Today marks the end of mine and Rob's first full year of parenting. This year has, by far, been the best year of my life. Completely and altogether different than any other year, but still, by far, the best. Our daughter is amazing. She is beautiful and funny and well-behaved and smart... and she's only a year into this life of hers.
As for the birthday part of the day, it was relatively uneventful. I mean, really, what do you do with a one-year-old for her birthday? We did birthday pancakes this morning and then played around naps. This evening after she went to bed, I got all the decor in place for the party on Saturday. I also did some Susie-Homemaker-ish things around the kitchen. Then, I got sucked into the black hole that is the internet.... and that's when my mental wheels started turning.
So as with all things online, one link led to another, and I found myself reading the archives of a random blog that I came across. It started off great. (The information I was actually looking for... slow-cooker recipes that can be prepped and frozen ahead of time.) Then, I couldn't stop myself from reading all of the back-logged posts with alluring titles, such as "breastfeeding fanatic," "42 days of pumping," "all-natural parenting," etc. Many of these posts expressed thoughts on parenthood that I myself hold. Then it got weird. It wasn't the right-off-the-bat weird. It was the slowly-ease-into-the-weirdness weird. It started with some issues where I just thought to myself, "this lady is trying WAAAY too hard." By that, I mean this woman clearly had certain ideas of the type of parenting she wanted to practice, and she was determined to follow through on these "philosophies" regardless of how much she had to fight and struggle against the way things seemed to flow naturally. (She even had a post acknowledging this herself.) Examples of what I mean:
-Mom was determined to breastfeed, despite her daughter's physical limitations to do so. Her initial solution was to pump and then bottle feed. Completely reasonable solution. One that requires an unbelievable amount of personal dedication, but given the dedication, still completely reasonable. Mom was eventually able to get daughter to nurse some of the time, but still used bottles for the bulk of the feeding. Enter the trying-way-too-hard part: this wasn't good enough for mom. Baby, obviously, was getting the nutrition she needed, but mom was determined (at like 10 months old) for baby to start nursing full time. And she went to extreme lengths to try to make this happen.
-Mom was convinced that co-sleeping was the best option for their family. (This example will be short because I think it speaks for itself.) Baby fell out of bed at least 5 times, receiving bruises on several occasions. Mom has resorted to putting the mattress straight on the floor, moving the night stands clear across the room, and lining the floor with pillows. Trying too hard (in my humble opinion).
And then it happened. The this-is-officially-weird-now part. She decided to eat her placenta. No, this is not the first time I've heard of this. The thing that made this weirder than usual was that this was not an early postpartum (read: crazy hormones) decision. No, this woman had it in her freezer FOR A WHOLE YEAR, planning to bury it in her back yard and plant a tree above it, but she never followed through on the original plan, and it all of a sudden came to her that she should eat it. WHAT???
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Now, switching gears, in relation to all of this, what does my current life look like? What kind of parenting do I "practice"? What areas could I be labeled "weird"? Well, here it goes.
Parenting: I am spoiled. I have the best baby ever. I don't just say that because I like her; she really is a good baby. She is an AMAZING sleeper, she eats well, she is generally happy. She has made my job pretty much as easy as it gets. All that being said, I'm sure whatever Rob and I did from day one certainly has had an influence on her being so good, even if we were just winging it as best as we could! So what did/do we do? It's hard to summarize a lifestyle, but here's my attempt at condensing the key points. I breastfed Aubrey from the beginning. We had a rough start, but I stuck to it. I did not try to schedule her feedings. I just fed her when she was hungry, and that always seemed to work out well. After a while, she pretty much fell into her own schedule. Sleeping is a similar story. We never really tried to schedule nap time, and really not even bed time. It just all started to fall into a rhythm. We tweaked things here and there to find out what worked best, but it hasn't ever been a fixed schedule kind of thing. However, getting to sleep is a different aspect than the timing of sleep. I do not rock my baby to sleep. She puts herself to sleep. I really believe this is a huge part of why she is such a good sleeper. She is not dependent on me (or Rob) to fall asleep because that is not how we have conditioned her. We have a routine that we follow every night (which includes rocking) that signals that it is time to get sleepy, but her eyes are always open when I put her into her bed. We do not force her eat a certain amount, or strictly limit how much she eats. If she doesn't want to eat any more, we stop. If she is fussing for more food, we usually give it to her. And like I said, she is a great eater. I wouldn't consider myself and Rob to be "hands-off" parents, especially considering a recent conversation I had with a friend about what the extreme of this looks like, but we do allow for a lot of freedom.
Home life: There are some things that I do in a non-typical way. I make my own baby food (which these days is pretty much "normal people" food, just frozen into small portions), I use cloth diapers (which are semi-homemade), and I have just recently started couponing, using dried beans instead of canned, cleaning with baking soda, etc. Is this "weird"? Maybe. Is it eat-your-placenta weird? No.
I started this post with an all together different idea of where I was going with it. I was going to talk about how we are in the process of weaning, and how if I didn't work outside of the home, I would probably be one of those moms who kept breastfeeding for a moderately long amount of time (not four years or anything, but probably two). I'm a little sad that this time is coming to an end, although it isn't completely ending, as I will still nurse morning and evening. I was going to talk about how I am having some anxiety about the idea of my baby being in full-time child care this coming school year and how many other things that has got me thinking of. I was going to talk about my latest decision to start putting together a bunch of freezer meals that can be pulled out and cooked with ease. But all of those ideas sort of morphed into the stuff I babbled on about above this paragraph. Good night.
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