Having kids will change your life

There's nothing that has the power to change your life quite so much as becoming a parent. Whatever life was like before you had kids, I can guarantee you that you won't even recognise it once they arrive. The short list of things that having a baby changes is:

EVERYTHING.

The slightly more in-depth list consists of:

Sleep

How much you sleep will change DRAMATICALLY overnight. Literally. Because yesterday you didn't have a baby and today you do. It's just like that. How much you value sleep will change too. Before you had kids, sleep was just something you did at the end of every day because your body told you that you had to. You probably didn't really give it that much thought, did you? But now your sleep is precious. Now four uninterrupted hours on the bounce is the Holy Grail. A whole night? Are you out of your fucking mind? That's not happening for a long time yet. I am yet to meet a parent with young children  - mother or father - who does not feel nostalgic about sleep. Oh, and those Sunday morning lie-ins you used to have? Yeah. I think you can see where this is going.

Freedom

When you don't have to plan every outing around the needs of a small child, you take your freedom for granted. Why wouldn't you? Before you have kids you don't have to think about packing a changing bag and having spare nappies and wipes in the car. You don't have to worry about whether or not you can breastfeed in the outfit you're wearing or if there'll be somewhere to heat up a bottle. You need to go out, so you go out. But once children come along, you can't do that anymore. You either have to plan the outing with military precision and accept the fact that your baby will probably unleash a poonami the second you sit down on the bus/start the car engine OR you need to find somebody to babysit. Somebody your child is familiar and comfortable with - and I really can't stress that part enough. Still feel like going out? Nah. Maybe tomorrow, eh?

Worry

It is ASTOUNDING how much parents worry about their kids. When they're babies, you worry if they're eating, shitting and sleeping enough (probably; undoubtedly more; and NO). When they get a little older, you start to worry about those dreaded milestones. And everybody else is worrying about them too (or being smug about them, which is pretty much the same thing), so they're THE topic of discussion at every playgroup, play date and clinic. Inescapable. After that comes behaviour (toddler tyranny is normal; anybody who says otherwise is lying) and thereafter it's a constant snowball of worry until you die. I mean, that sounds bleak, but apparently it's true. So get comfy and settle in for the ride.

Social Life

Okay, this one is tough. But the truth is, you might lose some friends after you have kids. As far as your friends with kids go, you're probably safe. When you cancel on them because you're too fucking mind-bogglingly exhausted to leave the house after 7:30pm, they will more than likely understand and feel secretly relieved. But when the same thing happens with your friends who don't have kids, they might not have quite the same level of understanding. That's not their fault, by the way, and they're not doing it to be assholes; they just have no personal experience of how knackering it can be to stagger through the bath and bedtime routine and then have to drag yourself into the shower and attempt to make yourself look something like human. So be prepared for some changes in your social circle; it's normal and it will be okay.

Your Home

After almost four years of motherhood, I honestly cannot remember what it was like to live in a home that wasn't full of toys and nappies and bottles. I used to have ornamental shit all over the place and laundry that was actually done and ironed and put away before it took on laundryzilla status. Now... Well, now I spend a lot of time trying to come up with ingenious toy storage solutions and despairing over laundry. None of my kitchen cupboards open without adult intervention and there's a lock on the OUTSIDE of my bathroom door to stop small people letting even smaller people in to rifle through the bin and unravel all the toilet roll. Sometimes, when I forget to put that lock on after I leave the bathroom, I find shampoo bottles and sponges down the toilet. Oh, and O actually pushed one of the knots in the floorboards all the way through earlier this week, so I had to call a joiner for advice about how to bung it up and fill it in. Such fun!

Honestly, reading this has probably made you think that parenthood is just an endless nightmare with no redeeming features, but that's not true. There are a lot of shitty moments when you have young children. Literally and figuratively. But there are really great moments too. There are the first moments of the morning when your kids are inexplicably ecstatic to see you. There are the moments when they climb into your lap with a book on a rainy afternoon. There are kisses and cuddles and I love you's and there is the simple fact that you are one of their absolute favourite people in the world. All of that is pretty cool really, and it's more than worth all the other stuff.

Parenting Experience: NEW SKILL UNLOCKED

Sometimes I feel that parenting is a bit like one of those games like WoW or D&D, because a lot of the time it's random chance. You roll the right number or meet the right player (I once had a boyfriend who was OBSESSED with WoW, but I actually still don't really understand it, so forgive me if this analogy sucks/is inaccurate) or you... Well, sometimes you don't. The thing about parenting experience is that it's fluid, which is not to say that it's smooth and pleasing to the eye, but that rather like water, if there is a gap or a crack it will find its way through and leave you feeling drained and like you don't know what the fuck to do now.

