I went to a cookie exchange party yesterday. Premise: You must bring 3 dozen cookies. They can’t be purchased and the recipe can’t be off the back of a package, i.e. tollhouse cookies. Everybody brings copies of their recipes. Then we all get to pick up 3 dozen other cookies and take home some new recipes. It sounded like a great time. Brandon offered to watch Aidan and I went. I did have a really good time.
There was an interesting exchange between a couple of new moms(their babies are 4 months and 6 months) and myself. It made me think about how much you really have to adjust your expectations as you wade through this parenting thing. The conversation for them swirled around sleeping through the night, coming into Mommy and Daddy’s bed, when to start solids, and a variety of other items.
It made me realize just how much some of this stuff ultimately doesn’t seem important in the end. One of them was talking about a really long car trip they were taking. I mentioned that it is better now than in a year when her son is walking, etc and really won’t like being confined to a car seat for hours. I talked about how I bought a DVD player for the vehicle for when we make long trips. It saved us on our 4 hour trip to Portland over Thanksgiving. Is it ideal? Probably not. I think at some point I probably even said I would never do it. Ahhhh….real parenting is so much more humbling than the idea of it.
I got a mildly disapproving look from one of the mothers who said she doesn’t intend on letting her child watch TV in the vehicle. Fine…your choice. I just didn’t appreciate the insinuation that I was making a mistake somehow.
As parents, we have to make all kinds of decisions and choices. Will we make mistakes? Oh, yeah. I probably make them every day. But you just do your best. You weigh out what is important with what the consequence of “giving in” might be. As my MIL would say, “Pick your battles.”
In this case, I can either let Aidan watch some Sesame Street and Curious George videos on a 4 hour car trip (he napped also) or I can listen to him scream out of sheer boredom. Honestly, I think for us the former solution is better for all involved. Did I SWEAR he would never come into our bed back when I was pregnant? Yup. Did he? OH YEAH. Still wanders in there in the middle of the night sometimes. And honestly, our sleep matters too. Sometimes it just isn’t worth the effort to take him back to his own room at 3am.
Anyway, I decided to tell these women the Reader’s Digest version of my scary pregnancy and Aidan’s very early arrival. I talked about where he started and what a delightful 2 year old he is today. The point, I said was that our experience forced me to adjust my expectations drastically early on. My son survived against all odds. And against even greater odds he is thriving.
So what if he watches a little Sesame Street and still comes to our bed sometimes? In the grand scheme of things, it just isn’t all that important.
Now for some cuteness….Daddy and the boy playing a variation of airplane. 