We’re different kind of parents. Although we’re not so radically different that we only buy wooden toys for our Little Bit (I know of a family who does that), but we don’t have many toys for her. Sometimes I feel guilty about this when we go to other people’s homes and their same-aged kids are loaded with toys and Little Bit tears after everything and is occupied for about 3 hours, with no argument.
Then I hear the parents complain on how many toys their kid has, how it’s so hard to clean, and how it’s so expensive. Then why do it at all? Our daughter plays with pots and pans, dollies from the dollar store, scraps of fabric, and her own imagination. She’s pretty content with all of that everyday. She has a stack of blocks, a ball pit (yard sale find), and a bouncy horsey-thing. That’s pretty much it. Compared to her little friends, she’s pretty poor in the toy department.
But why do parents do this to themselves? Why spend all that money on toys that their kid rarely plays with? We let family buy for her.. for all holidays. It’ll change once she gets a little older and will realize that she’s receiving gifts from Mommy and Daddy.
Take away those bells, whistles, dings, doinks, boings, and see what happens.
One of the hardest things I had to come to terms with was waking up in the middle of the night with my daughter to feed her. It was hard to go back to sleep (if she did) and there I was.. awake when the rest of the world was asleep.
The one thing that got me through it (sanely) was to look forward to watching TV shows. I had every hour planned out. At 1am was Northern Exposure, 2am was Nash Bridges, 3am TJ Hooker, etc…
So whenever Little Bit began to cry for her midnight milk session, I would look at the clock and automatically know what’s going to be on TV for me to watch. I started looking a little forward to it actually.
I wish someone had told me this before I had Little Bit. This advice is more for stay-at-home moms than working moms. Only because working moms are able to socialize with co-workers.
After you have a baby and have settled into being a mom and begin getting into a routine you seek out friendship. The current single-friends (or marrieds without kids) can’t identify with who you are now that you have a newborn. The only thing you can talk about is amazing things he/she has done and the poopy diaper they had the other day. The only thing left to do is to find new friends, mommy friends.
There’s bulletin boards all over the place for moms in local areas or even global mom groups. They’re fantastic to join if you need advice, share stories or pictures, and just have a common camaraderie with women who understand (for the most part).
Here’s my advice. It’s super to join a local group and have playdates, and it’s nice to consider these women as friends. But do not hang out with these women on a regular basis when the only thing you two have in common is your children’s age. That is not a basis of an everlasting friendship and it only leads to disaster.
Find a woman (or two, but not more than 3) that you have a similar set of beliefs on raising your children. However, you may find that gem of a lady who may have a complete different view on raising children but you equally respect one another for it. You want to find someone on your own level. Don’t settle for someone simply because your children get along. To help ease into motherhood and beginning your SAHM career, it’s good to meet up once a week.. have lunch at eachother’s house or even out. But go out and do something.
If you have at least one lady friend that you can develop a close relationship with and respect her opinion on advice with kids, then you have a super match. More than one woman and you get that strange triangle chumminess which often leads to backstabbing, hormonal conversations, and fights on who’s hanging out with who more often.
Also.. put yourself and the baby on a schedule. If you do the same thing everyday, it becomes a routine and the baby adapts to it. But just as the baby needs a routine, you do too or else you get into a rut. Maybe on Mondays you see Jennifer (your super-super friend), on Tuesdays you photograph the outdoors, on Wednesdays you plan your menu for the week, etc..
It may seem mundane and a little silly, but you’ll find yourself looking forward to such things.
Also.. to keep socks together in laundry, put them in a pillowcase.
I know competition exists with school-aged children’s parents, but did you know that there’s a different competition currently active at playdates? I call it the One-upmomship because basically that’s what it is.
“Sally just learned how to walk!” – Mom1
“Aw! How sweet! How old is she?” – Mom2
“She just turned 14 months. We’re so proud” – Mom1
“Johnny learned how to talk at 9 months.” – Mom2
“Neh.” – Mom1
I think sometimes we do it without realizing it, but I’m so fully aware of it that I actually interrupt other moms to make sure this doesn’t happen. A lot of feelings get hurt and many mom’s feeling inadequate. They feel their child is “behind” because they’re developing later than the other kids. No one is really immune to this either, even the crunchy moms have those who compete on who’s greener. Mom1 may use cloth diapers but Mom2 may use cloth diapers, washed them herself in rainwater, and dried outside on a laundry line.
It seems like it’s impossible for all of us to get together and support one another. Even on a mother’s supporting website you’ll find this kind of banter. And the walking example above is a true story. It happened to me.
