When I found out I was having another baby, my thoughts immediately turned to my first daughter: Would I be able to give her all of the love I had before? Would we still be as close as we were? Would she still feel like she was the center of my world? Would she be OK?
Well, here I am 10 months later, with a six-week-old and an I-can’t-believe-she-just-turned-two-year-old, and so far the answers to my questions are usually, no, no […]
No less than four dozen times a day, my daughter will do something amazing. Maybe she’ll make up a little song about her baby sister in mommy’s belly, or line up all of her stuffed animals and read them a story, or, like she did the other day, wake up from her nap, still half-asleep and say “Big, big nose. Big beard. No, little beard. So fun, so cute. Daddy!”
I will think to myself, “Man, I’ve got to write that […]
Fast forward six months, and the sight of another toddler’s nose running can send you into near-hysterics. Whereas really, that kid’s probably just teething, and it’s the clean-faced angel kissing your child on the mouth who really has CRV, his mama just doesn’t know it yet. The strategically placed bleach buckets for toys and the hand sanitizer bottles just seem to mock us now, don’t they?
Before I became a mom, I had never heard of self-soothing, much less worried about it. If you told me that I would spend hours and hours discussing it with other parents, I would have been about as credulous as if you’d told me I would someday be able to spot different baby brands on sight or that I would really, truly love making baby food.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about self-soothing over the past 19 months. I’m […]
Quinn has entered the cuteness stage far earlier than I expected. No, not the stage of being cute herself. That’s one she’s always been in and will never, ever leave (note to self: Re-read that sentence when Quinn’s in eighth grade, then cue the chianti).
No, my toddler is in the stage where she remarks upon the cuteness of other things and people. Like her pigtails, my earrings and her friends (especially a certain little boy at preschool, who is actually […]
It happened today. I was at the zoo and I saw a woman cradling a tiny baby and I stopped and stared hard. “I want one,” said a plaintive (and possibly crazy) voice from deep within me.
Well, that is a damn good thing, lady, ’cause you’re getting one in four months! I am quite relieved that my desire for a baby managed to kick in before my baby got here. I got pregnant again when Quinn was just 13 months […]
Now that Quinn is well into toddlerhood, and the burgeoning bump of my second baby sometimes edges into my field of vision, I have both the emotional distance and the sense of urgency needed to look back critically on the newborn period. My memories are often sepia-toned, infused with the magic that tiny little being brought into our lives.
But the picture isn’t always pretty. I didn’t realize it at the time (or at least I didn’t acknowledge it to anyone, […]
My whole life, I’ve felt like I was obtaining random skills and taking up random hobbies for just my own pleasure. I am one of these ever-curious people who likes to try new things, learn new languages, make new circles of friends. I like the liberal arts approach to life, reading Gray’s Anatomy one week, a graphic novel the next, and splicing my Paul Krugman/ Malcolm Gladwell with Jane Austin fan fic.
I always thought that my lifestyle put me at […]
It’s not until you have kids of your own that you realize how DIY this whole child-rearing thing can be. Parenting just seems so simple in theory (love them enough and they will turn out fine) and so ridiculously complex in practice (should I let her hold the pen for a few minutes while I watch her, or should I preemptively pull it from her hands for fear she might sprint off with it and have it lodge firmly in […]
Ever since I got pregnant with baby #2 four months ago, I’ve gotten hints of what’s to come for my first baby: Immediate move to “big girl” status on or around June 3, 2011, even though she’ll only be 23 months old. That thought makes me really, really sad.
The crazy thing about toddlers is they seem so much like little kids, but they still have so much baby in them, too. I really think that’s as it should be, and […]