Having an infant is boring and I can't wait to have a toddler.
Having an infant is boring and I can't wait to have a toddler.
As of today, I have a 1 month old. She is amazing and I love her so much, but she's boring! Don't get me wrong, she's difficult and my wife and I haven't slept a good night in a month, but all she does is eat, sleep, and poop. There's basically no interaction.
I'm so looking forward to being able to laugh with her, play with her, and generally start teaching her the world.
How do you feel? What's your favorite stage of child development?
I have an almost 3 year old. I love this age. He has such a personality. I love playing with him and reading to him and just generally spending time together. Infancy was awful. I don’t think he slept more than 2 hours for the first 6 months.
Congrats on the baby!
She is amazing and I love her so much, but she’s boring! ... How do you feel?
You aren't wrong. And so many people will come for you with pitchforks and torches for having said so. But you aren't wrong. Before ~ 6 weeks when they get social smiling, they really are potatoes that you care for. They have lots of amazing development going on inside, but on the outside you water, fertilize, give sunlight, and weed your potato and your potato ... sits there.
I actually call this The Grub Phase because they remind me of grubs: eating, eliminating waste, growing, leaking fluids in weird ways (not that this stops, mind you, a common statement exiting my lips at the toddler stage is, "Why are you sticky?"), and wriggling/writhing but mostly not going anywhere.
What’s your favorite stage of child development?
I love the lying phase which occurs between 5 and 7 on average. It is also the boundary testing phase. I love seeing what children think might be possible. They sometimes have the freedom of unconstrained creativity to come up with some solutions that are possible and while inelegant are a fresh new approach to problems. Of course, the payment for all of this delight is dealing with all of their sassy pushback on everything and sometimes undetectable lies due to their plausability, but it is worth it IMHO.
There's tons of interaction happening. You're teaching her the world right now. You're teaching her what safety and comfort feel like. What it feels like to be unconditionally loved. What it feels like to have new experiences, which she's having at a rate that would leave an adult human's brain lying in a puddle.
Don't mistake her inability to communicate in a way that's familiar to you as a lack of communication. It's your job to interpret her communications. Every arm and leg wiggle, every eye blink, every coo and fart and startle.
Hopefully you and your wife are taking turns interacting with her when she's awake (while the other works or rests). The more you talk to her, touch her, hold her, move her arms and legs around, etc., the more her brain will grow and make connections and reinforce and prune and become your daughter to be.
As for my favorite time? It's this time. Tomorrow it will be that time. Hopefully without sounding too judgy, looking back and calling some prior time with your kids as "better" does a disservice to the kids in front of us today who need us to do our best work for them today.
Some of this yes. Some of this no.
Every arm and leg wiggle, every eye blink, every coo and fart and startle.
This is the no. First of all, at this phase the child is a synesthete. The arm and leg wiggles are not communication but stimulus response. Espying the color red may be why the leg wiggled. While delightful to a parent, don't make more of it than it is.
Also, they cannot coo at this stage. You may have confused the social smiling/cooing phase for what the OP is commenting on. The OP is referring to far earlier in development.
The startles are reflexive. The Morrow reflex. It is also not communication. It is just an instinct hardwired in to a primate brain to prevent newborn death by putting the primate newborn in a position to grab on to an adult's body fur and thus prevent falling to their death.
I find this phase personally delightful because you get to see the human BIOS on which their person operating system is shortly to be installed, but it is absolutely okay for people not to, just like some computer enthusiasts love a BIOS and others don't. So long as one isn't neglectful, it is okay to not be enthralled.
I really disliked having a baby. Toddlers are cool, but babies are really demanding, boring, loud, and deprive you of sleep for months on end. I have no idea why women like babies so much.