Enjoying special moments of smiles and giggles with your baby is a big reward for mums at the end of a busy day…
Here’s something I bet you’ve already noticed if you’ve been even semi-conscious since your baby was born: looking after a baby is hard work!!
The amount of toil lumped on your aching shoulders within an hour of your little darling flopping into the world is truly staggering – and perhaps the most shocking thing of all is that all this work comes from something so small. I mean, how can something whose feet are smaller than a matchbox and who does, let’s face it, nothing most of the time require 20-hour-a-day care and cause your house to be filled with so much baby-related paraphernalia that you can’t find the front door, far less go out of it to buy a newspaper (which you then can’t read because there’s no free time)?
How can something it took ten minutes to make (OK, sorry guys. Fifteen minutes) now zap every moment of your waking – and sleeping – life, leaving you approximately five nanoseconds to go to the toilet and eight and a half minutes to get some kip?
In the early months the day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment drain on your energy and time can become completely overwhelming. Many are the new parents who spend the first week in post-birth ecstasy (‘He’s so adorable! I could watch him all day and all night! Look at his sweet little hands, and his sweet little mouth. And he sleeps like a dream!’ etc etc) only to come down to earth with a big, bad bump when it dawns on them that actually, they’re just about ready now for a moment’s rest from all the cuteness, cuddliness and feeding/pooing/possetting to, oh you know, just stare out of the window for a moment, or buy some curtains on eBay. Just a little rest? A tiny break? Please…..?
But Junior has other plans, of course. She wants to vomit into another three clean T-shirts, dribble milk all over your shoulder and wet yet another nappy. Before 7am. She wants someone to coo at her, and take her for a walk in the pram and spend all afternoon trying to wind her. She wants to do whatever it takes to make sure Mummy hits the end of the day so tired that she can’t actually register how hard all of this is. And the cherry on the cake is that if you’re brave (or stupid) enough to look back on the day’s hard slog and wonder what you’ve achieved, you’ll discover that the sorry answer is: ‘got through another day. Back to square one again for tomorrow.’
And that’s all before you go back to work, and suddenly find yourself catching up on deadlines at the weekend or after you’ve put baby to sleep in the evening.
But STOP! This is all far too doom and gloom! There is hope; a silver lining; light at the end of the long tunnel.
Because one day, dear reader, something miraculous happens. Out of the blue, between feeding, changing and kicking off his baby socks, your child will SMILE. Is it wind? Is it a freakish spasm of the cheeks? No, look, there it is again. He’s looking at you, and he’s smiling! He likes you! He’s smiling and he’s beautiful and you just don’t care any more that the house looks like a bomb has exploded in Hamleys or that you’ve aged twenty years since last Thursday. He’s smiling, and that’s worth all the hard work you could ever be asked to do.
And this isn’t the end – oh no! Things just get better and better from here. Once you’ve got smiling firmly fixed on the day’s agenda you can move joyfully on to gurgling, squeaking and even chuckling. When you’ve had a killer of a day, the boiler’s just broken for the third time in a week and your boss tells you you’re not quite pulling your weight any more, a good belly-laugh with your baby is powerful enough to melt away all the stress and exhaustion. Boiler? Boss? Where…?
I’ve found that as my children have got older (they are now 11, 9 and 6) the ‘knock me down with a feather’ moments such as the first smile or the first steps have become less obvious, but the general astonishment at how amazing children are, how lucky I am to have them and the overwhelming sense of love I feel towards them has grown year on year. Whether it’s hearing them finally master a tricky piece on the piano, tasting the first meal they’ve cooked all by themselves or just lying together in bed after lights out talking about the coolest superheroes we can dream up, the wonder never really stops.
Looking after babies and children is always going to be hard work, but from those first smiles and giggles to the day they graduate, we’re given signs all along the way that it’s worth it a thousand times over.
