Do-Over

There are a lot of things that terrify me about having two kids 21 months apart. There are things like potty training where I envision myself sitting in the bathroom with a newborn attached to my breast, encouraging my toddler to go pee pee in the potty. Or the first time Madison decides she’s not so fond of her new sibling and does something destructive like smack him in the face. Oh, and there’s also that small thing where we’re positive the second one is never going to sleep through the night and is pretty much just going to be miserable because Madison was so good. But beyond all of the fears, irrational or not, I find myself endlessly excited about the “do-over” aspect of the second child. Because let’s face it, Clint and I didn’t exactly do things “by the book” with Madison. If I sat here and listed all of our “blunders” this blog post would never end, but among some of my favorites are….

• The time when Madison was about four days old and was refusing the breast for a good 5 or 6 hours. I was exhausted, on an emotional overload and so I ripped open the breast pump and started pumping (no sterilizing, no washing of bottles, nothing). She ate and stopped screaming.
• On a similar note, we were struggling with breastfeeding and Madison’s weight gain so we were supplementing formula. Not only do I remember crying hysterically over how much to give her because I was certain I was going to overfeed my daughter, we also fed her for over 24 hours out of the Similac ready to feed sample formula bottle we got. But I had ripped off the label and didn’t read it so that formula sat out on the counter for those 24 hours, never refrigerated once.
• We used to get Madison to sleep by putting her in her carseat and placing her on our old, rickety dryer. Enough said.
• When she graduated from the carseat, she slept in her swing until she was 4.5 months old. Both naps and at night.
• I used to sit by her swing, with the blow dryer in my hand, dozing off and pleading with her to please fall asleep before mommy lost her cool.

So needless to say I’m looking forward to the knowledge of useful facts like “sterilization” and “don’t poison your baby with bad formula prior to his/her being two weeks old”. I am excited to see if I can get a newborn to sleep without a carseat, old dryer or swing. (Plus, its our luck the dryer will finally die and we’ll have to get a nice new quiet one. It’s no coincidence that M never fell asleep on my parent’s nice dryer). I’m certain I committed multiple fire hazard offenses by laying on the floor with a blow dryer next to my sleeping screaming child. I swear I never fell asleep only dozed off a few times. There’s the mashed potatoes that we let her lick at 2 months old, all of the cartoons and evil TV that she has watched and the bottles that we sometimes propped. Oh and don’t even get me started on the fact that we let her fall asleep nursing or drinking a bottle. I was certain I was going to have an 18 year old that needed a bottle to go to sleep. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to all of the perfected parenting skills I’ll get to put to use on our second. I mean, because of course we all do things better the second time around, right? Or perhaps we’ll just do it all the same. Madison has seemed to turn out just fine, you know, aside from those bizarre twitches. They’ll go away right?