Baby Yoga

Olive woke up at 8:30 this morning after a nine hour sleep, full of farts and smiles. I brought her into our bed and nursed her, then let her fall back asleep until 10 am or so, when we had to get ready to leave for our very first baby yoga class.

Let me tell you, timing outings with a baby is a tricky event. Breastfeed babes usually feed every 2-3 hours, and need to sleep every 1.5-2 hrs. So there’s a pretty small window for them to be awake and happy, and trying to schedule events around this is somewhat hit and miss. Trying to figure it out makes my brain hurt, like doing one of those old math puzzles, “If Olive wakes up at 1pm and feeds every two hours and gets cranky after more than 90 minutes awake, and it takes fifteen minutes to get to and from downtown and she wakes up every time you put her in the car seat, what is the best time to meet a friend for a two hour coffee date?”?” BLERGH.

So anyway these days I just feed her and change her right before we go out and hope for the best.

We got to the yoga studio ten minutes early because I needed to register for the class. Walking up those stairs lugging a baby carseat gave me the strangest feeling. How many times had I walked those steps  last year, each time rounder and rounder, each time my steps a little heavier and breath shorter. I went to classes at this studio two, sometimes three times a week until I was around 6-7 months pregnant. And now here I was, returning with Olive. It felt surreal.

I walked in and said hi to my instructors and we spent a few moments cooing over Olive and making introductions. I paid, got ourselves settled and then people started trickling in.

About seven moms in total, with their babies, ranging in age from just over three months (Olive was the youngest in the class) to eight months. We started with some baby massage and then proceeded to sun salutations and basic yoga poses.

Look, if you are a hardcore yogi, this type of class will probably bore you, it’s not a hard workout by any means. I’ve always loved yoga, but I usually sweat my wsy through class glancing at the clock wondering “Isitoveryet?OhgodamIdoneyet? Ican’tdothisanymore! Ohgodohgodohgod” and the class drags on and on and my legs tremble and every second I swear I’m just going to give up and take child’s pose but I never do. I love it.

Mom and Baby yoga is the same hour long class, but it seemed like fifteen minutes had passed between opening stretches and savasana. At any given moment there’s a few babies squealing and cooing, at least one crying, and at one point there were three of us nursing. I think I got through about seven poses in total.

Babies are lying on your mat in front of you, sometimes they get incorporated into the poses, like perching on your knees in warrior one, or sitting on your lap while you do spinal twists, and other times they lie there and you sort of entertain them while doing downward dog, or lean down to kiss them in a modified pushup in plank.

Internets, as I sat there nursing Olive on my yoga mat with a crying baby to my right, watching the baby in front of me spit up on his mama’s toes, I thought to myself, “I think I have found my people.”

Then the mom to my left helpfully pointed out that I was leaking through my shirt because I had mistakenly put both breastpads on the right side, and she said this without so much as batting an eyelash. 

As I cleaned up I thought to myself, “Yes. Yes, I have found my people.”

There’s zero stress. None. I don’t care if Olive cries, because everyone else’s baby is crying too. I don’t care that I haven’t lost all my pregnancy weight, because we’re all new mamas with a bit of baby belly left. It doesn’t even matter if I’m late, because the instructor made an explicit point of mentioning that she knows how hard it can be to get out of the house on time with a baby.

At the end of the class I lay down with Olive beside me for the final pose, Savasana (corpse pose). In five minutes she was asleep. she slept right through the final moments of the class, kept sleeping as I bundled her up in her snowsuit and headed out the door.

I HAVE FOUND MY PEOPLE!

(Now I just need to hunt down some of that baby spandex Ashley was telling me about.)