<\/p>\nAlthough we aren’t quite out of rough newborn waters yet, I think we seem to be finding our “Rosie legs” pretty quickly. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
p{color:gray}. Photo: Roz gives her two cents. (Compare to “Lucy at a similar age”:\/news\/2006\/second-guessing\/).<\/p>\n
While it is definitely different to care for an infant *plus* a toddler, most of the time life seems surprisingly smooth. Jon and I have worked out a system of Rosie-duty at night that allows each of us to get some sleep (especially when we head to bed around 9pm!), in blocks up to three hours long. (Woo hoo!) Nursing continues to be easy and relatively comfortable for both me and Rosie. My emotions seem to have settled back into their usual pattern of gentle ups-and-downs. I even baked some brownies yesterday (from a mix, but still).<\/p>\n
I am just trying to take one day at a time and trying to be grateful for the peaceful and joyful moments we happen upon. But part of me does wonder why things feel easier this time around. I notice a few factors:<\/p>\n
* Jon is still working a greatly reduced schedule, meaning we can tag-team against the little ones. Advantage: grown-ups.
\n* Rosie is only eleven days old. Fussiness starts when babies are around two weeks old and peaks at six weeks. We could still be in for it in a big way.
\n* Since nursing has been so easy, I’ve been willing to feed Rosie more frequently, especially in the evening. With Lucy, nursing really hurt — which means that poor Lucy might often have been simply hungry all those months we were “bouncing her on the ball”:\/news\/2006\/bouncing-baby-boyd\/.
\n* Jon and I have honed our parenting skills so perfectly that adding a newborn to our family mix doesn’t rock our world. (Ha!)
\n* Jon and I are more confident about parenting, which makes everyone else more relaxed, too.
\n* We have a lot more fussy-baby-soothing techniques under our belt that we haven’t even needed to try yet. Options are good.
\n* The Lord has answered our prayers and sent us a relatively easy baby.<\/p>\n
One thing that is certainly true: it is much easier to believe that we are in a temporary phase with Rosie as a newborn. When Lucy was born, for us newbie parents it was hard to imagine that she would actually grow into a “mobile”:\/news\/2007\/rockit\/ and “verbal”:\/news\/2008\/listen-to-this-lydia\/ child who sleeps for twelve hours each night. And while this temporary sleep-deprived phase we’re in may last even six months or more, I do believe that it is *temporary* and that Rosie will grow into a little girl, pretty much no matter what we do. That makes it a lot easier to appreciate even her newborn quirkiness now!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although we aren’t quite out of rough newborn waters yet, I think we seem to be finding our “Rosie legs” pretty quickly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}