the-kids / uncategorized Memo to Moms-to-Be (cont) | Better Way Moms
Today is May 18, 2012

Pregnancy - Adding On

Um, what? You want me to keep doing this? HA HA…oh wait, I want to.

Memo to Moms-to-Be (cont)

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What? Why would I even say these things? This is not helpful, but rather upsetting!

Well, because it’s the truth and I’m doing you a favor, believe it or not. Parenting is on the job training except you have no supervisor there to help. Your normal “supervisor,” of sorts, your own mom, will be 50% useless in this department. You will find yourself rolling your eyes when your mom says things like, “Having babies now is so different from when we did it. We smoked the whole time we were pregnant and you all came out fine.” And one of my personal favorites, “I would never wake up a sleeping child.” You’ll hear this right after you tell her that your pediatrician just told you to feed the baby every three hours and if she’s sleeping, wake her to do so. The 50% of your mom that will be useful is when you need to run an errand and leave your baby with her for an hour. She can’t do too much damage to your kid during a limited amount of time. 

So where do you turn? At this point you will realize, if you haven’t already, that your friends who have already gone through this are your resource. A huge, empathetic, patient, experienced, non-judgmental (mostly non-judgmental), infinitely valuable resource. Use your pregnancy time wisely and after the first month when you’ve read all the books, pick at the brains of as many of your closest mom friends as you can track down. Write down what they say and start your own book. Your friends hold the nuggets that are truly helpful. “The Girlfriend’s Guides” are probably the closest thing to this real resource and this is why she actually tells us about the hemorrhoids. At the very least, the series made me laugh. 

As a side note, I use my “What to Expect the Toddler Years” (it was a gift, the spine is barely cracked) for exactly two things: to look up how high is “too high” for a fever when one of my kids gets one in the middle of the night, and to kill the ants that I get in my bathroom every spring. I keep it in the basket of magazines by my toilet for easy access.  

I had an inkling that the books were letting me down during the end of my pregnancy, but I figured it was just the hormones influencing my thinking. Things went wrong during my 2nd trimester and I consulted my many books for solace. But didn’t walk away feeling better informed, and on a few occasions not informed at all about some of my issues.

I went into labor the morning of my 35th week. As I stepped out of the tub to dry off, my husband looked over at me while he was shaving and asked, “did you just pee on the tile?” The truth was, I had no idea. The books described water breaking very differently than what had just happened, so I assumed that I had, in fact, just peed on the floor. I won’t go into the infinite list of things that followed during my labor and delivery — but let me say that nothing about my labor and delivery had been mentioned in any of the books.

After the delivery, I was nervous. I was clearly unprepared to take this child home. My pre-baby What to Expect the First Year reading was clearly a futile effort. These books were not going to help me. But I figured, plan B, no problem. I was at a hospital and surely these medical professionals would give me some additional “training” on how to care for the human life that I had to take home and be responsible for.

On the day we were going home from the hospital, a lovely nurse came in and showed me how to diaper the baby (ok, even I could figure that out), clean the umbilical cord, swaddle her and give her a sponge bath. She handed me about four Xerox copies of information on how to feed, burp and clean the baby, and one on not shaking the baby. That’s it, four Xerox copies. That should do it. Now go home and good luck.

At that very moment, I knew I was screwed. I knew what they were saying, “There’s really nothing helpful we can tell you. The best we can do is give you a flier on Shaken Baby Syndrome that our lawyers insist that you have. Oh and, by the way, please sign this release that says you watched the accompanying video.”

And so the adventure of parenting began.

Here’s the good news. Most of us do figure it out, because we sort of don’t have a choice. I have three kids, the oldest one is eight and somehow they have all survived. Some might even say a couple of them have thrived.

So my one piece of advice is, save the $300 you would spend on baby books and use it for a day at the spa when your baby is about a month old. You’ll understand what a better use of your money that is when the time comes. Borrow the baby books from one of your mom friends.

She’s not using them anyway. *wink

 Author: Shari Dabby

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