Lessons Learned

Asher will be turning one soon.  People keep asking me if this year has flown by.  Sometimes it has, but at other times, like when I was getting up in the middle of the night for the umpteenth time, it has seemed to drag on forever.  Despite the bouts of sleep deprivation, however, I have managed to learn a handful of things this past year.  Here are just a few:  

1. Temperamentally speaking, babies are divided into easy babies, slow-t0-warm-up-babies, and hard babies.  Asher is an easy baby.  I am a slow-to-warm-up baby.

2. No matter how sweet your baby is, he is inevitably sweeter when he is asleep.

3. It's interesting how you can become attached to nursing when you hated it for the first two months.

4. Babies are naturally attracted to either the most dangerous or the most breakable thing in the room they are in.  If there is an item that is both breakable and dangerous, they will, of course, be drawn to that.

5. Babies are designed to need naps so that their mothers can survive.

6. Babies are designed to be cute so that they can survive.

7. The three-hour church block means that no matter what time your church starts, it will interfere with your baby's nap schedule, turning him into an over-tired grouch and your "day of rest" into Chinese water torture.

8. An infallible cure for grouchiness is a baby who wants to snuggle with you.

9. One of the most frustrating things in the world is a hungry newborn who won't latch on at 2:00 in the morning.

10. One of the sweetest things in the world is a baby's first laugh.

11. Baby clothes are really cute, but, assuming that your baby actually wears them, they have a decent chance of getting ruined.  So, unless you want to keep your child in a hamster ball forever, you might as well get over it.

12. The secret to getting water onto an airplane is putting it in a sippy cup.

13. All variety of household substances can be used as convenient hair styling products:  rice cereal, spaghetti sauce, refried beans, oatmeal, etc.

14. Babies really do learn to sleep through the night.

15. It is often very hard not to laugh at something your baby does, even when you know that it definitely won't be funny the ___th time.

16. Having a baby can help you to form instant friendships with just about anybody else who has a baby, or who has ever had one.

17. Once in a while, you can go to bed without tidying up the house first, and nobody will even die.  (Really.  Try it sometime.)

18. Daddies can sleep through pretty much anything.

19. Even on the days when you can't wait for bed time, it's easy to miss your little destructo-machine once he's actually asleep for the night.

20. You don't have to be perfect for your baby to really like you.