It is really amazing how much calmer you are when you have a second baby. With The Girl it took forever to change a diaper. Three years later with The Boy, I’m like a Nascar pit crew.
I also forgot that new babies don’t do much more than poop, eat and sleep (during the day, not the night), which is good because anything beyond that right now would be a struggle. It’s not the new baby that we’re having to spend so much energy on right now – it’s The Girl. I guess I wasn’t really fully prepared for the extent of her adjustment period, but suffice to say it’s been difficult for her.
Not that she doesn’t love her new brother – far from it. She is overly eager to help and hyper curious as to what he is doing at every single moment of the day and night, which has led to some long nights and stressful days as we dance along the fine line of correcting her handling of the little guy and crushing her enthusiasm.
To say she has been emotionally tender is an understatement. Little things that she normally took in stride have become emotional obstacles for her. We’re finding that we spend a lot more time with her, helping he adjust to this new little person and not feel that she has been pushed aside, or that she is loved any less. Add in some Christmas hype and you’ve got a tender ball of emotions.
As for the regression to babyish behaviour we were expecting, it hasn’t really happened. She is going thru a soother phase, but she plays with it for a couple of minutes before discarding it, so that hardly seems significant. I should note that she never used a soother when she was a baby, so there is a novelty element to them. Not that we were planning on using a soother with the Boy, but some overly eager Nurse in the hospital eager to quiet him during his overnight stay in Neo-Natal gave him one.
On the upside, since she has become a big sister, she has taken the unilateral step of finishing off her potty training. The day her little brother came home was the first night she decided to sleep without a diaper, just her underpants. It’s been a week and so far, so good. And 2 days ago, I was summoned into the bathroom to witness her first #2 on the toilet – an event that almost made her Mom cry (at this point, those of you who do not have kids are bailing out of this post, wondering what the hell it is about poo and toilets that turn parents into socially inappropriate idiots). So, in terms of baby regression, I think we’ve come out ahead.
