My question to Eric? "Uh...did you know having a baby was going to be this hard?" His answer, "Yeah (obviously)." Well, thanks for the warning, world! I never had to live with a baby before! I AM the baby! My realizations?
-Sure, you can sleep while your baby sleeps. Oh, and babies sleep all the time. That is, when they are in your arms or at 10:00 in the morning or 6:00 at night.
-If you don't formula feed, you are the bottle. That means they are crying for you and while hitting dad at 4:00 AM seems satisfying, it won't do anything.
-Little teeny tiny clothes can actually overflow a laundry room within hours.
-Babies have the midas touch, if you replace gold with spit up and other pleasantries.
-I think I have what you call an "easy baby," which frightens me.
-The strangest realization is that the very things that make babies hard make them the most endearing, adorable, lovable creatures on earth. Motherhood has been the best part of life so far besides wife-hood. I highly encourage baby hunger.
In fact, my more viable realizations have been:
-If Liam's arguments are half as charming as his smile, I'm in some trouble.
-Babies can even make toots seem cute.
-The biggest reason why I don't get sleep is because I want to take in every moment of that little guy.
I recently went back to work. I had forgotten how much I loved being in the classroom, so it was fun to reenter the working world, but leaving Lamb-ee has been really hard. I managed to convince some students that I just left Liam home alone with some bottles in the fridge during the week. I can't decide if I should be offended by how easily they believed me. Luckily, we have an excellent babysitter who lives just around the corner. While I'll miss teaching, I am counting down the days to when I can just be Liam's mom. It's too hard to balance both!
My fatigue shows at school and home. More and more often, a student will wave at me to break my wide-eyed sleepy trance while I'm watching them complete assignments. At home, I can't stay awake past 8:30 and have finally come to value sleep over food... unbelievable.
I'm lucky that Liam makes everything worthwhile. Just look at him! (Disclaimer: I realize that this video clip is probably not as entertaining to you as it is to me. But, as a mom, I receive the right of passage to show long, boring videos of my baby that only I could watch over and over)
