After the baby comes out, there's a certain expectation that things will be fairly mental for a while and then eventually settle down and go back to normal.
At least, this is what I was banking on, but the reality has been somewhat different. It's not that I'd change it as such, but really there's nothing normal about spending most of your waking life negotiating with a miniature, infinitely stubborn and unyielding version of yourself. It can get a little surreal. Sometimes I catch myself saying or doing things that, taken out of context, are actually pretty mad. It's at these moments that I think about my child-free friends saying "YOU didn't change after you had a baby" and I realise that they are completely wrong. They just don't really know that much about my life anymore; they don't know for example that sticking a vaseline-coated cotton bud up my baby's arse is not the most random or the most disgusting thing I've done today so far.
10 New Parent Milestones That No One Tells You About (And Prove You'll Never Be 'Back To Normal'):
1. The Tar Poo
A black, sinister, sticky puddle just oozed out of the baby. BAH.
2. The Shitty Up The Back
So THIS happens. My advice? Cut the baby out and incinerate the babygro immediately.
3. The Drunk Baby
What the hell is wrong with the baby? It's milk-drunk, is what. And it the goddamn cutest thing you will ever see.
4. The First Nail Clipping
AKA "OH Holy Divine God in Motherfreakin' Heaven I Cut The Baby."
Absolutely harrowing. I think (PRAY) this happens to everyone at some point.
5. The Return of the Bra
The first time you put on a 'real' bra after months of unclippable boulder-holders feels as fancy as putting on a wedding dress. Until you have to pull it down to nurse the baby and then the baby spews in it.
6. The Total Loss of All Modesty
I completely and utterly forget to be modest since having a child. There's something about the whole process that strips you of all sense of propriety. Once you've had you breast extracted from your shirt during brunch by a tenacious and hungry baby there's nothing much left to be embarrassed about.
7. The Cotton Bud Up the Bum (see above)
Aka The Constipation Shit Storm. I never thought constipation would be such an ordeal until the baby didn't take a dump for eight days and I freaked out and found myself gingerly following the steps I found on the internet for the cotton bud thing. This was one of those times, I definitely had an out of body moment and thought "Would ya look at yourself here." I had definitely traveled far from normal at this point. Now sometimes when I meet new people and I'm smiling politely and doing my best normal impression, shaking their hands etc, inside my head I'm thinking: "Little do you know I once did the cotton bud thing..."
8. The White Noise
Allow me to set the scene:
It is 3.54 am. The baby is screaming in my arms as I sit slumped and dead-eyed on a couch covered in laundry as a 6-hour White Noise loop I found on YouTube roars in the background.
Totally normal.
This was a fairly average night during my son's babyhood. I had made it 28 years never giving white noise much thought, only to discover that countless hundreds of thousands of hours of the stuff has been painstakingly recorded and uploaded to YouTube for parents like me.
9. The Baby Rolled Off the Bed
It's like they're deliberately trying to make us look bad. One minute they are totally immobile, the next minute you hear that sound that will reverberate through your head for the rest of your life. I can still call it up now two years later, the thud of my son hitting the floor. We were both hysterical; The Man had to calm everyone down, while I frantically texted everyone I knew to find out if this had happened to them.
10. The Baby Slept All Night
But you're up every hour frantically wondering just what the hell is going on?
What'd I miss? What were your lesser-known new parent milestones? Let us know in the comments...
