Your baby is 1 month old today! Congratulations—everyone is still alive.

This week, the ends of your hair are probably stuck together with dried spit-up. If you have a toddler in the house, he is probably expressing his resentment of the new baby by occasionally kicking you for no apparent reason.

One month after the blessed event, you are still bleeding. You aren’t supposed to use tampons yet, so you are rocking bulky maxi pads á la 1978. These days your life revolves around pads of all kinds, including the ones you stuff into your bra to prevent milk from leaking onto your clothes. Not sure why you even bother at this point—what’s one more bodily fluid on your shirt?

You have a not-so-secret fear that your husband will be overwhelmed by the whole thing and take off. The jig was up when you “joked” for the fortieth time, “Are you going out for a pack of smokes and never coming back?”

If your house were a rainforest, the forest floor level would be composed of: wadded-up breast pads, Bristle Blocks, Matchbox cars, Christmas tree needles, crusty spit-up cloths, and dog hair.

Remember in the movie Beetlejuice how things got really weird and scary if Michael Keaton and Geena Davis tried to leave their house? That’s kind of how things are for you right now.

Breastfeeding a new baby often means lots of time on the couch, which can lead to an addiction to HGTV. You fantasize that Hilary from “Love It or List It” will fix your life with some nifty storage solutions, and you lose hours pondering the Property Brothers’ sexual orientations.

If you had a C-section, it will be a couple of weeks before you will be allowed to drive. When you get clearance from your doctor, your first trip out of the house on your own—to the optician’s and the grocery store!—will be your most exciting outing since you were a teenager with a brand-new license.

As you drive to Target to get last-minute stocking stuffers for your toddler, you might find yourself getting choked up while listening to Johnny Mathis sing “The Christmas Song” on the radio. Was it this hard for your mother? Probably harder—she had three kids and worked nights. Get a grip!

Whenever you do manage to sit down for a meal, you are like a lion tearing apart a zebra in the Serengeti. We get that you don’t know when or if you will be able to finish your food, but you are seriously grossing everyone out.

Every once in a while, your toddler son will sit next to your infant son’s bouncy seat and say, “I love him! He’s so snuggly!” and your poor, tired heart will melt. Things like this will happen just often enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. Soak it up while you can.

Stay tuned for next month’s email: Your baby is 2 months old! Have you brushed your teeth lately?