The Physical Impact of Motherhood.

I felt like I was pretty prepared to be a mother. I thought that I had read heaps of books and had talked to as many mothers as I knew to get a picture of what motherhood was about. One thing that I didn't understand was the physical impact of motherhood.

Over the past 10 years, I have been pretty fit and I have set and achieved many physical challenges over this time. I have competed in 5K, 10K runs and even a half marathon. I even hiked up to Everest base camp in Nepal with my bestie. However, the biggest physical challenge that I ever participated in was a 100km (62 miles) walk over 48 hours. It was a walk for charity and I competed in a team with my sister in law and a couple of her friends. We trained for it for 6 months and it was absolutely full on.

The 100km culminated in the last 10km climbing up a mountain (not that we have very big mountains in Australia but it was a mountain nonetheless). As long as you walked through each check point - you could leave the course and have a rest at any time, which we did on the first night. We had walked for 14 hours that day and went to my brother's place (which was close to the course) and 'slept' - I use inverted comma's here because basically all I did was lie there for a couple of hours feeling my whole body throbbing.

So, why am I telling you this story? The other night, I got up to feed JBB at around 3am - generally he is feeding a couple of times during the night so I am not really having more than around 2 hours of sleep in a row at any one time (JourneyMan was feeding him expressed milk for one of the night feeds for a while so that I could get a bit more sleep but the maternal health nurse put the kaibosh on that saying that I would reduce my breast milk if I continued to do this regularly). Once I had fed JBB, I went back to bed at about 4am and tried to go back to sleep. As I lay in bed, I realised that my body felt like that night that I was in the middle of the charity walk - the whole thing was throbbing.

It is quite amazing the toll that this motherhood caper can take on your body. That being said though, I look at JBB's peaceful sleeping face and the tiredness and throbbing, exhausted body is forgotten.

It also hasn't helped that I was completely inactive throughout the pregnancy - I am going to have to start getting (slowly) back into shape. I am hoping that the weather is nice on Monday - I am going to venture out for a walk with JBB, just a small one, to see how I go!