I volunteer in the Nursery at our Church a couple of times a month and am starting to wonder whether it is not good for my 'healing Mama heart'. I usually spend the remainder of the day on the verge of tears.
Mikail usually LOVES the nursery and that is why I have been volunteering. So that several times a month he will have the comfort of me being there while he socializes with other kids his age. The other Sundays he is on his own. He needs to learn how to deal with that too. The kids in nursery range from a couple of months old to walking age. This Sunday all of the kids who were in Nursery are all born within a month of each other. Mikail being the oldest.
And yes, the problem is that I start comparing him to these other kids. Some are taking their first steps and are quite verbal already. Others cling to me and I have no clue whether they can walk yet. They are just too scared being away from their parents that they play the cling game so I can't quite tell how far along they are developmentally. I hate it that other workers and other parents do the comparison thing with questions they ask. I hate that I do the comparison thing. I know that this is what parents do. I fall into this trap all the time and I hate that.
There was this sweet little girl six days younger than Mikail in the nursery and she is soooooooooooo mobile and soooooooooooooo verbal. I know. She's a girl. Mikail is a boy. Boys are 'slower'. Ugh. But I still did the comparison thing and boohooed my way through the rest of the day wondering what my little boy's future will hold. Silly, I know. S-I-L-L-Y.
My dear husband reminded me that in his family babies often don't crawl at all and Mikail is army crawling so it's okay. My dear husband reminded me that we were told that our little boy would not be mobile at all. That he would not eat without feeding tubes. NONE of these things have come to pass. My dear husband reminded me that Mikail gets to his milestones on his own schedule, when he is ready, but he always reaches them. He will crawl normally. He will walk. He will talk a blue streak. He IS eating on his own. My dear husband held me and let me 'ugly cry' until I felt better. I love my dear husband.
Today my eyes are dry as sand paper and sore and puffy, but I am reminded of all the wonderful things our miracle baby IS doing:
Here he is tackling the stairs with Opa who came to visit for a few days:
Here he is working on his hand-eye-coordination which was a HUGE battle up until two days ago. Now he is getting it:
4 comments:
Love the crawling and the hand-eye!!
I am so with you on the comparing. Oh my God, I do it every single day. I'm on a FB group with a bunch of other moms who had babies born around the same time as Noah, and some of them are crawling already. CRAWLING. And Noah still doesn't have his head control down 100%. Same as I'd love to do BLW, but he doesn't bring stuff to his mouth enough. There are also babies in his birth club that are pulling themselves up on furniture! (All the babies are born between Nov 21 and Jan 11....Noah is actually near the end, so it's hard seeing all the babies that are almost a month older than him doing all this stuff that he's nowhere close to doing yet).
It just SUCKS. It's hard not to think about what he would be doing now had he not had any birth issues.
Anyway, not trying to be a Debbie Downer lol, just thought I'd share....again, love the videos! :)
- Olivia
Oh Iris . . . this is such a normal new mama feeling. I remember those days without fondness. Yuck. This is probably the worst part of becoming a mother. Surround yourself with people who are accepting of you and Mikail and who laugh off all the comparing.
As Mikail gets older this will become less and less of a personal battle. Mostly b/c parents children get older, some have more children and all of us are humbled in some way by our children. Humility is the leveling ground and can fill you with shame, but it can also fill you with empathy for other parents (and their children) and it can also fill you with freedom. Freedom from expectations and a wholeness that comes from living in the now and appreciating what is before us (b/c it all changes so quickly).
I don't know if you remember the group of mom's I hung out with for E's first 6 months. Well, thankfully, during her first year I found some friends that didn't take any of that too seriously. They were SOOOOOOOOOOOOO healthy for me. They would laugh at me whenever I got too anal and laugh at their 'slow' boys, etc. Just what I needed.
This too will pass and the future you will want to give the present you a great big hug, tell you exactly what J did, and tell you to do an internal eye roll mixed with a quiet giggle every time you catch yourself or another mom playing the 'my kid is better than your kid' game.
comparisons are a hard thing! When watching other little ones the age of my boys who were crawling when mine were not I was encouraged by the idea that there are 40-50 different ways of crawling - army crawling being one of them. Watching Johanna trying to figure crawling out today Todd and I reminisced how our boys basically skipped that stage altogether - too busy with other tasks. Each child is so different and will accomplish things in his or her own time.
Ohhh, Olivia, I hear your heart. It`s just so plain difficult sometimes, but we have to be gracious to ourselves. I have to remind myself of that a lot.
Monica, I love your wisdom. Thank you. This too shall pass.
Ruth, thanks for the reminder about each child being different. That is so true.
And the funny thing is that M is now doing a bit of both. Army crawling and real crawling. He`ll do about 5 `steps`of a real crawl and then it`s too slow so he scoots on his tummy and zooms around army crawl style. So, it`s coming--in his own time.
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