Monkey grows so fast sometimes it seems like she’s literally growing out of her clothes as she wears them. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if one morning I put her in a sleeper only to find her feet poking through by the evening.The past few months have been quite the eye-opening, parent-appreciating-sorry-for-every-bad-thing-I’ve-ever-done-mom-and-dad experience. I can summarize the experience in 14 lessons I’ve learned:
1. Baby’s cleanliness - you will start out gun-ho about baby being clean and you will change her outfit 17 times a day after she spits up. By week 2, unless the outfit is truly a biohazard, you will conclude that she’s ok to sit in it for the rest of the day. This does not make you a bad parent. This is survival.
2. Your cleanliness - cleanliness is fleeting so don’t bother – you will always be covered in baby goo. If you’re all dressed up to go out and temporarily have regained some sense of looking anything other than haggard – baby will nip this in the bud and remind you of your new role.
3. You can sleep when you’re dead – cause you ain’t sleeping now, and not for a very long time...Even if baby sleeps for a whole two hours straight, you will still startle awake, and poke her to make sure she’s ok. She will now wake up...very angry.
4. If strangers peer into the stroller to admire your lovely baby, she will inevitably and shamelessly use that exact moment to have a bowel movement...loudly.
5. You can slave away all night feeding, changing and burping baby, spend all day cleaning, bathing and comforting baby, but when daddy comes home, he’s still the favourite.
6. Babies have these amazing gummy smiles that they bust out right after they’ve vomited in your laptop that make it impossible to be annoyed.
7. You will somehow find that it is 6pm and you haven’t eaten anything other than cereal for breakfast all day. You then eat a dinner that comes out of a wrapper because it’s quick, easy and you can do it one-handed. This repeats every day until you come down with scurvy and decide that you best start eating like a normal human being.
8. You very quickly learn that some babies are very picky about certain things. Some babies (who shall remain nameless) will only make a mess in a fresh, clean diaper that has just been changed.
9. You become adept at doing everything using just one hand, your teeth, your feet, or a combination of all of the above all the while balancing sleeping baby in your other arm and quietly chanting, “stay asleep sweetie, please, please, please, stay asleep.”
10. You can dress your baby girl head to toe in pink, in a onesie that has the words “BABY GIRL” embroidered on the front, and strangers will still ask you if it’s a boy or girl.
11. If you ask your husband to use the sound machine (the "sleep sheep") to put the baby to sleep in the bedroom, you will enter said room a few minutes later to find the sound machine on, the husband asleep, and the baby wide awake.
12. Everyone will claim your baby looks exactly like some member of their family - aunt Erma, uncle Bill or cousin Larry, and yet somehow Erma, Bill, and Larry look nothing alike.
13. While you might think that you are deeply adored by your little one, never forget that the second someone dangles a plastic toy in baby's face, you cease to exist.
14. You will find your keys in the fridge, your cell phone in the laundry hamper and your wallet in the dishwasher. Simple arithmetic will baffle you. For reasons why – see number 3 above.
