I found out I was pregnant the week we signed a contract to start building our house. My son was born a week before we moved in to that same house, two weeks after our first wedding anniversary. It was a busy year.
If it weren't for the help of our parents, it would have been far more difficult and much more stressful. My son was unexpectedly delivered four weeks early and that didn't help with our schedule and planning either.
But we made it work. It was an exciting holiday season, what with a new baby, a new house and family all around us. And it was busy. We had so much to do house-wise and we had a small child that also needed a lot of our time. There was so much to be done I had trouble prioritizing sometimes and getting anything done.
For instance, I would leave the bedroom to go to the kitchen to get one thing done, see something in the living room that I could possibly do on the way, stop to do that, realize I needed to get something else in the bedroom, go back, get confused at where I was going in the first place and walk to the kitchen, look around and realize I'd completely forgotten what thing I was about to do because I'd seen so much else that needed to be done along the distracted way.
And stuff...we had so much stuff out and in our faces. Usually, most of our stuff is put away and I don't have to think about all the tureens and wine glasses or the paperback books because they're put up. But when so much of your "stuff" is out and visible, it's mentally distracting. Okay, well it is to someone who likes a tidy and organized house. Some people prefer to be in an environment surrounded by lots of things and they find that comfortable. For me though, it was way too much mental static.
It was about this time that a good friend of ours sent over, via my parents, some random things she thought I might be able to use. It was stuff that needed to go in different areas of the house, like the craft area or the children's toy area or the kitchen area and it was all piled into one box. And right about then, I was about to snap from too many things and too many decisions to be made and I didn't want to see a box of random junk I might not even want from someone else.
One of the things in that box was a stack of baby spoons. Our friend had said, "you're going to need a lot of spoons when he starts eating solids." And okay, I believed her, but these spoons were random and different and I had a child that was eight-days-old and I didn't have any clue where my utensils were, much less where the baby spoons were going to go. My husband looked at them and said, "this one's from Dairy Queen. It's not even a baby spoon."
It was about then that I had my meltdown. I just couldn't take any more right at that moment. My mother-in-law was in the room and she said, "give me the spoons" and with a big flourish, she threw them in the trash. And we laughed. And I felt better. It was something little, but it helped a lot.
Today, I think back about that conversation and those spoons. I think about how we scoffed at the spoon from Dairy Queen and I think how foolish we were to shun the spoon just because it was designed to be disposable. Today, the spoons my children love the most are the ones we saved from a frozen yogurt store in Florida two years ago. We saved two then, and we got four more of the same style from another store in another town much later.
Sometimes it takes time to learn something valuable.
The Big Boy Update: "I made Batman." My son had a cookie for dessert. He took one bite out of the left side of the round cookie and then he took a similar-sized bite out of the right side. He held the remaining cookie up and realized it looked a bit like the batman symbol. When he showed me, I realized he was completely right.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: We walked out from the grocery store tonight in rather heavy rain. I was pushing my daughter in the cart and I told her we were going to get wet. She smiled and told me she could feel the rain. She held out her hand and caught raindrops and then wanted to see if my hand was catching raindrops too. After we got into the car, she said to me, "Let's do it again."
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