So today I'm going to share some parenting level-ups and experience points with you, because maybe it'll make us all feel a little better about the bad days.

Sleeping through the night: NEW SKILL UNLOCKED
For one glorious week. Under-eye bags are diminishing, elixir of life is returning, you're about to attend your coronation as the monarch of parenting... Oh wait... Is that?... Yeah. It's still the middle of the night and the baby is definitely NOT still asleep. FFS.

Teething: EXPERIENCE POINTS +5
The struggle. The tears. The unadulterated anguish. And then... POP. It's all over. But don't get excited; you've got 19 more to go. Time to restock the Calpol and grit your own 32 pearly whites.

Unswaddling: LEVEL UP
After an hour of watching your baby struggle on the video monitor, they've finally passed out sprawled awkwardly across the cot with their arms flung wide. Quite why this is such a pivotal parenting moment is beyond me, but the joy of it is almost unrivalled. Y'know, except for the nagging worry that they might wake up at any moment and beg you through the medium of screaming to be bound back into the swaddle again. They stayed asleep? LEVEL UP, MAMA.

Weaning: EXPERIENCE POINTS +10
That's 10 points for every food offered that doesn't end up in your hair. Or theirs. Or the cat's. Another 10 points if you remain calm in the face of an upside-down-bowl-on-the-carpet incident. More experience points are on offer for the discovery of successful distraction techniques when trying to feed a teething/tired/sick baby. And if you don't cry the first time your baby spits out the food they loved last week which you have lovingly steamed, blended and stored shitloads of in a huge Tupperware container ... Well, then you're a Weaning Warlock.

Potty training: LEVEL UP/NEW SKILL UNLOCKED
You've just stepped in your third puddle of pee of the day and you're pretty sure there's a poo somewhere around here too. What do you do? Sigh and locate the poo whilst mopping up the pee, say "never mind; it's just an accident" and kit your child out with new pants and a subtle reminder of where the potty is and how to use it? +5 Experience points for you. First pee in the potty earns you a level up, as does the first poo. And on the glorious day when puddles and secret poos become a thing of the past: NEW SKILL UNLOCKED. I bet you feel like a parenting paragon, don't you? As well you should.

Public tantrums: EXPERIENCE POINTS/LEVEL UP
A screaming toddler is a force to be reckoned with at the best of times. In the middle of a busy supermarket it's just about the Worst Thing Ever. To be honest, I don't think there's a wrong or right way to deal with a public tantrum. I've tried most things, like getting down to my child's level and talking calmly to him about why he is unhappy. I've also tried ignoring him and walking slowly away in the hope that he will get up and follow me. Bribery has even been attempted once or twice, as has the threat of not buying him the magazine I promised I would at the end of the trip. It depends what kind of mood he's in. If he's tired, NOTHING works. I've always wanted to be one of those mothers who has The Answer to diffusing every tantrum... But I'm not. If you are, LEVEL UP for you. I'll be down here building up my experience points.

Disapproval from older generation: EXPERIENCE POINTS/NEW SKILL UNLOCKED
You're out in public with your baby/child, minding your own business and trying to get on with your day. You hear an older person make a rude comment about your parenting style/child's behaviour. How do you respond? This tends to be very heavily dependent on your level of sleep-deprivation. The worse it is, the more likely you are to explode or cry. Or both simultaneously. Since it's generally a comment such as "children in my day were seen and not heard/didn't have dummies/never cried in public", you can actually just fucking ignore it. This happened to me at a funeral tea earlier this year when an elderly and distant relative made an observation about "young mothers these days sticking dummies in their babies mouths the minute they make a noise" while watching me try to comfort a tired and refluxing Baby Taylor with his dummy. In hindsight I wish I'd asked her to repeat herself, since she wasn't actually talking to me directly, and then questioned her about why she felt that it was her place to comment. I didn't. Experience points for me. Not giving a shit what anybody else thinks about how you parent your children? NEW SKILL UNLOCKED. You know what? You can get a LEVEL UP for that too. You deserve it.

The thing about parenting is that no matter how you handle any given situation, you will probably always wonder if you could have handled it better. Some evenings I will sit on the sofa after the kids have gone to bed and go over every little thing I think I did wrong with them that day, but being a parent is a live-action experience; it’s happening right now and you have to think on your feet. It’s hard work and it’s exhausting and, no matter what anybody says to the contrary, there is absolutely no way that you can “cherish every second of it”. For every moment with my kids that I wish I could bottle, there’s another one that I just want to forget about. I suppose the only take-home message I have for any parent is this: We’re all at the rookie stage in one way or another and we are all just doing the best we can. The most important thing you can do for your kids is to love them and be there for them. Everything else you do, you do because of that.

