic everywhere. It hurt my heart a bit, but I can say now that it was absolutely necessary to get us through the early days. Now that things are starting to settle down, we’re phasing into cloth diapers and wipes and getting back into cooking meals from scratch with fresh foods.

I've also been more lax away from home. With breastfeeding full time, it has felt like I can’t keep up with the caloric demand on my body. I’m constantly trying to add extra food to my body, and I have not once but FIVE times indulged in a milkshake or smoothie when out and about. These inevitably come in a plastic cup with a plastic lid and straw. I haven’t even been using my own straws. I was at the end of my rope exhausted, and was not willing to give up my milkshake because I didn’t have a straw with me.

Another thing that has changed, and maybe will remain changed, is the shocking amount of laundry that we now do. Instead of laundry once a week, I’m having to put in a load every second day. He spits up or pees on several blankies a day as well as on our bedsheets, goes through two or three different outfits and several washcloths. I’m also leaking boob milk onto a minimum of one bra and shirt daily, and soaking through the limited reusable breast pads that I have (on the agenda is to sew a bunch of extras, when I find the time).

So it’s been an interesting couple of weeks. It will be the first, and hopefully the last, time that we have to put out two bins of garbage on garbage day. Our water usage has without a doubt gone up and we’ve spoiled ourselves with wasteful takeout meals and drinks. It’s been interesting, though, to think about how different this is from our usual habits. Whenever I feel as though we’re not making enough of an effort, I will be able to remember these few weeks and how just relaxing our habits resulted in a monumental amount of trash.

Arguably the worst thing that I’ve done for the environment is bring another person into the world. Do I regret that? Not in the slightest. Everything that we do, we have wanted to do to make sure our son has the best possible world to grow up in. If we lose our joy in babies, we lose our hope in the future, and I haven’t lost that much hope yet.