Neuromum

The baby (still spoiled) rides on someone’s back and Miles pedals his trike. We don’t have too many long evenings left- already the days are shorter; but they are still crisp and beautiful and full of opportunity. Will we do this next summer? Will the baby still be little enough to be carried? Will Miles still ride a trike?

1. Attempted to have “down-time” at home. Failed.
2. Ran around the neighborhood with 2 laser guns (large plastic spoons) in an attempt to rid Montlake of all invisible aliens.
3. Played “What time is it Mr. Wolf” at the community center.
4. Found large caterpillar on the sidewalk and carried it home in one of said spoons.
5. Attempted to feed the catepillar many foods including a leaf, an Asian pear and a plum.
6. Made pumpkin cookes
7. Took the caterpillar on a walk to the local corner store to purchse additional snacks for him.

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. –John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

If the order that babies learn words tells us about their character and priorities, we are in big trouble with Alex. At about 12 mos, last May, she learned the word, “No!” and began to use it frequently. At that time, she didn’t have many words. Since babies learn words in order of their importance, it was clear that saying “No!” was very important- about as important as “cup”, “mama” and “doll”. And just this week, FOUR months later, she finally started saying, “Yes!”. I imagine that is typical for a toddler, to learn no loooong before yes, but in our case the length of the delay was rather hilarious.

Listening to Alex’s speech, you can not only tell that she is a contrary personality, but that she has an older brother. She talks about “bad guys”, “Backhoes”, and “McQueen” (a character in the cars movie).

At least she is better off than Miles, who learned the word for “backhoe” a full year before he learned the word, “Bird”.

Up with the baby at 6, off to work at 7, home for playground runs at 3:30, dinner at 6, work on my grant from 8-10. Long, long, long.

We have waited all winter for this and it is bliss. We swim every day, picnic every evening. This weekend we even took the kids hiking up a STEEP trail. Miles complained but did make it to the top, and Alex hiked most of the way down. I hope it never ends…

My friend Erin wrote me an email the other day. Therein, she included the statement that is the title of this post. It made my day. Let me back up for a second.

It would be mistake to say that I have been anything but lucky in this business of child-having and child-raising. But, as this blog has tried to detail, Miles and Alex are sometimes lots and lots of work. Of course, this is true of all babies, especially pairs of them that are less than 2 years apart. But my two, with their fussy babyhoods and high energy toddlerhoods, are definitely a wearisome duo. I am not alone in my view of them: just last week at the children’s museum, another mother, sitting comfortably in an easy chair while her two-year-old sat and read books, said to me, “Well, I see why you’re in such good shape.” Mind you, I could barely make out her words as I dashed by trying to keep track of both my toddler who was up in a treehouse and my baby who was lost somewhere in the train track area. After you hear words to the effects of, “Wow- better you than me!” enough times, you sort of accept your lot in life.

Until suddenly, things have changed. Miles’ energy and independence, so long a drain on my energy, are suddenly extremely convenient qualities. And he can do so many things for himself now: he puts on his own shoes, he gets up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, he helps unload the dishwasher and aids with the laundry. And the icing on the cake, and the topic of Erin’s email, is his swimming lessons.

Miles is 3 now, and is finally able to take the class where he goes on his own. We showed up to the first class, and met Miles’ teacher, Oscar. By way of a greeting to my tiny first-time swimmer he grunted, “Get kicking!” and pointed Miles to the side of the pool. Oscar proceeded with a collection of activities Miles hates including swimming on his back, and having a flotation device attached to his body. At the end of the class, instead of a cheerful goodbye song, Oscar grunted, “You’re done.” But Miles loves it! He is always excited to go and does everything the drill seargent instructor asks! It’s fantastic, and when I told Erin how happy I was about his enthusiasm, she said that I, the parent of the two crazy energy-balls, was the lucky one. Yippeeee!!!!

Tomorrow my sweet baby Alex turns 1. They say that you can’t spoil a baby, but you can, and I speak from experience.

This year that I have spent with her has been so different from my son’s first year. For many reasons, of course: the second baby comes into a very different life than the first one. But there is another key difference in my mind between Alex’s first year and Miles’. for a number of reasons, much, much more than Miles, Alex has been HELD.

I don’t mean to suggest that we negleted Miles. Sure, we had a baby bjorn and I do have some lovely memories of walking around holding him while he was all swaddled up like a tiny burrito. But things were different then. It was reasonable to expect that he would nap in a bed, for example, because morphing our schedule to his needs was an entirely doable enterprise. Not so with Alex, of course, because… well, there are just more of us and we have stuff to do and we can’t sit at home all day waiting for the baby to wake up. So Alex has spent many hours napping while attached to my body (and more recently, Michael’s body) as we romped about Seattle. Secondly, putting Miles in a stroller while we were out made sense: confining our travels to level sidewalks was not really a problem the way it is now. And lastly, with Miles, at least at first, I was inclined to kind of keep him on a feeding schedule and this constraint was hard to fullfil when he was physically pressed against the snack bar that is my body. In retrospect, it seems laughable that I would have been so inclined: Alex ate virtually nonstop for the whole first 3 months of her life.

