I finally plucked up my momma bird feathers on day 13 of having a baby bird in my care and decided to leave the nest for the first time...
This meant being completely alone (with my little one of course), driving my car by myself for the first time with an actual 'live' brand new baby in the back... and when I say I plucked up my feathers, it wasn't without the encouragement of my wonderful fiancé, Ron.
He was about to leave for work, I was still in my pyjamas with Aurora, our two week old baby attached to my boob... when he said "why don't you try get out of the house a little bit today ?" to which my response was a flood of tears followed by a weary and shakey response of... "I'm scared".
Scared was an under statement, I was petrified... but I decided I needed to do it, I needed to get out of my milk-stained pyjama's, get into the shower and get out of the house...
I put Aurora to sleep and got into the shower, with the monitor on full volume, and my fingers crossed that she would stay asleep long enough for me to wash my hair...
I got dressed, packed her baby bag, then unpacked it and repacked it again. I practiced putting the pram up and down a few times while I waited for her to wake up, then got her dressed and ready, put her into her car seat, checked her straps about a million times and then clicked the seat into the base in the car, then un-clicked it and re-clicked it a few times just to make sure she was really clicked in and double checked her straps again...
We slowly drove down our street and Aurora started screaming... This was it, the sign I needed to tell me to go home...
I almost reversed back up the few hundred meters to our gate and called it a day. We turned onto the main road, and just like that - Aurora stopped crying. The next worry on my mind was what I believed was a terrifying noise coming from my car that was definitely the sound a it makes when one of the wheels is about to fly off. Not that this has ever happened to me, but I swore that this sound was as real as my fear was of driving alone with my baby girl.
We made it the three kilometres down the road to my mom's house. I was now shaking and couldn't figure out if the sound was in my imagination, if it was actually me crying out loud or it was real and I was about to win the "worst mom-driver of the year" award. Finally, in parking the car at my mom's I got out to have a look and to my surprise all four tyres were still safely attached to the vehicle. Phew!
My mom then came with us to a nearby shopping mall where I successfully managed to get the pram out of the boot and the baby safely into the pram...
We made it safely home again, and outings got easier...