The Best Excuse

I have the best excuse possible for not keeping up with my blogging. It starts with a "B" and ends with a lot of diapers. Meet Miles.


When I had my first child we were unprepared. Oh, we had about four stylish baby carrying devices, endless booties and piles of freshly laundered diapers, but we were very, very, very unprepared. My first baby was what a nicer person would call challenging. I used many bad words to describe the situation. I'm going to have to preface this next part with a disclaimer. I love both of my sons and I don't think being a "hard" baby says anything about what kind of person the baby will mature into. My first son is a sweet, charming, thoughtful little boy.That said, my first boy was a disaster of a baby. He would probably have been diagnosed with colic if we'd ever been brave enough to get in a car with him for more than 10 minutes at a time. If he wasn't nursing, or asleep, or being carried by someone who was walking, he was crying. It made me feel like I didn't know what the heck I was doing.
I considered trying to convince a doctor to make me deaf. I fantasized about those sci-fi pods that put people into stasis for crazy long periods of time while they zip around the universe. Why don't we have those yet? Our first baby hated all of the baby carriers save for the Baby Bjorn. He wouldn't lay on his back. He never slept. He always wanted to be in motion so, that year, my husband bought me a rocking chair for Mother's Day. The instant my butt hit the seat the baby started crying. I was woken up 5 to 7 times a night until he was 8 months old, and he didn't actually start sleeping through the night until he was two. I thought all babies were that hard.
That's why I prepared for this baby as if we were all about to go on a four month trip to one of Dante's layers of hell. I stocked the freezer with about a month's worth of pre-made meals. I cleaned the whole house as if it were not going to be cleaned for a month. I taught the dogs not to scratch at the door. I organized all of our paper work. I was prepared to do nothing but nurse and pace the house. This is, I'm sure, why I now have one of the least demanding babies possible. It's like I gave birth to a house plant. He needs food, a clean diaper, an occasional burp and some cuddling. That's all. He makes me feel like a super mom. All I have to do is pat him on the tummy lightly and he starts cooing at me. I think this is nature's way of trying to trick me into having more. I just have to find the part of the form where I can check the box for the "easy baby".