Second time round

Being a mom the second time round is definitely easier, and more enjoyable. The first time was really tough. Here i was thinking, look women have been doing this for millennia, since we came out of the water. What can be so tough? You feed it, clean it and make sure you put it to bed. Can't be hard. Boy was i wrong. I have never done anything so difficult in my life, particularly since, as i was growing up, even though i had more than 20 cousins all younger than me, i never really paid attention to what it takes to do stuff to a baby. So it was really a case of where's the instruction manual!!! when i had Oisin. And when you read the one's which were written they all disagreed with each other, or gave advise that didn't help. Anyways, it turns out the only way to know about child rearing is to do child rearing yourself.

This time round, well, i don't get stressed out so easily and when the baby cries, and nothing's too wrong, i tend to just hold him and wait it out. If he's full, clean and comfortable, there's isn't very much else i can do, is there? I've made a sling out of a sarong which Father Ollie gave us when we got married all those years ago. It just goes across me and keeps him in place while i type, prepare food, clean, do the laundry - well, his laundry in the sink. He loves it, even if he looks squashed in. This is what i mean by more experienced the second time round: we tried it for Oisin and we thought he looked al squishy inside the sarong. But babies love squishy and he falls asleep in it with no bother at all. and they are, for all the appearance of newly made jello, very resiliant little things. If they weren't we'd never have survived this far.

Here he is at one week. When his eyes are open, he has this expression that says, "Am i still here?" or "What is the meaning of all this?" When i look at Oisin now, i can't quite understand how we got from this to that. One week to six years, and all the teething, walking, toilet training and why-ing in between.