When I found out I was going to be a parent for the first time, I made all kinds of promises to my unborn daughter. Her baby nursery would be perfect. (True, I did most of the work myself and obsessed over the tiniest details, eschewing any advice anyone else had to offer, least of all her father.)
She would always look impeccable and so would I. I saw no reason, pre-delivery, why I shouldn't always look my normal makeupped, curled and styled self.
A few months later, as I was wandering around the house in sweatpants and a puke-stained oversized t-shirt, I came to the conclusion that I had made promises to my kid that even Mother Teresa wouldn't keep. My daughter didn't look much better. Instead of the pink-clad, hair-bowed infant I imagined, my daughter was sprouting cradle cap, yellow as a canary from mild jaundice, and permanently dressed in sleepers that I had to keep changing every five minutes. She was also slightly drunk from all the gripe water for her constant gas. (Actually, I bought the alchohol free kind. If there had been any alchohol in it, there might have been none left for her.)
The first time I gave her a bath was a nightmare. I handled her so carefully and delicately, and when she hit the bathwater for the first time, she went as red as a tomato and screamed until she lost her breath. I started bawling then and my mother had to come to the rescue.
Her baby book had to be maintained, constantly. True. But when I had my second and third kids, the baby books kinda fell to the wayside, and whenever I fell behind in the subsequent books by a few months, I had to resort to cheating by looking in the first one.
Same with the pictures. Rolls and rolls upon rolls of film were used on the oldest kid. Come the advent of the digital camera, however, and all the pictures are now being stored on the computer, and the photo albums are collecting dust.
Everything had to be super sterile. Boiled baby bottles, nipples, pacifiers. If my third kid dropped his soother, I just rinsed it, even if the dog had just licked it.
The 'five second rule' was used regularly.
Everything my kid ate was going to be homemade, nutritious and ultra-healthy. Three kids later, I see no problem letting them have Froot Loops for breakfast.
All toys were going to be the type that were durable, sent a positive message, and called back to simpler times, like when many toys were hand crafted out of wood. These days I'll fight another parent to the death for some popular toy the kids are really hankering for at Christmas, and I don't even blink an eye when my three year old boy holds crash derbys with his toy cars in the living room.
So I deal by occasionally giving my kids canned food or a McMeal. I'll lock myself in my room so I can use the phone for five minutes without some kind of interruption. I'll put on a movie with no positive message just to keep the kiddies occupied for a while so I don't have a complete meltdown. I hoard small amounts of chocolate around the house and I don't share with the kids.
Don't get me wrong. I adore my kids. It's just so..busy. My mother looks after the kids till I get home from work, and when I get home she generally resorts to giving me a laundry list of their activities during the day. "We're out of milk, Scarlett has math, Juliet has a new project to do, Brody squirted toothpaste all over the wall, and DO YOU KNOW what those kids did today?" Kinda makes me glad I 'played' at work all day.
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