This is a guest post from my friend and Bloggers Helping Bloggers mentee, Catherine, who blogs at Plunged In Debt. Make sure to stop by her site or follow her on Twitter when you’re done reading her post. She writes some great stuff (and she’s a pretty cool lady, too).

My husband and I welcomed our first child this past June (Jana’s note: Yay for June babies! We’re the best!). I know it’s a total cliché, but it really was a life-changing event. There’s no other way to describe never using the bathroom unattended again.

I am a planner. I am a type A personality in almost every way. If I don’t know the answer to something I become near compulsive until I find said answer. Google is my crack. Needless to say, as soon as I found out I was pregnant I became a Google-monster, book-reading train wreck. If I was driving myself nuts with researching everything to do with pregnancy and parenthood, I can only imagine what my poor friends and family were going through having me around (Jana’s note to future moms: stay the hell away from baby sites and books. People never want to tell you the good things, only the bad, scary ones, and you will, in fact, make yourself nuts).

Becoming a mother is a funny thing. You very quickly realize that no matter how prepared you may think you are, it doesn’t matter because your baby has other plans! Becoming a mother means disengaging the type-A, overachieving personality traits, and letting go. You learn to roll with the punches and re-live your entire life in a different way. Entire life.

As prepared as I thought I was, these are things I could never have foreseen going into Motherhood.

Poop is exciting

You learn an entirely new diagnosing process through poop. As a mother you become a poop-stalker. Learning scientific, analytic-type skills you didn’t know you had in you. Maybe all my years spent dissecting stuff during my first undergrad weren’t totally wasted skills? A baby’s health can be very obvious through their stinky diaper. You learn to love seeing normal poos everyday. (Jana’s note: This is completely true. My husband and I discussed poop every day when our daughter was a baby. Now that I think about it, we still talk about poop every day. We’re very classy.)

Socializing is defined around necessity to wear a bra

I’m on maternity leave. My kid spits up, oozes poo and spits food at me. I don’t wear my finest when I’m at home. Unless I have to go somewhere you can usually find me lounging in my comfy clothes or pj’s that I don’t care about. When you have a baby breastfeeding on demand, a bra becomes annoying and cumbersome. Don’t get me wrong, I still remember how to clean up, and maintain an acceptable level of cleanliness, but I often find myself making decisions based on whether or not a bra would be necessary. A decision making process I didn’t know existed in society pre-baby. (Jana’s note: as a well-endowed lady, I am not afforded the luxury of going bra-free. I am a tad jealous of Catherine right now).

There is rarely a right answer

After our daughter was born I would continue to look up anything and everything in books and on the internet. Was she latching properly? How the eff do I make her sleep? What is this rash? How do I learn to change a diaper with my eyes closed? I looked for everything and quickly came to the conclusion that there is no right answer. There are a lot of good reference materials out there, but nothing could really prepare me entirely for parenthood.

If someone had asked me before her being born if I would co-sleep I would think you were nuts. Sure, she might share a room with us the first few nights but that would be it. Ha. Ha. Ha.

I had a c-section. Between discomfort levels and tubes connected to me, it was difficult for me to get up and re-position throughout those first few nights. Even with my husband sleeping in the same room as me at the hospital, it was much easier and very natural, to have her sleep beside me in bed, within an arm’s reach. I never intended it to extend beyond the hospital stay.

When we arrived home, in her bassinet she went (though still in our room). After WEEKS of searching for ways of trying to get my kid to sleep I decided that it was more important that she sleep than where she sleeps. In bed with us she came and guess what? We all slept better instantly. (Jana’s note: I differ from Catherine a bit here. I am not a supporter of co-sleeping but I won’t tell you not to. You need to choose what’s right for you and your kid and if you do co-sleep, please just do it safely).

Time goes fast

No amount of reading and research could prepare me for how fast time goes when you have a kid. Nowhere did I read time increases at warp speed. I cannot believe almost nine months has passed and she’s almost walking. I’ve really learned to stop cut back on sweating the small stuff and enjoy all that motherhood offers, good and bad. (Jana’s note: Yup. Time goes very fast. My daughter is 6 and I swear she was an infant yesterday).

Love grows

I fully expected my baby to be born and for me to instantly be madly in love. I wasn’t. I certainly felt connected and my instincts were to protect her, but my love for her had to grow. It continues to grow every day. I love her more than any words could possibly describe, but this is a feeling that has developed over the last nine months. It wasn’t brought upon me instantly. I initially felt bad about this but realized it’s a totally normal process of emotional growth.

