It’s a truth universally aknowledged that babies cry.

Which is fine.

And truthfully, I really don’t mind it when babies around me scream their guts out. As the books say, they’re just trying to tell us something.

What I do mind is the sound of my baby crying. I mind it especially when it begins at 6 a.m. and it keeps up a steady and consistent pace until 7 p.m. when my baby mercifully passes out in snarling exhaustion.

Today was one of those days.

After I’d tried the bouncing and the shushing and the feeding and the burping and the singing and the dancing … and after I’d tried the trusty pacifier and had it spat back into my face five times, I resorted to yoga. Why not? All else had failed.

We began by singing three times the song of om. August cracked a smile which grew into a grin. But wait, was he laughing at …  me? Harrumph.

Enough of om. Aug lay back in savasana and I ran my hands down his torso to his toes.

At this point I had his attention and was it … focus?

Then we did a visualization exercise which went something like this:

You are outside, lying on a bed of soft grass. You are warm, well-wrapped in a blanket. (Actually let’s make that a swaddle.)

You are looking up at the sky. Surrounding you are trees, their leaves turning from green to yellow to orange. The yellow leaves start floating and spiraling down and land on your tummy. They land on the grass beside you. You can make out the branches against the sky.

You start to notice the sound of waves lapping at the shores of a nearby lake. A mist emerges from the water and twists among the tree trunks, rising up, up, through the branches to the leaves…

…And so on…

And then August started to cry. But hey, it soothed him for 10 minutes, and for today, that was a record.

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Tags: Crying, Exhaustion, Parenting, Schedule

Nobody could ever say that having a baby is easy. Or that it doesn’t change your life. Or that it won’t occasionally interfere with a good night’s sleep.

But I’ve about had it up to here with folks who have nothing but misery to report once they become parents. How many times have I heard that the first weeks are hell, miserable, a nightmare? Too many times to count, I tell you.

When I was pregnant, I anticipated the very worst because I’d been told that life with a newborn is the very worst. It’s rot, I tell you, absolute rot.

Parents-to-be, listen up: having a baby is not that bad. It is occasionally even — gasp — fun!

Everybody talks about the first smile at six weeks but there’s so much more to it than that. There’s the feeling of his warm breath on your cheek. There’s his skin smooth and supple and sweet. There’s the downy fuzz of his hair like silk through your fingers. There’s the feeling of his tiny foot in your hand; his hand on your arm.

And that’s just for starters.

Of course, there are moments when you want to throw up your hands and throw in the towel. But take those moments step by step by step by step and you — yes, you — will be just fine.

Tags: Parenting