Ha, this is soooo true. I was just reading the thread and came to this post and thought immediately about my second baby. Not 2 minutes later my second baby im’d me with a link to this very post and said she was going to call herself ‘satan baby’ from now on.
ETA: Well on preview, everyone now knows who my second baby is. No more hiding kid.
Damn, now where will I go to post about my crazy parents?? 
The biggest thing to know is that parenting is not nearly as bad as you would think from reading about it on the Internet.
Oh, and we’ve had three, and maybe a handful of truly sleepless nights amongst all of them. But then, middle-of-night feedings are a lot easier when you sleep alongside the baby and can just turn over in your sleep, do a feeding, and conk back out again. (This only worked on Whatsit Jr. after he reached 4 months or so and was able to actually nurse lying down, but MiniWhatsit and Whatsit the Youngest figured it out on like day 2 of life.)
Also, eat a lot of snacks.
I still think all of you are understating the sleep thing…
My first had colic and at times there was nothing I could do for him, so I let him cry. This was more for my sanity. At about three months it was over and he slept for three to four hours at a time which was like heaven.
My second was a content baby. She rarely cried unless she was hungry or needed a diaper change. She came home from the hospital sleeping three to four hours at a time and by three months she was sleeping through the night. She slept most of the time in her baby carrier seat as I had a c-section and it was easier for me to feed her that way as I could not really lift her out of her crib. I jsut sort of slid her in and out of her little chair.
I started out reading a baby book when my son was born. Dr. Spock was worn through in a couple weeks but pretty well abandoned after six months. By the time my daughter was born two years later I did not even know where the book was.
I just did what felt right. They were both on whole milk well before a year and eating mostly the same thing I did but prepared without spices and blended for a baby food consistency.
I guess I did okay as this October my youngest turns 18 and I can raise my hands for the “touchdown”. She and her twenty year old brother are still my babies though.
Even if you are prepared for all the physical and financial responsibilities that are required for being a parent, which I was not, I don’t think you are ever prepared for events that will happen over the next 18 years.
Now there are little saliva spots all over my computer screen because of the snort of laughter that caused.
Nor as easy as you think it will be reading about in on the internet. I breastfed one. Who had to be in a certain kind of chair at a certain angle with a preference for a certain breast. Without distractions. Lying down! Hahahahahahahahaha
Oh, and my son was having night terrors while she was in her middle of the night feeding stage.
If you get extraordinarily lucky, your children will be easy children. They will sleep though the night early. They will not be picky eaters. They will be naturally tidy. They will go to school and do well. They will pick friends you approve of. They will become teenagers and bathe regularly. They will date with age appropriate activities and date people you find to be enriching. They will go off to college and will excel. They will get a job, be self sufficient, marry and give you grandchildren who are as enjoyable as they were.
Or you may face a child who is ill. One that has developmental issues. One that has a personality disorder. Or ordinary children who seem to have “wake up with a nightmare whenever Mom and Dad are having sex” radar. And the incredible skill of picking future glue sniffers for friends in kindergarten. Ones that need to be hassled to get out of bed and dressed and then hassled to go to bed and get enough sleep. Ones that tell you “I don’t have any homework, Mom” and you discover three weeks later when the teacher calls that your kid isn’t completely truthful. One that lives off peanut butter and mac n cheese.
As each stage becomes a distant memory, the stress of a child who showed every sign of potty training at eighteen months - and then finally wore big girl underwear two years later, becomes hazy. Potty training wasn’t a big deal. Yet for two years it wore away at your soul every day. Every day you looked at other two year olds without bubble butts and wondered why your kid couldn’t get this. Every trip to the store to pick up diapers reminded you of what else you could do with $20 other than buy a pack of diapers. But you move through it - and onto riding a bike.
Yep, and guess what
That person screaming is you
and 18 months is only the start :smack:
Si
So the trick is just to have the first one then…right…? Please tell me that’s right.
Mrs. Jim is due to deliver our first “any day now”
My first tested my sanity and he sometimes still does while my second was pretty much a breeze and she still is.
I am my parents’ first child, and I’m pretty sure I was more difficult than my younger sister from babyhood on.
My favorite unexpected aspect of parenting was the diaper rule:
The first child gets Pampers or Huggies
The second child gets Drypers or Good Nights or a store brand
The third child gets something that comes out of an unlabled white bag marked “Diapers”
All three got Huggies wipes though, more for us than for them. We kept them around long after the diaper stage was over due to their usefullness.
I only have one, but so far, I’ve realized that having a kid involves breaking every single promise I ever made to myself about things I’d never or always do.
I’ll only breastfeed my baby until he’s X months old. He’ll never, ever have formula! That one went out the window when my milk wouldn’t come in and he lost a dangerous amount of weight.
I’ll make all my own baby food - only home made organics for my little one! Bullshit. If you’re working full time (or even maybe if you’re not - I imagine having more than one kid and staying home is more than a full-time job), it’s an unrealistic expectation to be able to not only make all your baby food, manage a household and pay adequate attention to your kid and fulfill work obligations at the same time while managing to get time with your spouse, too.
