We recently took our first family trip to Northern California and survived the 5-hour drive both ways. In fact, that was actually the easiest part of the whole trip. It was great seeing our friends from college whom we don’t see enough and Isabel was relatively well-behaved (as much as a 9 month old can “behave”). We invaded the home of soon-to-be parents, and over dinner one night, the expectant dad asked us, “What is one piece of advice you can give to soon-to-be parents?” Pfff…
Advice? I’m hardly in the position to be dishing out advice, most of the time I feel like we’re just surviving another day. And since every situation, kid, and set of parents is different, there is no “one-size-fits-all” survival formula. Of course there are “experts” and tons of websites claiming to have the secret baby sauce, but let’s be honest, all of those are also just people sharing their experiences and what worked for them. (Well, except maybe the baby scientists.)
So without much hesitation I gave him a rather ambiguous, yet fairly specific response, “Relinquish control.” (To which I received a high five from Mrs. FWL!) Once you have a kid, there are few things you can actually, truly, control with them. Yes, you will create routines. And yes, everyone will get into a rhythm. But guess what? It’s all temporary. Case in point – that trip
Minus a few traumatizing times, Isabel has slept through the night since about 5-6 months old (as I knock on the biggest tree possible) – until this weekend. Not only did it take Mrs. FWL an hour and half one night to get her to sleep, suffering through banshee level screaming we’d NEVER heard or felt before, but Isabel also unexpectedly woke up two nights in a row at 3am and would not go back to sleep. Using on our normal techniques of rocking, shhhhing, or patting didn’t event soothe our little monster. So both nights, she slept on mama the rest of the night. This hasn’t happened since she was weeks old.
All we could do was relinquish control and figure out how to survive the night.
Mrs. FWL and I deal with the survival of parenting in very different ways. We each have our own techniques and if asked for a list of tips, would probably differ on more than half. Even our own techniques frequently fail us since babies will inevitably do what they want despite our best intentions and effort. But we always have the same goal – do our best to keep Isabel happy and not lose our minds in the process. So when one parent inevitably starts to unravel at any given point, wave the white flag, call in reinforcements, and figure out how to survive together.
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