Thursday, May 14, 2015

Luscious Locks: A New Mother's Irrational Views

The other day I read a blog post (that I can't find the link to, sorry) about a new mother's set of instructions for her babysitter, it was six pages long and ridiculous and neurotic and could have been written by me word for word at any time during Cooper's first year of life. It got me to thinking about all of the times that first time motherhood robbed me of all logic and reason.

Cooper took about two years to get any hair. One day my mom and I had a conversation about it-
Me: I can't believe it took Cooper two years to grow any hair!
Mom: Oh you thought he had hair like a year and a half ago. What did you used to call it?
Me: I did not!
Mom: Yes you did. Oh yeah, you called it his luscious locks.


Luscious locks you guys. And I was deadly serious.

I used to be EXTREMELY concerned with Cooper's sleep schedule. One time I started crying because I felt guilty that Josh and I had gone to see a movie at 8 p.m. and left Cooper with my mom and I was upset I had ruined Cooper's bedtime. Did I mention Cooper was like three months old and didn't really have a bedtime?

Or the time my mom offered to keep newborn Cooper for the night so Josh and I could sleep and I asked her not to make eye contact with him. I was very concerned with day and night confusion and had read some dumb thing somewhere about how babies take eye contact as a sign of daytime. Apparently I used to feed Cooper with my eyes closed...

When we moved to Washington my mom kept Cooper for three days while we drove our stuff here and unpacked. Every day I would call eight month old Cooper on the phone, not my mom, I would call to talk to Cooper. Multiple times a day. During which I would sob and tell him how much mommy loved him and not to worry we would be back together soon while Cooper sat and pushed buttons on the phone oblivious to the fact that he was talking to his mom because, you know, eight month olds can't conduct phone conversations.

Hypochondria also took advantage of my diminished reasoning skills during this time. Cooper was six months old before I went a whole month without taking him into the pediatrician. I don't remember all the diseases I thought he had but some of them were: a lazy eye (When he was a newborn no less. Don't all newborns have lazy eyes? Anyway I had the pediatrician write me a referral to see an opthamologist), asthma (I still kind of think he has asthma), scarlet fever, carbon monoxide poisoning, lead poisoning, measles, dehydration (this one included an ER trip where the ER doctor just stared at my happy, laughing baby and said, "nope."), botulism, every allergy there is, every developmental delay there is...

Also I tried to tell the pediatrician that my two month old was getting his bottom teeth. Spoiler alert: he was not.

The videos! Cooper recently found the videos on the iPhone and has been watching them when I realized that I took videos of the most mundane things! Like ten minute videos of him sleeping or a video of me reading a book to him, he not even doing anything, he's just sitting and listening to the book. Worse still, I emailed these boring videos to everyone I knew and expected everyone to be excited about them.

The hundreds of times I refused to go somewhere because Cooper was sleeping, or about to sleep, or there was the possibility of sleep on the horizon.

The time I tried to sign my one year old up for preschool.

When eating an egg gave Cooper a small rash one time and then I told everyone he was allergic to eggs and got mad at my mom for giving him a bite of a sandwich that had a minuscule amount of mayo on it and then I tried to take him to an allergist to get stuck with a million needles because I thought he had severe, life threatening food allergies.

I used to refuse to change lanes when Cooper fell asleep in the car for fear that crossing those raised bumps on the road would wake him up.

Wow. I was a mess.

1 comment:

Meg said...

Hahaha! Daisy just had that same egg sensitivity rash and I was so glad it was the second time around so I could just go, "Ah. Sensitivity. Well, let's wait on eggs for a few months."