Posts tagged Baby Einstein
Adulthood Revisited? Reset Your Grown-up Self, when your Baby is just too cute!
Have you ever felt so entranced by your baby that you lose track of yourself as a grown-up? I don’t mean in the chronological sense of your age but in the sense of your role. Are you Mommy, the cuddler-nurturer, at one with your infant? Or are you Mommy the leader, an example for all the little ones who are going to grow up in your home? Sometimes we need a wake-up call to merge the two into the one person our children call “Mom.” (Not to mention regaining the identity of co-producer with the other adult member of the family).
My mother gave me my wake-up call at 3:00 am, one Tuesday morning, when she walked into my kitchen where I was more or less pretending to enjoy playing goo-goo-gah-gah with a baby who obviously thought it was 3:00 in the afternoon. (more…)
Does Baby ALWAYS Come First?
In 2005, the author, Ayelet Waldman, wrote an essay for the NY Times declaring that she loved her husband MORE than she could ever love her children. All hell broke loose in the mom universe. A mother of four, she asserted that if one of her children died, she could get over that, but without her husband, her life would “have no joy.” She could not “picture a future without him.” (more…)
Taking Care of Yourself – The importance of Recharging
Me Time
Have you ever put a week of your life on a spreadsheet and accounted for every hour of your time? Have you ever tried to find time for the “ME” in your life somewhere on that spreadsheet? (more…)
What’s More Important: Nature or Nurture?
When Baby first arrives, most of us spend a lot of time just looking, thoughtfully, at our newborn and wondering “Who are you going to look like?” or more importantly, “Who are you going to act like?” We definitely spend a fair amount of time wondering and waiting for our babies to show us who they are. Let’s just say we let nature reveal itself.
It doesn’t take long before we start thinking more about our plans for Baby rather than Baby’s designs on us. We make plans for our personal contributions to Baby’s self-concept, social development, and learning. Some parents I have interviewed have very specific goals in mind for their infants (Brown University—Class of 2030!), while others are more general (good, kind, generous), or religious (at one with God, faithful to morals and ethics). (more…)
Ending an Eventful Year: Creating Meaningful Traditions
If there is one thing that is an end-of-year tradition for me, it’s the all-nighters that precede Christmas morning. Are they a tradition or a bad habit? I can’t quite decide. All I can say is those late nights made it possible for toys to be tested, bikes assembled, and a ton of packages to be wrapped. My husband, an only child, always wanted children (plural) and dreamed of giving them BIG, exciting, and overwhelming Christmas mornings. The all-nighters were my necessary prelude to creating that Grand Tradition for the rest of the family.
Having a baby inspires parents to think about everything they ever wanted their child to have in life; the list usually being a combination of everything good and everything that each of us thinks should have been in one’s own childhood. (more…)
Days, Weeks, Months, and Years: How Many Ways Do We Count the Age of Our Precious Little Ones?
Have you ever wondered why we describe age in terms of days, weeks, and months for the very young but are not so precise after a child reaches the age of 3? Or to take the opposite tack, why are we so vague about the age (or definition for) when adulthood begins? I mean, can your 28 year old, unemployed high-school drop-out younger brother be considered an adult when he’s still at home and Mom and Dad pay all the bills?
There are several reasons age is treated differently over the course of the lifespan. Some of these reasons are based on science, others are mainly cultural. Still other age specifications are designed to meet institutional needs, such as when we start and finish a required amount of schooling—not whether or not we actually got educated during that long and laborious process (see younger brother, above). (more…)
