Real Moms meme

Thank you Kerflop for pointing me to this particular entry in the Real Moms meme. It's beautiful.

I was just walking my almost-2-year-old Biscuit to sleep for his nap, and thinking how we are going to do things differently with The Cupcake. I'm going to try the advice I read (I think in The Happiest Baby on the Block) and start laying her down to nap when she is drowsy around 6 months old instead of rocking her until she's completely asleep. And that made me flash on how some day I'm going to have to explain to her why we did things differently. At first she'll probably only be old enough to understand that Mom and Dad learned from the first time and so she got the benefit of our experience. But there will come a day when she'll think that she didn't get special cuddling treatment because (Oh, please, God!) she doesn't have Down syndrome. And that's not really why. It's because of that heart surgery which loomed so large from the time he was 3 days old. I was so afraid that he would not survive the surgery or that it wouldn't be enough of a help for him and so he wouldn't live; I thought that the days I had with him before his surgery might be the only ones. So I sat in the glider and sometimes napped with him for every nap and every night before bed.

After laying him down for his nap about 20 minutes ago I came downstairs to my computer to read a bit, so amazed that after almost 2 years it can still hit me so hard how much I love him. I kind of got over that by starting to read and BOOM there was the link on Kerflop.

I don't have any photos of me walking him or rocking him to sleep, so I'll just post this of our glider.




Real moms rock their babies to sleep, even when the parenting books tell you that you shouldn't.
(They also use $20 chairs from Ikea as side tables.)