When I look at my most recent photos of my children, I realize just how obvious it is that they’re not babies any more.
And that reminds me of a book I used to read to them called Love You Forever (affiliate link). The recurring phrase in it is, “I’ll love you forever. I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” Don’t you just love that?
And that’s OK with me. Easily, this is my hands-down FAVORITE stage as a parent so far. I love that they are in middle school and high school, that they are taking the SAT’s, and struggling to figure out what to do “after graduation.” I also love that they’re so independent, but that’s probably just because I’m really lazy. :-/
One of the interesting things about being in this stage of parenting is that I can look back at things we did when they were babies, and go…wow, that was a total waste of time. Or, meh, this didn’t really matter. Or, thank the Lord we stuck to our guns on this.
Waste of time? Worrying about when they would potty train. Or worrying that they would NEVER potty train. Seriously. Who cares if they’re 18 months or 38 months when they decide to go in the potty? Or earlier. Or later. I mean, my worries were not because I was tired of changing diapers (although I probably was tired of that). My worries were more in the realm of…pride. Wanting to be able to say, oh it was so easy. We had this system. Blah blah blah.
I also focused my worry (hey-I’m a good worrier) on, does this mean that there’s something wrong developmentally? Are they going to be delayed in every other way? Even though, logically, I could see that these were healthy kids, talking up a storm, showing empathy for others, fighting with their siblings. You know, all the typical things kids do. But somehow, I seriously freaked out about potty training.
And then there’s the doubt. Maybe I’ve rushed them too much and they’re rebelling already (get a grip, Mary). Maybe I put too much pressure on them, and now I’ll have to support them for the rest of eternity while they live in our basement. My doubt was not deterred at all by the fact that we’ve never had a basement.
Looking at them now, I can confidently say that despite any stubbornness they may possess, they were not actually going to stay in diapers all of their life. Wasn’t gonna happen.
I should have followed what the Good Book has to say about that in 1 Thessalonians (5:16-18) and in Philippians (4:6) and saved myself a lot of trouble.
In the “meh, this didn’t really matter” category: when to start feeding them real food. I think we waited until 6 months to introduce cereal, but I honestly don’t remember. I just remember waiting 3 days in between new food introductions, to be sure there weren’t allergies, but I just never got into the whole argument about starting foods at 3, 6, 9 months, or whenever. We did what our ped told us to do, and it worked. Life goes on.
Also in this category, pacifiers. Do or don’t. But don’t stress either way. I’ve never had a kid come into my Geometry class with a pacifier in his mouth. And if he did, that would be a drug-related problem, which is a whole ‘nother issue entirely. Sometimes my southern just comes out.
So, what did matter? What can we look back and say, it was worth the tears and the arguing? (not to mention how the kids felt…ba-dum-tshhhhhh) 😀
- Teaching them that no means no
What I mean by this is just not laughing when you tell your kid to stop doing something and they inevtiably keep doing it. You know how they do. Nowadays, when I see little ones doing this, I have a really hard time not laughing. They’re being mischievous, and they’re just so cute! But as a parent, I felt it was really important not to let mine think they were being cute because I wanted to have some confidence that if they were about to put something dangerous in their mouth, or run out into the street, or any of the bazillion things kids can come up with to endanger their lives, that they would stop if I yelled STOP!
We were laying the foundation for a Christian worldview. More about that, here.
We enjoyed this so much, I wrote a whole post about it. See it here.
Parenting babies is a tough job.
What do you think?