Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The Difference

Scenario:
Mama needs a shower, but infant is screaming his proverbial head off for no easily defined reason.

If this is your first child:
You bounce, rock, soothe, snuggle, sing to and otherwise try to calm your cranky child. Eventually, he falls asleep in your arms. You live in fear of waking the baby, so contort yourself into the least uncomfortable position in the rocker and hope the Newsweek nearby holds enough articles or Bravo! runs enough episodes of The Real Housewives to get you through however a long a nap this is going to be. He will inevitably wake up a few hours later hungry. You'll manage to feed him, change him and try to pee while trying to regain the feeling in your arms. At some point, you'll realize it's 3pm and you haven't eaten lunch and are still in your jammies. You will now give up hope of showering or getting dressed until the hubby's home from work and you can hand off the baby to his fresher arms.

If this is your second child:
You plop that screaming similarly inconsolable child in the bouncy seat in the bathroom, turn on the bounce, turn on the bathroom fan, turn on the shower, pop in the pacifier and he's fast asleep before the water's even heated up.

Ah, the joys of experience and clean hair.

3 comments:

Liz Jimenez said...

I love it! Glad to hear life with two seems to be going A-OK. The whole parenting-with-experience thing is one of the reasons I'm tempted to have a third... might be nice to have a clue!

Stef said...

That's so true! Kind of funny to watch mothers of one...compared to mothers of 5 (that's me). We stress less about the little things.

Melissa Haak said...

This is so true! I wished I had realized it with number 1, I would have had cleaner hair! :-)

I included this is my Sunday Funnies: http://tinyurl.com/yhub64y