(Find previous lists here).
Mine.
1. That you need a wind down routine in order to go to sleep, just like your sister does, so you’d think we’d know how to do such a thing by now. In the evenings I want to go straight from the last gasp of chaos that is dinner, to you in bed asleep instantly, and me finally free for the night.
2. That you weigh 10 kg and that you like to be carried a lot.
3. The separation anxiety. How whenever I need to leave you for a tiny moment – to go to the toilet, put a load of washing on, grab a hairbrush for your sister’s hair, grab a bib, close the door, get your sister a drink, or answer the phone etc etc – that you will start wailing and crawling desperately (and rather hopelessly, because you are still mostly comando crawling, which isn’t all that efficient really) towards my direction of the house. Then.. the subsequent carrying you around with me everywhere and see point 2 above. If you think the washing is a sucky job, try doing it while also lugging 10 kg around with you.
4. Having to make sure that you have something to nibble on every time I manage to grab something for myself to eat. That I spend the day either in a state of starvation or stuffing something in my mouth quicker than I can taste it.
5. The buckling and the unbuckling of three sets of seat belts for you, your sister and I every time I want to get in and out of the car. Sometimes it feels like I am dying a slow death of seat belts.
6. My low blood sugar in the morning when I wake after a night of feeding you and not getting a chance to eat until about morning tea time when your sister is dropped at kindergarten and you’ve gone down for your nap. How intolerant I start to feel when I am that hungry.
7. All the many, many times that your father and sister forget that you are sleeping and they go around the house holding conversations with each other at incredibly high volumes, for some unknown fucking reason.
8. That you won’t transfer asleep from the car to the house or the pram to the car etc. That you won’t go back to sleep even though you are clearly tired and still need more sleep. Still, up side: you are much happier when you are tired than your sister ever was/is and you will occasionally go back to sleep again after a breastfeed, which is still more than your sister would.
9. That by the time it is cool enough to walk in the evenings it is getting close to your bath/dinner time and you get stroppy at the mid-point of the walk and I end up carrying you and pushing the pram simultaneously. And that your favourite sling to be carried in is the one that gives me a sore neck if used for any distance. Also, see point number 2 above.
10. Now that you can crawl so fast I have to know where you are every second of the day (and as if my day wasn’t already over-scheduled with baby-tasks) because the house isn’t baby-proof, and because apart from anything else we live with a four year old who owns mountains of crap, and some of it is very small choking-hazard crap, and anyway, this time around I have the unrealistic hope that we can avoid that whole taking apart the house to make it ‘toddler-proof but seriously ugly’ stage.
11. When you won’t sleep without a nipple in your mouth, but you also won’t let that nipple leave the bedroom with you and sit somewhere more interesting, like in front of a computer or a DVD or back at the lunch party. The nipple is bored!
12. The scratch scratchy scratchies with your sharp little baby claws on my soft, naked breasts while you drift off to sleep. And I think, how, how could I have forgotten to clip your nails today?
13. Worrying constantly about you crawling or rolling your way off beds (even with their guard rails) and even your little low-to-the-ground side-bed, and that time when you crawled your way out of our bed and fell to the floor with a loud thump and a terribly sad cry, eyes still clenched asleep.
14. How you lean out of my arms to look at the ground while I am carrying you, this increases your weight by about a factor of three. Also refer to point 2 above.
His.
1. Deteriorating quality of the nappy changes as you eat more ‘solids’.
2. I wish you’d stop falling backwards out of ‘Montessori corner” (ie. a corner of the playroom that your mother has supposedly set up under Montessori instructions).
3. Realising that I can’t actually parent more than one child at a time. Not something I can do.
4. The fact that taking the two of you kids out anywhere with me becomes all too much. Buying a loaf of bread becomes a major ordeal.
This is hysterical! Ditto to the seat belts and LOUD ditto to the bored nipple experience.