"You'll Just Know"

I was chatting with a friend who's expecting her first child. I told her one of the most confusing parts of being a parent is that things are always changing. And, when you ask people for advice about how to deal with these changes, they say, "Oh, you'll just know!"

Guess what? You won't. Not always.

Ok, perhaps there are some parents out there who used to work in daycares, or had a bunch of younger siblings/cousins, or babysat all the time, or have infant ESP. Maybe those people intuitively know what their babies need. But this mom? I was (am) flying by the seat of my pants most of the time.

(Also, I think some of the "you'll just know" crowd are ladies who are now grandmothers and who've forgotten what daily life with little ones is really like...)

Take sleeping, for instance. Since a newborn sleeps a lot, it's important to know what works best for your baby. Let me emphasize the extent to which I DID NOT KNOW what I was doing on the sleep front. Why? A) I was sleep deprived myself. B) There were two babies. C) They kept changing what they wanted. D) There is no consensus in the "sleep expert" community. E) Every baby is different.

So what did we do? We experimented. We tried various sleep locations - swing, bouncer, pack-n-play, crib. We swaddled in blankets. We swaddled in velcro sleep sacks. We bought blackout curtains and a white noise machine for the nursery. We used different types of pacifiers. We rocked them to sleep. We let them cry (a little). We drove them around in the van.

Eventually, through trial and error, we found some methods to get our kids to sleep that were effective. Yay! But then we had to deal with nap transitions. That's another area where people love to tell you, "you'll just know when it's time." Uh, negatory, good buddy! Here's my thought process.

Hmm, Gus took about 20 minutes to fall asleep. That's a long time. I wonder if I need to move his nap back a bit? Meanwhile, Gibson fell right to sleep, but he woke up 30 minutes before his brother. So let's try pushing nap time a little later to see if we can get them to sync up. But I need them to be awake for at least 3 hours between naps, and then we're running into dinner time...hmm...

My powers of observation informed me there was a problem brewing, but my motherly intuition didn't immediately tell what to do. Instead, I formed a hypothesis about a solution which required further field testing. Ultimately, I suppose I learned that you can't really control your kids, even when they are infants. And although the craziness of multiple nap schedules makes you want to pull your hair out when you're going through it, that phase of life doesn't really last too long.

How did I arrive at that conclusion? I just know :)