Baby Sleep

So, here's something I've been thinking about a lot lately: Baby sleep. If you've ever read a parenting magazine (and there are a few to choose from), you will have noticed that every single month there is an article advertised on the cover that promises 5 SLEEP TIPS THAT WILL HAVE YOUR BABY SLEEPING THROUGH TONIGHT or GOLDEN SLEEP RULES EVERY PARENT SHOULD KNOW or some other patronising tagline that 100% promises you that your baby will sleep well from this day forward and NEVER fucking delivers. Ever. Every single one of these articles follows the same basic premise, which is to make you, as a mother, feel like you are doing everything wrong when it comes to getting your baby to sleep.

Can I please have a show of hands for anyone who has ever done that ridiculous fucking shush-pat crap and found that it actually worked? How about pick-up-put-down? Controlled crying? See, I’ve tried all of these things and the only thing that has ever actually worked for me when it comes to making sure Baby Taylor goes to sleep when I want him to is this formula:

He needs to have been awake for at least two and a half to three hours.
He needs to have been recently fed and have a clean, dry nappy.
He needs to be showing actual signs that he is tired (a little yawning, eye-rubbing or general grizzling is usually a good indication).
He needs to be in a very dark room with a white noise machine running constantly.
He needs a dummy and he needs to be swaddled.

That’s it, and I know that it sounds like a lot, but most of it is just basic common sense. Babies are just small humans, and they function in basically the same way. If you’re hungry, thirsty, uncomfortable or just not tired, are you likely to go to sleep just because somebody else thinks you should? No. So why would you expect your baby to? Why do all parenting publications seem to base their sleep-related articles on the assumption that all people who have babies are morons?

For my part, Baby Taylor is almost ten months old now and, until last week, he had only slept through the night a handful of times. I used to blame reflux and then I got to feeling like maybe it was just habit and maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t a great sleeper. Toddler Taylor was a fantastic sleeper as a baby, and I did all of the same things with him that I have with his brother. So I’ve arrived at the shocking conclusion that maybe babies are just a lot like their adult counterparts; maybe some of them are good sleepers and some of them aren’t and maybe there’s not much you can about a crappy sleeper except ride out the storm and rejoice when they actually sleep well.

Sometimes I actually read the baby sleep articles and find myself feeling aggressively infuriated by them, because they are usually just a rehash of the same generic bullshit, and what really fucking annoys me more than anything else is that they always try to tell me that if I don’t take Baby Taylor’s dummy away from him RIGHT THIS MINUTE then he will never, ever, EVER sleep, ever. If I let him have his dummy – the dummy that helps calm his reflux and makes him feel comforted – for one more night, I will, without doubt, find that he is still waking in the night at 18 wanting it. Can you imagine a more ridiculous concept? Toddler Taylor had a dummy for naps and night time sleep until he was two, then one night I just didn’t give it to him when I put him down to bed. He asked for it a couple of times and I had to go into his room half an hour later to give him a cuddle and reassure him that he hadn’t done anything wrong, but the point is this: At two years old, he understood when I reassured him. Baby Taylor would not understand if I just suddenly didn’t give him his dummy one night when I put him in his cot. He would think I had forgotten (which I sometimes do) and he would cry and whinge and yell until I went and gave it to him. Why would I put either of us through that? Where are the 18 year-olds who still need dummies to sleep? I need to meet them, hear them say “it’s all my mother’s fucking fault for letting me have it when I was a baby” and then I might pay some attention to idiotic articles proclaiming that sleep aids are The Devil Himself.

I’m not even going to go into the things that come up when you type “baby sleep tips” into Google, but invariably you will end up on a message board or chat forum populated by other parents, some of whom think they have all the answers and will tell you that you are basically a complete failure of a human being and why don’t you try doing the pick-up-put-down dance for another 27million hours until you’re so completely sleep-deprived that you can’t even remember your own name or how to put on your knickers. Believe me, I have talked to these people – usually women, sorry – and I am doing everything wrong. Allegedly, Baby Taylor is going to suffocate because I still put him in a swaddling bag and he often sleeps on his front or side OR he is never going to sleep through because of the Devil Dummy.

So now I just approach baby sleep like this: Mothers of the world, keep doing whatever you’re doing to get your baby to sleep because (and I am only going to say this once, so listen carefully) they are NOT still going to need you to do it when they’re 18. Ignore the articles and the message boards and the self-important “experts” and trust yourself. It’s really unlikely that anyone who doesn’t know your baby knows better than you what they need to “sleep through”. Which, by the way, is only actually considered to be five consecutive hours anyway. Don’t even get me started on how five hours is NOT fucking “sleeping through”.