you know you have a new baby when…

You eat some sugar snap peas and a bowl of cereal and call it dinner.

You worry that the crunching of your cereal may wake the baby. The baby that is in another room, behind a closed door.

You consider yourself more accomplished than ever before in your life if you water your two plants in the same day.

Wait. Scratch that. You consider yourself more accomplished than ever before if you master the magical babywearing contraption called the Moby wrap on the first try.

If it takes twenty tries, you are normal.

No matter how many times it takes you to master the wrap, every time you wear your baby in it, you feel a bit smug and also totally in love with carrying your baby close, hands-free!

You throw a pillow across the room at 3 a.m. because you just can’t.be.awake for one more second and then you cry when the baby daddy picks it up for you because that’s just. so. nice.

You spend a rare spare five minutes updating your facebook status and bantering on Twitter and then feel exhausted by all that leisure time.

You know the floorboard dance. You could do it in your sleep. If you slept.

You remember that you haven’t brushed your teeth as you run into someone you haven’t seen in quite some time while wearing your pajamas and a baseball hat at the grocery store. At 3pm.

You almost never ever know where that smart phone of yours is, anyway. You used to have it on your person at all times but miraculously, it is now just an after-thought.

You hear said phone ringing somewhere from the depths of something far away and you can’t for the life of you figure out why the doorbell sounds so funny and muffled.

You go into a blind rage if the dog barks when the doorbell actually does ring.

After two days of gas-induced crying, you feel joy like nothing you’ve ever experienced at the sound of a major diaper blowout.

You think four straight hours of sleep is a good night’s rest. If only you could have it.

When you get more than three consecutive hours of sleep you feel so rejuvenated that your to-do list for the day suddenly reads (but is not limited to): finish painting exterior of house, go to recycling center, Goodwill and the grocery store, finish all scrapbooks for all children, make a cake from scratch, write a post pretending to be a humor blogger and then cut everyone’s fingernails. And toenails.

Yesterday, after no sleep whatsoever your to-do list said: water the two plants.

You feed your older children popcorn and turn on Wild Kratts and then you call it dinner and movie night.

You feel a little guilty when they fall for that.

You take a shower during dinner and movie night and wonder why showering has never felt like twelve hours of sleep and a massage before.

While in the rare and beautiful shower, you have 6 new great ideas. You decide you need to blog about all of them or at the very least, you must update your facebook status with all the wisdom you just created all on your own. You try a memorization game to be sure to remember the ideas when you get out. But when you get out, your train of thought is more like: I better hurry. What time did I feed the baby last? 9:30. Wait. It’s 9:30 right now…look at that vent. I don’t remember that vent being there before.  I wonder if it was always there. It’s silver. I better hurry….wait. what was that? Is that crying? No, I think it’s a cat or a wolf or something…I’m hungry. I want hummus. I’m so glad I’ve finally figured out what the best hummus in the world is. What time is it?

You go on a solo outing to get groceries. You are high with freedom mixed with exhaustion-a lethal combination. You are so high that you’re thinking thoughts like, Wow, there are people in all of these houses. Every one of these houses has people. Or maybe not every one, but most of them. The empty ones want people.

You believe these thoughts are the most profound thoughts you’ve ever had.

You want the baby to sleep so badly but the baby won’t sleep and you wonder if the baby may have a sleeping disorder-a rare baby one, and then the baby sleeps and then you wonder if the baby should be sleeping so long, maybe the baby is sick.

You watch your baby sleep without blinking your eyes because you can’t blink because then you might not see that slight rising up and down of that tiny chest. You hold your breath while not blinking.

And finally, you know you have a new baby when…

You look in those baby blues and you feel every best song and best poem and best story from your life.

(And it’s not an actual audible hallucination provoked by sleep-deprivation;

it’s love.)

P.S. If I’m the only one, please don’t tell me. Let me live here in my shower-induced fantasy world.