What We've Learned as New Parents

Parenting is hard. It's not something you can train for, you just kind of get thrown into it. And we've said that a few times now but there are three things that I think stood out to us both or that we learned or appreciate most in parenthood.

 

The first is something I talked about in trying to find harmony in your day, and also being able to practice more self care. And that is being flexible. So I've always been a calendar planner, everything has to be on the calendar, and planned out like two weeks in advance. If you try to invite me to something the day before, I'm not going to be happy because I most likely already have plans. And if I didn't, I was already looking forward to not having plans. But Bobby's always been the flexible one, whatever comes up, comes up and we can do it. So I have learned to be very flexible with our schedule because I'm home with the baby all day long every day. So it all depends on how his mood goes and how the weather is for the day, what we're going to do and how my mood is. And Bobby just goes along with the flow.

 

While we still keep our schedule pretty flexible, we still have to plan because we have a kid and we have to take into consideration “Where can we actually go? Is it gonna be kid friendly? Is he gonna be behaving?"

 

 

You have to consider them and fulfill their needs all while enjoying what you're doing at that time. Because before kids, you're just like, "Okay, we're going here", you didn't need to get anything ready, you just went. And now we are having to figure out so much more like: diaper bag, change of clothes, diapers, food for the baby, you got to make sure you have all the things to distract them/keep occupied. We literally have a bag of toys designated for bringing out with us because he gets antsy. And we need to distract him to the best of our ability until we can just let him run around.

 

The second is being more responsible. I guess that's one of the things that stands out to me. It's like, I am already a forgetful person. And now I have to think twice as hard as to how I will not just like keep him safe, but also raise him. Now I'm responsible for a whole other human being granted, this is a very tiny human being that doesn't really know anything yet.

 

 

He's curious, he finds things around the house to be a challenge to try and figure out. It's exciting to watch the developments, but keeping up with the childproofing can get tough when they seem to be one step ahead of you. I feel like we are always thinking "he won't get into that" then next thing you know, that exactly what he's getting into.

 

Baby gates, locks, covers, decluttering, and organizing. I think we are constantly working to toddler proof our home and it's starting to show! Ha ha ha

 

 

The third, which I am grateful for, is that although we have changed in his new role as parents, we still kept a lot of our favorite things to do together. And at first, we weren't doing it because we were so overwhelmed with other things like a pandemic, me running a new business, Bobby's job. We were just sitting around doing nothing other than me working and Bobby watching TV at night for a long time. But we never stopped going to breweries. (Declan was 10 days old when he went to his first brewery, and is now at 23 and counting! Mom and dad are over 100.) We still travel, go camping and do brunch. While these are usually with the baby, we finally took the leap to get a babysitter and start back to date nights and solo outings.

 

You might feel like there is no right to go do the things you want to, but there will never be the right time. Just know that you can make it work.