Maybe after reading this you’ll see that it’s happening. It’s not about who’s better than who, who’s wrong and who’s right… it’s about the children. They develop differently, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less special if your child was faster or not.
I seem to get a lot of hits off of feeling guilty about stopping breastfeeding.
Why would you feel guilty? Either you tried and it didn’t work or you did it as long as you could and now it’s ended. I don’t understand this stigma people have attached to it. Either they’re discussing the picture of a child breastfeeding on the cover of a magazine or they’re talking about how formula-feeding moms are abusing their babies by not breastfeeding (on mom boards).
It’s a breast… it’s life-giving, foreplay-inducing, symbol of a woman and most women are repelled by it. I see now why America is heading towards hell in a hand-basket. We’re amongst a lot of conservatives that are too scared to see tits. And they call European barbarians? They’re far more advanced than we are because they don’t give a shit. They let the boobies fly everywhere! I know.. I’ve been a few times.
They don’t care if you breastfeed or formula feed. Naturally doctors assume you’ll be breastfeeding, but I’ve known some European women who straight-out formula-fed and they were met with no criticism from peers or physicians. Isn’t that nice? They don’t have this pressure of breastfeeding in public and they don’t carry the guilt about not being able to breastfeed. You do or you don’t. I can’t tell you how many baring breasts I saw. Some nice and perky and others large and pendulous.. all of them attached to women who felt free to do what they need to do.
I said it once and I’ll say it again. As long as you feed your baby, I don’t care which you prefer. I don’t mind public breastfeeding (as long as it’s not an 8yr old! Shoot! I forgot to post that story again!) and I don’t give dirty looks to a mom fixing a formula bottle for a newborn.
So don’t feel guilty about not breastfeeding and don’t feel guilty about having to stop breastfeeding for whatever reason. I stopped because it was my birthday and I was getting pretty tired of it. Little Bit didn’t seem so tired of it, but I was. How good could it be for a nursing mom to have ill feelings towards nourishing her baby? Not good, I don’t think. So I stopped for the both of us, and we were much happier.
I did feel guilty after 12 hours or so. Then I felt really really guilty after the first day, but I realized that it was all hormones, and soon it’ll go away and I’ll be out of my breastfeeding fog and back to my normal self (and normal libido!) soon.
My Little Bit is very active, happy, dancey, and engaging little girl. She loves to babble, wave hi, and inspect things. So when we go into a store she’s usually occupied with merchandise to really pay attention to people. So I just make sure she doesn’t run into people and that she doesn’t run away from me. However, I still manage to get dirty looks from people. I don’t know if it’s because sometimes she takes things off of shelves (which I put back) or because she’s in their way. One woman actually had the balls to tell my little girl to move. Hello.. she’s 2. She barely listens to me much less anyone else, especially a stranger. Thankfully, Little Bit didn’t move and looked at the woman like she was crazy, which I was mimicking.
When my daughter is in a very good mood, she likes to wave hi to people. It catches some off guard and takes them a moment to wave hi, maybe even smile. Some just grin, and others do absolutely nothing but stare at her as if she grew a second head. I know they’ve had enough time to register that a cute little girl just waved hi to them, so why they respond with a glare or a scowl is beyond me. But the affect it has on Little B is what pains me, she actually frowns.
Most times when things don’t go her way, she cries or sighs and sometimes even shrugs. Rarely does she frown. Only when it has a deep impact on her will it cause her little bottom lip to poke out.
It makes me want to chase these people down and trip them. It’s a 2yr old little girl who’s beginning to understand the world and how it operates. Sure she’ll come under criticism, bitter people, and even arguments, but does it take so much effort to at least crack a smile? Or maybe a little nod of gesture?
Apparently when I was a baby/child I was extremely serious. It’s always my mom’s favorite story that I took a 3yr old little boy by the hand, took him to his mom, and told her that she had to take him home because he was touching too many things (trinkets on tables, picture frames, etc). I was 4 when I did that. She said that I gave other children the oddest expressions when they acted up, she said it was as if I couldn’t fathom kids acting like their age.
Of course Mother Nature has a large sense of humor (the beautiful woman that she is) and has granted me the wonderful opportunity to birth and raise the most unique creature I have ever come across (the #2 slot is her father/my husband). She loves to put blankets on her head and run into walls (not on purpose but because she can’t see where she’s going). She finds those “ears” that you buy in novelty shops are to put on all at once and then accessorize yourself with necklaces and sunglasses.
She’ll ask for your hand in order to dance to a song.. any song that suits her fancy. It could be Death Cab for Cutie, Ok Go, or the commercial for Geico with that caveman guy. She hums to herself, she sits in a corner and talks to herself, and she laughs when no one is talking and then she sighs as if no one got the joke.
