Friday, January 20, 2017

MY THIRD BABY - Lower Your Expectations

Lower, lower, lower...

In order for you to maintain your sanity, you are going to have to start viewing everyday tasks as achievements. This shift in perspective basically goes from "Hey, I cooked a lovely dinner from scratch!" to "Hey, we ate dinner!" If you don't see things like showering and getting out of your pyjamas as achievements, at least for the first month or so, then everything is going to be pretty miserable.

Of course by the time you realise that a lot of new babies just sleep a lot of the time, and actually you have heaps of time to do stuff while they sleep, you'll be having your second baby and using all that spare time to look after your first child!

My tip would be in order to get any BIG task done (and I'm not saying you SHOULD clean your bathroom, but if that sort of thing makes you feel happy and normal...) you are going to have to break it down into smaller tasks. So instead of setting yourself up for disappointment with "Clean the bathroom", you set yourself the tasks as separate jobs "Clean the sink/bath/shower/toilet". Then you don't have to set aside the one big chunk of time to get it done, and by the end of the day you can pat yourself on the back for having achieved three of the four things you set out to do.

The thing is, you sort of can still do all the things you want to do, you just can't do them whenever your feel like. That's the sacrifice; time. Doing things when you'd rather be sitting around, and sitting around when you'd rather be doing things. Anywhere you want to go, you CAN still go, you just have to plan it more carefully, start getting ready earlier, and give yourself more (or less) TIME to enjoy it. If you want to go out for a coffee, go while baby is sleeping, or TAKE baby while he's sleeping. If you want to go out for dinner, go on a weekday when you won't be stared down by the Saturday night crowd who have been looking forward to a quiet dinner all week long at work...

That's the other thing though, I'm sure in ancient times we were all very used to just lumping our babies along with us wherever we went so they didn't get eaten by tigers, but somewhere along the way (as the risk of being food for wild animals diminished) we started to feel a lot more comfortable leaving them behind in quiet rooms and whispering all day long so they could sleep undisturbed and just getting on with things without them. We've removed babies so much from the public sphere that one can't help but feel that their presence will always be an intrusion on the comfort of others. However there is now a lot more evidence, scientific and anecdotal, that they will feel most comfortable and learn best by being close to us and seeing what we do all day, and that sometimes (not always but, I would hesitantly propose, more often than not) they will be happy and settled and quiet and not bother anyone just being with their loving parents in a lot of places.

This is not to say you should be taking them along with you to clean the bathroom (if you work with toxic chemicals, obviously not) or that you shouldn't rest whenever you can (you definitely should, we'll talk about this more when it comes to breastfeeding info) or that you shouldn't leave them behind and go off and do things on your own (which is sometimes more fun or just more convenient) ... I'm just saying don't be AFRAID to take them with you. 

By all means, expect the worst, but do it anyway, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that other people dining out on a Wednesday night aren't bothered by your baby being a little unsettled, or that baby who screamed all evening being rocked to sleep in his nursery is transformed into a sweet little lad when you step outside the front door in the morning, or baby who hasn't done a poo for two days is suddenly a cheerful and happy companion after making a biohazard of their carseat on the way to the restaurant. 

Sometimes it's almost like the thing you're dreading is actually the thing they need. Whether it's that they need the stimulation of a little excursion, or they need a mum who is calm and happy after putting on actual clothes and drinking actual coffee in public. And chances are that somewhere along the way someone says "Oh isn't he CUUUUUTE?!?!?!" 

And you will be able to take and deep breath and see that yes, yes he is cute.

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