I don’t know why I think being the parent of one 19-month-old child qualifies me to dispense any wisdom on raising kids, but sometimes (after seeing it over and over and not recognizing it), a pattern reveals itself that begins to take the shape of truth.
I was thinking yesterday that the only reliable thing about having kids is that you can’t rely on anything other than unreliability. Just when your child starts sleeping through the night, she’ll wake up at 1:30 a.m. for a week straight. When she starts eating well, she’ll suddenly become finicky again and won’t touch anything but chocolate pudding and ham.
Adults are used to routine. We go to bed when we’re tired and eat when we’re hungry and go to work every day even if we’re a little sick. It can be really tiring to try to adjust to each new stage in a baby’s life, and no matter how aware you become of the constant changeability of her schedule, you still embrace anything that looks like a new trend. The minute you think you can count on her 90-minute nap from noon to 1:30 (which she’s done every day for two weeks), you plan a lunch date out somewhere on the day she decides to stop taking naps at all.
If you’re not a flexible person already, you get flexible in a big hurry (usually after about the second night home from the hospital). And of course all this mayhem and sleeplessness and instability is smoothed over by one little smile or hug or giggle, somehow, which always seems to come just when you’re getting to the end of your rope.
What a ride.