She’s not even two and she’s my hero.
I was putzing around on halfbakery when I ran across the entry for the Ultimate Baby Formula. The idea is that breast milk is the best thing for an infant, and if the mother’s milk is the best.. how about milk from multiple moms? Wouldn’t that make the milk stronger, better? Collect milk from multiple moms and a company would put it in a large vat and then distribute that to stores nationwide.
Super.
I’ll just let you sit on that idea for a little bit while I tell you about a group of moms that I know that have a breastfeeding group. This isn’t any ordinary breastfeeding group, this is a group who pass their babies around a room and let other moms breastfeed their babies. So you may feed about 5 to 8 kids in one session off your own milk. They just pass the babies around like a basket of bread, chat about life, all the while having some baby that isn’t theirs suckling off them.
Kudos to those that can do that without grossing out. I couldn’t do it for sure. But I would LOVE to hear some of the stories that come out of that group! I know we have a lot of drama that goes on my board, I can only imagine what goes on over there!
Help me out with a moral dilemma here. *all names have been changed to protect one guilty adult, one sad parent, and 2 innocent children.
There’s this woman that I know, Lisa, her and I used to be friends not too long ago. Our daughters are almost the same age. It was cute having them play and we would chit-chat. Her and I are extremely different in personalities, but we got along ok because our kids did. Plus, I’m the type of person that is amiable. I’ll shrug off a lot of things because I know how people are simply different.
Anyways.. Lisa used to take care of this baby named Emma. Emma was just a few months younger than her own daughter. Immediately, those of us who went to Lisa’s house for a playdate would notice that poor little Emma would stay in her carseat almost the entire day. If she wasn’t in the carseat she was in the crib “taking a nap”. The only time Emma would leave one of those two places is when one of us moms played with her because all of us got so sick of seeing this injustice.
Let me put it frankly, Lisa is a lazy bitch. She’s extremely obese and absolutely exhausted all the time to take care of 2 little ones. Renee (Emma’s mom) bought a double stroller for Lisa to use to take the 2 babies out on beautiful days… did Lisa ever go out? No. Those babies stayed inside all the time. When there was an opportunity to leave, Lisa would bitch and moan that it’s too hard with 2 babies.. although all of us would offer to help.
Some of us moms spoke on the side and said that at least Emma will be able to crawl soon and then walk so we won’t have to worry about the carseat thing anymore. True, but then we had to worry that she was in the crib half a day.
Lisa is entirely unfit to taking care of anyone’s children. She ignores them, spends most of her days on the sofa, plays on the computer a majority of the time, and is generally an unhappy person who would break out into “fits”.
So why didn’t I tell Renee all this? Because I couldn’t. Lisa and I had a huge falling out, and if I told Renee the truth would she have believed me? I found out recently that Renee was warned by Lisa that many women may contact her and say bad things about her taking care of Emma. All of us were seriously tempted to, but were worried we would be sued for slander.
Lisa is not taking care of Emma anymore, Renee has finally seen the light. One of my friends has spoken to Renee candidly and has told her everything she saw at those playdates. Needless to say Renee feels horrible. My heart goes out to her because if I ever found out someone had wronged my child…. I would feel unfit myself and guilty as hell. Then I could get pissed and plot to beat the shit out of her behind the Piggly Wiggly.
So.. my moral dilemma. Lisa is looking for a new charge to take care of. I think she’s unfit, possibly abusive, and shouldn’t even be taking care of her own kid much less someone else’s. She’s taken out ads on craigslist, and I just want to call her out on it and warn everyone. Can I get in trouble for that? Should I even do it? I just don’t want to see another baby harmed.
I’m a different type of parent. I’m not up my kid’s ass all the time. She spends a good part of the day amusing herself and I spend my day working from home. I spend an hour or so with her in the afternoon and about 2 hours at night. I don’t talk to her constantly through the day, sometimes we’re quiet through lunch. I want her to be able to hear her own thoughts or maybe talk and share with me.
It’s amazing whats being said when you just shut up. I know so many mom’s who chat with her baby/child all day long or feel like they have to entertain them every minute of the day. When do you have time to clean the house? (By the way, that’s stay-at-home moms.. working moms are entirely different). Those moms are the same ones who only play children’s music in the house and in the car.. watch children’s programs only on TV, and pretty much surround them and their baby with academics, stimulation, and primary colors. Doesn’t that get old after a while?
Granted I’m not playing rap music and watching CSI with Little Bit, I do know what is acceptable for my little viewer and what’s not. But if I want to watch an episode of King of the Hill, well, I’m watching it.
Whoops. Got off on another rant.
