Neither Emily nor I had any idea what was in store for us as new parents. Sure we went to the class at the hospital, yes we have lots of siblings who've we've seen make this transition, and sure we even have "What to Expect..." and various other books that try to warn us that our baby will be unique and therefore the advice in the books may not apply to her. But it's really something you have to experience for yourself to understand it. Here are some of the interesting tidbits we've learned about ourselves as parents, Lizzie, and other people's interactions with us.
It is shocking how fast dealing with another person's fecal matter can become just another part of the routine of life. Shocking.
People are fascinated with Lizzie's hair and use many different words to describe it, several of them made-up. The main constant in people's descriptions seems to be the f-sound. To wit, people have described her hair as: fluffy, foofy, fro-y, fuzzy, froofy, fly-away, and floofy. I'm not sure what to make of the prepondernance of f-sounds (I'm pretty sure it's a bilabial fricative sound...) in words people use/invent to discuss baby hair, but I bet there's a linguistics paper out there discussing it.
Just because you learn to function on less sleep doesn't mean you don't miss it.
Though they're terribly one-sided, some interesting conversations take place when it's just you and your child in a room.
I don't care if it's just gas, it's still cute when she smiles at this age.
The likelihood of Lizzie immediately refilling a diaper right after I've changed her seems to increase in relationship with the number of tiny snaps/buttons that are on the outfit I just got her back into.
You can memorize which channels don't air infomercials at 1 AM pretty quickly.
Emily and I are no longer the reason our friends come to visit us.
Currently, one of the only techniques we've found that almost always stops Lizzie from crying is to hold her head in one hand, her butt in the other, and perform bicep curls. If this continues as she gains weight, our upper arms are going to be ripped.
Though breast feeding is supposed to be a natural process, there sure seem to be a lot of how-to guides and information to track which make it more complicated than sticking a bottle of pre-measured formula in a child's mouth.
When we're sleeping, Emily's sensitivity to Lizzie's cries is much higher than mine. But this was true of our alarm clocks before Lizzie, so it isn't surprising.
Having closed the MI chapter of our lives, where we met, fell in love, and survived graduate school together, we are now on to being professors in ID. While we enjoy teaching, our lives revolve around each other and our kids: Lizzie & Kit.
2 comments:
Joe, I would like to remind you that you once described my hair as floofy, and I warned you never to use that word again to describe a girl's hair. I am sad to see that you're just as good at ignoring me now as you were then.
As Emily grows in her motherhood, she will find that her sensitivity for a lot of things will grow. My husband calls me SuperMom because of the way I can smell a messy diaper from another room, tell if it's a bad cough or an okay cough in the middle of the night, and hear a child wimper from the other end of the house.
It sounds like you guys are growing very well together as a new family :)
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