I asked you all on instagram what kinds of baby type posts you’d be interested in seeing before I give birth (IN 6.5 WEEKS OMG!) and I got a lot of the standard ‘what’s in you hospital bag’ type questions, but I loved this question the most, and wanted to cover it first. Hindsight is always 20/20, and raising baby #1 VS baby #2 is something I think about a lot. I am pretty happy with a lot of the things we implemented with Hudson. Hudson was NOT an easy baby at all, and I feel like we have been working through a lot of things with him since he was a baby that we’ve seen a lot of successes in. I won’t go too far into detail, but he’s come a really long way, and we’re so proud of him, and we like to think a lot of it does have to do with our parenting choices thus far. That being said, we are only human, and there’s a lot of reflection we’ve done on how we can be not necessarily BETTER, but just different versions of ourselves. Here’s the top 5 that I think about most – please realize this is what I feel will work for US and it is not universal whatsoever, we all have differing parenting styles and opinions.
1. Leaving room for solo-play & self soothing: This is obviously not something that can happen for a newborn, but I am talking about closer to 6/7 months old here. Because Hudson was my first baby, and I was on maternity leave with him, I gave him 110% of all of my attention. I answered his every whim, and if he was upset, I’d run to for everything without giving him even a second to try to work things out on his own. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a helicopter mom, I was just so in love and obsessed with him that I truly enjoyed playing with him on his play mat every second of every day. That is, until I didn’t. When I needed more time to myself to make a coffee, or answer some e-mails, I had never equipped Hudson with the ability to feel confident enough to handle things on his own. I still to this day feel that way sometimes, in situations where he’ll tell me “he can’t” do something simply because he wants me to come in and save the day. Nobody ever told me to let your baby play on their mat alone for a little bit each day, to let them fuss a bit so they can figure out how to soothe themselves, and how to teach them confidence and independence from a young age. This time around, I will try to force myself to be more that way after seeing other mom friends who have seen successes in parenting in that style.
2. Worry less about everything, and enjoy your baby: Around 7 months old, I started to worry that Hudson was delayed in crawling. I would take him to gymboree classes a few days a week, and as I watched all of the other kids begin to crawl, I would get in my car and cry because he wasn’t up to speed with them. Comparison truly is the thief of joy. Hudson did have a gross motor delay due to low tone, but he crawled at 12 months, and by 18 months he walked. Now at age 3, you’d never ever know he had any of that, he runs and jumps and walks down steps alone, and has basically caught up on milestones. On one end of the spectrum I’d say definitely trust your mommy gut instinct, but I spent SO MUCH TIME sad and worried about Hudson’s delay, and comparing him to other kids, instead of knowing it will all work out, and enjoying him as a baby. This time around, I want to turn my blinders on a lot more, and enjoy my baby boy for whoever he is, and not get fixated on things like comparison of milestones.
3. Rely on help! Matt and I both have parents who live in South Florida, so we don’t have immediate family around to ask for help. That definitely poses its challenges, and when I had Hudson, it took me probably almost a year to find a babysitter, and even when we found one we barely used her. This time around, I want to keep my relationship with Matt a priority, and rely on help. I definitely have a ton more support now from friends, and local sitters, and I will 100% be using that help so we can take even an hour or two for sanity purposes, and to keep our spark alive.
4. Buy less things: I wouldn’t say I necessarily OVERBOUGHT things with Hudson, but there were definitely months, especially during that first year, that I felt like he only wore certain clothes once or twice before growing out of them. Now that Hudson is older, I’ve learned to buy him only a few staples each season, and to re-wear them as much as possible. I’ve saved a ton of Hudsons clothing for baby #2, and I really want to practice mindfulness in what I buy. I purged SO MANY of Hudsons toys that I eventually regretted buying for him, and I want to try to stick to only buying toys that I know we can use and reuse over and over again.
5. Introduce sweets and bad food later, and don’t give up on days they refuse healthier options. Matt and I talk about this one A LOT in our home. Hudson is a picky picky eater, and he LOVES sweets. We discuss where we went wrong on this all of the time. When hudson was a baby, I homemade him all of his baby food, and he used to eat everything from avocados to sweet potatoes. But then, at about probably a year or a bit more, he went on hunger strike, and started to refuse things. He would only want pasta, carbs and “kid foods” like nuggets. We gave in, and eventually we got into the horrible routine of mostly feeding him what he asks for, kid-type foods. We are the parents who make a separate dinners for Hudson, and for ourselves, and we are not proud of it. But now we’re pretty deep into it. We do try to feed Hudson tons of fruits, and when we make pasta it is chickpea pasta – so we’re always trying to swap out ingredients for something healthier when we can, but we still feel like in the food department, we failed a bit. For baby #2 we want to be stronger on weeks he won’t eat healthier foods or decides to reject a bunch of things, and we want to let him try sweets much later.
There you have it – those are my honest 5 responses to things we want to try to do differently the second time around. I hope if you’re going to be a first-time parent maybe these provide some insight! If you have two kids, what did you do differently from 1 to 2? Let me know in the comments.