Warts and All

I know I'm not coping well.  Life as a stay-at-home mom has been more difficult than I would care to admit.  Oh sure I can get dinner on the table, the house mostly straightened, and a few loads of laundry done with the best of them, but it's the mental work-out I miss.  Going from the Board Room to Board Books has been quite the transition.  I had a lot of assumptions about how life would be as a SAHM.  Actually "assumptions" sounds too unicorn and tulips.  How about "delusions?"

1)  My child will be normal or above normal.  Let's face it, every parent wants their kid to be the early talker, early walker, precocious problem solver with an early admittance letter into Harvard.  Seeing that H's Mom and Dad were on the higher end of the bell curve it was easy to assume our Mr. Man would be too.  Well, and whose to say he isn't.  However his theme song should be Mr. Rodgers "I Like To Take My Time."  H didn't crawl until he was 11 months, didn't walk until 17 months (literally 23 hours before the first physical therapy appointment), and we're still hanging on for his first enunciated word.  Although people mean well when they say, "Gee, I bet your little 12 month old is walking and getting into everything!"  You smile and say nope.  Inside you are beginning the running self-battery of, "If I was a better parent he would!  Maybe it's something I did/didn't do in or out of utero that's causing this.  What if I doomed him to special ed for the rest of his life?  Etc, etc, etc."  It's a pretty ugly feeling.  Oh we have speech therapy coming 1x/week, but we have had little progress and now they are talking about getting more experts weighing in on the matter.

2)  I am Freaking Mary Poppins.  Sadly I cannot turn medicine into cherry cordial or turn ordinary chalk drawings into animated singing sequences.  In fact, I've never prioritized my time to go to the fishmonger for a nice piece of cod.  We do play tidy up the house a lot to the point that H's favorite past time is to clean.  I literally right-sized the swiffer so he can dust the floors at will.  I suppose the best part of me not being Mary Poppins is no matter which way the wind shifts I'm still going to be here for him.

3)  We will be at play-dates or the library or the gym or the park every single day.  Um, no.  H has yet to see the inside of a library and he's just barely getting into the swings at the park.  Surprisingly that outing only takes like 30 minutes of your day.  I tried extending it once by making it even more fun and getting ice cream.  I have learned it takes 2 parents to manage a 19 month old and a dairy loving dog on a hot day with sticky running goo.  Since we are a one car family and Mr Man has unpredictable naps there are days when we never leave the house.  I've learned I'm not Julie, the cruise director on the Love Boat.

4)  Surely child development is an innate skill.  Somehow I missed this.  While I elected to stay at home hoping to give my infant the 1:1 care and bonding I thought to be essential, I've learned that a toddler needs a bit more.  I'm not a child educator and cannot imagine making crafts or science projects or whatnot that is age appropriate and stimulating every single day.  I'm beginning to feel a bit out of my comfort zone and now worry that I'm doing a disservice to Mr. Man by NOT having him in a structured daycare.  (Re-read #1 and add that last line to another ugly script running rampant in my head.)  On the other hand I watched the documentary "Babies" and saw kids in Mongolia and the savannah hitting their milestones without any age sensitive educational programming.