I’ll never, ever have our baby in the bed with us. Co-sleeping is so stupid and unsafe! Then the little one gets RSV, develops bronchiolitis. After a few trips to the ER and regular breathing treatments, combined with the need to be propped up while sleeping and an understandable desire for comfort, the idea that there was no way my kid would spent the night with me went right out the window. He’s two and finally sleeping through the night on his own occasionally. But this is a rule I’m particularly glad I broke if it means we all sleep and are happy.
I cannot tell you how much I loathe it when other parents speak in absolutes and/or act like superior dipshits. “Oh, your baby doesn’t sleep through the night yet? You must be doing it wrong. You just didn’t try hard enough. Our little one has slept through the night since he was X months old. Just let him cry/give him a pacifier/whatever other suggestion worked for them that MUST work for everyone.”
I’m also really disappointed that there is so much controversy around parenting. When I look for advice, I don’t look for someone to tell me that I’m a horrible parent if I do or don’t do X - I just want a different perspective and new ideas. Sheesh.
In the end, just do what works for you and forget all the other crap that doesn’t.
It does get better. The infant years with the breast vs. formula, cosleeping, cloth diaper, SAHM/WOHM debates are the worst. The toddler years have the potty training issue.
Then parents start to realize that the chances little Austen is going to hit every mark and actually graduate from the top of his Harvard class are slim and they stop. They become too busy raising their own kids to care so much about how you raise yours. Or maybe they finally have the conversation that realizes that this isn’t some sort of contest. They start to get lives other than the ones they live out through their kids. There is still some of it (‘oh, you really should have your kid in martial arts’) but its less, and about far less contentious things.
That’s such good news! I’d hate to think this continues too much longer. Still, even though I’m undoubtedly scarring my kid for life (from others’ perspective), I’m already realizing I’ll really miss this stage.
This worked for me, too, though it was much later before I ever even heard of cosleeping as a religion. I nursed my kids and put them in bed with me and even put them in cloth diapers because it was what I knew about and what I was familiar with.
I was astonished to discover that I was in some way understood to be making a statement. So I asked my mother who informed me that the reason for those things was fundamentally that we didn’t have the money to do otherwise. With the nice side benefit that sleep training was not an issue.
My husband tells me that Eldest used to nurse in his sleep while I was asleep.
But I think if it had been important to me that my child be able to go to sleep on his own that it might have become an issue of major proportions. Sleep deprivation is not a thing to mess around with, it makes people crazy.
Yeah, I find that co-sleeping and cloth diapering are two things that I try to avoid bringing up unless someone else does first, because people tend to get all defensive, as though by mentioning that we use cloth diapers, I am somehow passing negative judgment on them for not having done so. When in reality, I don’t give two craps (pun intended) how someone diapers their kid. Ditto co-sleeping; although I do think that people who are having a lot of night wakings with infants should at least give it a shot.
We adopted our daughter from DCFS when she was 12 weeks old. She never did the normal baby crying routine of getting fussy, making a few whimpering sounds, crying and then hollering. She went from zero to screaming in nothing flat. It turned out that the birth mother was neglecting her and wouldn’t pay any attention to her unless she was screaming. The baby quickly realized that if she needed something that she had better make damn sure you could hear her.
It took almost 3 months for her to realize that we responded quickly to her screams and then another 3 months for her to find a medium tone that was somewhere between whimpering and air raid siren.
Everybody is scarred for life to some degree by something. The chances that you, as a parent, won’t do something that will scar your kid for life are zero. They’ll have bad or frightening memories of something that happened to them as a child when they grow up. But most of the things that scar people for life aren’t bad enough to keep them from functioning as an independent adult.
And most people wouldn’t graduate top of their class at Harvard even if nothing that scarred them ever happened- by definition, only one person a year can do that. Oh, and you don’t need to graduate top of your class at Harvard, or even get into Harvard, to have an independent, productive, and fulfilling adult life. Lots of people who have never even seen Harvard manage to do it.
There just are so many who do pass that negative judgment, though. Or maybe there aren’t so many but the few can be pretty loud.
I have conflicting feelings about the “give it a shot” thing. I think my own experience with nursing was good one, for instance, largely because every female relative I knew well nursed their child. So I had very large bank of experience and support to draw from when the inevitable problems occurred. And I did not expect anything like a Hallmark card; I expected a nursing baby.
Which is good because the advice to be had from professionals was confusing and appeared to be largely agenda driven.
I think the cosleeping thing, if it’s done out of sheer laziness (as in my case) would be worth a shot. But for a person who is invested in independent sleeping and privacy and I don’t know what all symbolic issues people have tied up in it I think giving it a shot would be unlikely to help and might even make it worse.
But I have indeed sometimes thought, well, complaining bout night waking for an infant who is sleeping alone – it’s like you invented weather and then you want to stand around and bitch that it’s raining.