When I launched The Style Project on the blog at the beginning of the year, the goal was to force myself to curate a practical and stylish closet, which I very much did not have after spending approximately six years making and taking care of babies. This is not an exaggeration. There were pools of vomit. It was messy.

34+ hours of labor and emergency C-section? I can handle that. Unmedicated until 9cm VBAC? Got that too (times two). Surviving bleeding nipples? I’m ya gal!

There are many experiences from my childhood I would love to revisit. To wit: Long, lazy afternoons fishing on the lake with my grandfather. The feel of smoothing down a bluegill’s fins as I unhook him and toss him back with a splash into the crystal water.

…because when you’re a mom, everything changes. And that most definitely includes spring break.

Imagine the feeling of stripping down naked and plunging into an ice cold pool of water. That complete shock you feel? That’s new motherhood.

If there were someone out there looking for the next Big Idea, I’m going to lay it out for you right here—an alarm clock where the music and/or beep is replaced with a baby’s screams.

Let me start off this post by saying, I hate that I have to even write this. A parent’s nightmare, hands-down, is the though of something bad happening to your children.

We start movements. We start baths. We get our minds so set on something that it would take an act of God to vaporize our passion. (You tell us we’re stubborn; we say it’s strong.)

Right now, as I’m typing this, I’m in the McDonald’s drive-thru line. It is 5:19pm. Tonight marks the second time this week I’m feeding my kids Grade A, Unadulterated Crap.

Before having kids, I pictured early motherhood in several scenarios–mostly charmed–but I can promise you that not one vignette in my mind’s eye was that of me, standing in a hot shower, squeezing my own nipple to within an inch of its own life.