In all seriousness, a friend and I were recently discussing our thoughts on the newborn phase. She, like many others I seem to talk to, hated it. I, on the other hand, (my horrible birth recovery aside), loved it. Once we were home from the hospital, I so enjoyed all the baby snuggles, lounging about in my robe, watching movies, and greeting a revolving door of visitors that I didn't want it to end. This really speaks to my skill set. I am flipping great at receiving visitors and serving as a mattress for a wonderful-smelling newborn. I am also great at sleeping around an atypical schedule. It's one of my gifts. I don't need 8 hours of consecutive sleep at night because I can pretty much fall back to sleep in the middle of the night any day of the week. As long as I can get plenty of hours of sleep, I am good, and newborns sleep 16-20 hours a day so I can totally get down with that. I am not one of those people who can't rest if the dining room table needs dusting or the dishwasher needs emptying. The 9-5 schedule is actually way more daunting to me because I'm such a night owl. And we were lucky in that my baby and I took to nursing quite well and had a lot of help in the beginning for things like making meals and emptying said dishwasher. I also liked the phase where she would fall asleep in her car seat and we could just stick her under the table at restaurants. And the 6-9 month phase is great, when babies are mobile, but not that mobile yet.
On the scale of typical toddler behavior, our daughter is actually extremely good-natured and does have a healthy sense of danger. She hasn't tried to scale the staircase or swim in the toilet or any of those potentialities, but when she learned to walk a few months ago, she face-planted approximately three times a day and got her hands in front of her, probably only 50% of the time. I think I've been pretty clear here that at least one of her parents is not a natural athlete, ok? But additionally, she never crawled and instead scooted everywhere on her butt, so I think that contributed to her center of balance being off, (though it was extremely high on the adorable scale!) On the first day of our family vacation this summer, for example, our daughter fell once in the house over a broomstick, once outside on concrete and lightly scraped her head, and then fell again while holding a picture frame and got a bloody nose. They don't make picture frames that say "Baby's First Nosebleed", as far as I know so it wasn't a milestone we were hoping for so soon. Even though she is very skilled now at the whole walking thing, the jumpiness of that phase has been wearing off quite slowly.
And I know we are supposed to enjoy parenting, and I do. In fact, according to this one article, "parenting" is even an aggressive term, since not too many other generations thought of it as a job in the way contemporary society does. Children probably weren't starting to be seen as intellectual receptacles for all our worldly knowledge until recent decades. And now science has found even more ways to remind us every two seconds the myriad things we could do to make sure our children get into Harvard. Thirty years ago, our own parents researched only to the point where they chose one child-rearing philosophy and thus, one or two books on early childhood. For my mother, it was Dr. Penelope Leach's Your Baby and Child. She felt she was particularly sympathetic to the needs of young children and that the book was so detailed, she could be in the Outback and still survive with only that one volume. (She means the Australian Outback, not the steakhouse. I don't think many parents could survive the steakhouse with young children). This was her parenting Bible and it was a good one. Of course, nowhere in there did Dr. Leach tell my mother to make sure I had dance lessons, which remains her biggest regret in my adulthood. I lamented this once, possibly twice, that they would have been useful during my musical theater performing days and she brings it up at least twice a year with regret.
These days, there is just so much information out there, you can find anything to justify your beliefs and your mercurial child's whims. You were a sleep-training advocate before your baby was born? Well, when your baby screams with or without your reassurances, you can find any number of articles on the merits of co-sleeping. Nursing isn't for you? You can find a million articles on how formula-fed babies do just fine, because they do. My friend in Ireland, who I'd say has a very similar parenting style to me, asked if I'd heard of RIE parenting over in the States. I hadn't but asked if it was similar to Hand-in Hand parenting? She didn't know, so I responded; "But we have to choose a method!!!" I was being facetious. We do not. There really are no wrong answers here- just ones that work for your family.
I just try and tell myself when I'm losing my patience that exploring is how our little one learns and discovers the world. And I really didn't know how much patience I had until she came along. I tell myself that as long as she's well-attached and she knows she's consistently loved, that she gets a new operating system and is a totally different child every few weeks. Most of the rest is just noise. We are incredibly lucky and have a healthy child, and so far, that means that most things I worried about just went away and were never a problem again; like how she refused to eat any food with a texture for a while except lemons. To quote the husband: "We have an odd child".
Of course it's challenging, but I try to think of her childhood as something for us all to live in and enjoy instead of always thinking of it as just a means to the ramifications of adulthood. This is all easier when we're having a dance party in the living room, (some of the fondest memories from my own childhood), compared with the times she is trying to stick her fingers in my eyeballs or see what happens when mama's arm skin gets pinched between her fingers. Or worse, the times she forgets that 4am is actually still night time, which of course, was never a problem in the newborn phase; this only happened once I returned to work. But don't worry! I found an article about how that's actually a thing!
So, I don't doubt that by the time she's a teenager, we'll have given her some stuff to be angsty about. I know the problems only get bigger from here and that someday the times my daughter refused to eat her eggs will pale in comparison. In the meantime, I will strive to be as unabashed and embarrassing as my own mother was and maybe we'll skip the dance lessons too.