So Alex, sweet Alex, has been held and cuddled and rocked and bounced and snuggled. She has, without a doubt, been spoiled beyond comprehension. I think she’ll turn out okay, though. And I wouldn’t trade all those sweet memories of her tied up in my wrap, warm against my body, for anything.

Do everyone else’s babies go through this stage? My daughter Alex is 11 months old and is truly a danger to herself and others. She is at the unfortunate stage of toddlerhood where she is completely mobile but has no sense whatsoever. We can’t take her anywhere! An afternoon at the playground becomes an endless struggle to prevent her from eating sand and a trip to a restaurant becomes a crazed game of cat-and-mouse as she climbs from her highcahir and darts off into the kitchen. Even a seemingly innocuous visit to the public restroom leads to behavior that may ultimately result in her contracting either the rotovirus or giardia (and I should know, we’ve been through both in this house). My son Miles was the same way at this age. We took him once to a marina so that he could walk along the dock and look at the boats. The excursion was a disaster and lasted all of 7 minutes because he spent the whole entire time trying to hurl himself into the water.

For parents of toddlers in this stage, many venues are off-limits. Certainly restaurants are out, and even the shopping cart at the grocery store only seems to incite climbing mishaps. Before starting a family, I knew that my cinema visits and shoe shopping would be seriously curtailed, but I never thought I would wax rhapsodic about just being able to go to the drugstore unencumbered.

Parents of such toddlers also look enviously upon parents whose 1-year-olds (or almost 1-year-olds) seem to be cut from a different cloth. We wonder why there is such a big market for strollers: if someone could tell me how to get a kid like mine to actually sit in one of those things I would pay them big money. We wonder why highchairs were even invented: the 3 minutes that it takes to shovel all the food in is a welcome break but so short as to be almost a tease.

The good news is that, if my first child is any evidence, the padded cell stage only lasts about a year. Miles can actually handle himself in almost any environment without incident, and he hasn’t tried to hurl himself into a major body of water in at least a week.

Four friends of mine from graduate school are having babies this month. This is of course, wonderful, and I have already oohed and ahhed over the first photographs of puffy-faced mums and round faced, red-lipped beautiful babies. While looking over these photos, I was overcome with an emotion that I had not expected to feel: envy. Partly, or course, this is because newborn babies are sweet and lovely and stay that way for such a short time. As a result, anyone lucky enough to have one is the target of universal envy. But I don’t want any more newborns, so what I was feeling was a bit different. Let me try and explain.

I have 2 kids now, and on a daily basis I am faced with situations that I don’t know how to handle. The problem is twofold: first, my older child is a toddler, and I’ve never had a toddler before. The other day, when I gave him a warning about bad behavior and he giggled in my face and started singing a song, I was faced with defiance for the first time and had to really think about what to do. Second, taking care of my younger child requires a balancing act that I never had to do when I only had Miles. How do I keep a highly mobile baby from eating the tiny playmobil toys that litter our living room?

But newborns? I know newborns. I have determined the optimal bouncing frequency for curing evening fussiness, I can simultaneously breastfeed and cook dinner. I know how to use at least 5 different kinds of slings. I am a pro. And I look at my friends who have newborns, only one newborn each, and I know that if it were me with just one baby, a newborn, that life would be so easy. Mind you, I did once have only one baby, a newborn, and it wasn’t easy at all. It was horribly difficult because I didn’t know how to do any of the things that are now second nature to me. But we can never go back, of course, and now here I am with 2 kids and constantly facing problems I don’t know how to solve.

The worst part of it is that some of the knowledge we gain as parents is both incredibly hard won and utterly time sensitive. Take swaddling, for example. I can take a crying, wriggling newborn and wrap her up in a tight swaddle so quickly that she will stop wailing immediately if only out of pure shock. But my babies aren’t newborns anymore so now I have no one to swaddle. Or pumping: I could write a book! (maybe I should write a book). Years (yes, years) of dealing with fenugreek, expression schedules, pumping bras, freezer bags, and filter adapters have given me a wealth of knowledge that, in a few months, will be utterly obsolete.

This is truly one of the tradgedies of parenting: we become experts in one stage of childhood just as our children pass to the next one. This leaves us with no idea how to solve today’s problems and no use for yesterday’s knowledge. I think this may be why new moms are on the receiving end of so much advice: mums with older children want desparately for our vast knowledge to be of some use to someone. Anyone! So to my friends from graduate school with your brand new beautiful babies, please, please call me. If you ask about the difference between the accessory sets for a medela classic and a medela pump-in-style, I will tell you in great detail and it will make my day.