The Deep End #newparent

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Eight months ago my life changed. It was like standing on a cliff and blindly jumping into the unknown. Yet I did not fear the falling, I knew it was right to jump I just had no idea where I was going to land.

The thing about being a new parent is that you really know nothing. You are arrogantly ignorant to what is about to happen. I think that’s the best part of it all. There is something fun about having no control over your life. I say that in a good way, really when you are a new parent you quickly realize you have little control over your time or your life. Your baby demands attention, has little regard for timing and influences your every decision.

I have always heard people suggest you should not wait too long to have a baby because you will have become set in your ways. Once you have a baby there is no “your way” for some time which again may not be a bad thing. When you stop and think about these things you will find so many Godly lessons. The great thing is you have little choice in accepting these lessons. Having a baby is precisely the thing you need to break “your ways”.

The greatest thing however was that soon after I stopped falling, I found my way onto a path that felt more familiar. That I owe mostly to my wife who found these amazing motherly instincts and learned the secret code of our child. This is no joke. Babies have this secret code to unlocking them and making them happy. There is a reason many parents have a knack for putting their own child to sleep, they obviously broke the code. The thing is though, they can change some of the code at random. This requires some tweaking on your part but as code masters you learn quickly.

I recall sitting with a few new dads for some lunch and drinks one afternoon (our wives were at a baby shower). We were talking about our lives as new parents and shared hilarious stories about these new experiences. It was the perfect medicine for us. One of the dads asked me how my baby was sleeping. I told him that our guy was really starting to sleep well and had in fact sleep through the night that very week.  Our baby was only a few months old, so I was pretty excited that he was starting to sleep really well. This dad gave me the dirtiest look and made a joke I can not share on this family friendly blog. Each of our babies had been different and it was easy to see that at the moment his child was not sleeping. He was happy to know that had changed the next time we talked!

That’s the thing! The code changes so fast! Around 4 months our baby who was becoming a great sleeper turned into a horrible sleeper! This would go on for months! Having a good sleeper and feeling like we had escaped the worse part of being a new parent turned on us really quickly. Eventually we would start to see some progress but the slightest change in schedule would knock the whole system out of line. That is the deep end of being a new parent! This is level of change that is not quite expected, you think 3 months but 8 months later its still going on.

Eight months in and I am still standing! So he just started to crawl and my baby is no longer seeming like a baby but a child.