Friday, December 21, 2007

Enjoying the Second

My dad reminded me of how anxious i was with my first daughter in her early months of life by asking me, "Are you charting the new baby?" For the first 4 months (yes, four) of my toddler's life, my husband and i charted every single poop, pee, sleep, wake cycle that she experienced. Seriously. We had a chart. And codes. We'd try to find patterns in her behavior or consistancy. Being a baby, there was rarely any predictability. Before the toddler even came to be, my husband and i studied every book published about sleep as if we were preparing for boards. We made notes and decisions of how we'd handle any possible "problem" (or normal baby behavior) before we had even met her.

Luckily, our first child turned out to be extremely easy-going. Because we had studied so vigerously, it was rare that my husband and i would come across a situation that we didn't immediately know how the leading experts and authors would advise us to do.

All of the studying didn't calm my anxieties. While my husband spend hours losing sleep thinking of how to keep the baby from dying (he has become the safety expert), i was consumed with questions like "If she's swaddled all the time, how is she to establish range of motion of her arms?" and, "If the most interesting and developmentally appropriate thing for newborns to look at is a face, how can my face the there every time she opens her eyes?" and, " Will she become addicted to TV is i'm watching tv while i'm nursing her?"

Although i get small waves of anxiety with numero dos, i'm mostly calm. I am surprising myself by enjoying her babyness instead of worrying about it.

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