Any parent will tell you having a child is the best thing in the world and it really is. When else in one’s life do you get the chance to instill as much dysfunction as you want? I kid. Seriously I love being a mom so much more than I ever thought possible. Even more than Google told me I would. It really is the best, and stinkiest job, in the world. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

 

I’ll be honest with you. For the longest time, I never understood the allure of a dollar store. To me, it just smacked of cheap, crappy items and people who love to shop for junk. But as I got older, I notice that

people everywhere–at work, at daycare, in my neighborhood–couldn’t stop raving about the damn place. So one day, I went into one.

And I understood.

For starters, the store was just so…clean. Not at all what I pictured. And it had everything! Toiletries, groceries, household staples, craft and school supplies, party supplies, candy, balloons…I don’t think there was anything I could have needed that I couldn’t find at the dollar store. From that point forward, I was hooked.

It made me glad I stopped being all judgy and went inside. My budget is stretched just a little farther in certain areas now that I shop at the dollar store, which, at certain times of the year (what’s up, December), pretty much reaches capacity no matter how much we save in advance.

I won’t say that I do all my shopping at the dollar store. For instance, I’m not big on grocery shopping at the there for a number of reasons (number 1 being there’s an Aldi 3 miles down the road. More items, similar prices). I’m also not fond of buying certain household products because the quality is somewhat compromised (unless I’m in a huge financial pinch. Then I’m not in any position to be picky). But there are certain items that I do buy with some regularity. Inspired by a post on Money Saving Mom, I’ve compiled my list of my 5 favorite things I buy at the dollar store (really Dollar Tree):

1. Storage containers. It may not seem like it on the outside, but I am a mess. Well, not so much me as my child, husband, and house. Since clutter drives my anxiety, I’ve been on a huge kick to organize as much as possible. Enter Dollar Tree. For under $20, I’ve been able to buy a number of storage containers, caddies, and laundry baskets to help organize all the shit that litters my house and my pantry closet. These have worked just as well as the fancy ones I bought at other places and will continue to work well as long as the other people in my home use them with the same regularity that I do (hint, hint, husband. I know you’re reading this). 
2. Greeting cards. I’ll say it. I hate greeting cards. It pains me to spend money on something that just gets thrown away or recycled almost immediately. And I don’t quite understand why the cards cost so much. I’ve thought about making my own since the discount card store went out of business but I’m not crafty at all so instead, I purchase them from the dollar store. This way, I still look all polite and fancy, and it doesn’t bother me as much to know that they’re going right in the trash when I’ve only spent $.50 on a card.
3. Gift wrap. Along the same lines as greeting cards, I can’t stand spending money on something that looks nice for about 17 seconds and then gets torn to shreds. While I usually use tissue paper instead of wrapping paper, it’s still a better value at the dollar store than anywhere else. So, when I’m in need of  gift bags, bows, ribbons, and all of the other accoutrements that go with making your gifts look fit for Pinterest, I hit up the dollar store. $10 and I’m set for 6 years, give or take. That’s a sweet deal.
4. Kid stuff. My daughter is one of those kids that will draw one stick figure on a piece of paper and call it done. As a result, we go through lots of construction paper, doodle paper, coloring books, crayons (which, I’ll admit, I stock up on during back to school sales), and assorted other craft supplies. Rather than spend unnecessarily at the craft store, I can hit up the dollar store and for $5, buy 5 pads of paper that last, surprisingly, for quite a while.  While we’re there, we also stock up on some of the other crafts they have as well. A few extra dollar to save my sanity on a rainy day? So worth it!
5. Candy. Here we go. Another confession. When I go to the movies, I bring in my own candy. And drinks. I hide them in my (very) large purse and once we’re settled into our seats, we dig in. Fortunately for me, the dollar store and the movie theater are in the same shopping center so I don’t have to lug the stuff around for a while. It’s just a nicer deal to spend less than $4 on snacks instead of close to $5 for a bottle of water. I’ll also buy bagged candy around the holidays and fine, yes, sometimes I go in and just buy myself a Butterfinger because I want one.

So those are my favorite and most frequently bought items at the dollar store. I’ve been known to purchase other things, too, but those really aren’t worth talking about.

Readers, do you frequent a dollar store in your area? What do you purchase the most often? Do you also sneak candy and drinks into the movie theater?