Parenting By Instinct (Alt. Title: Everyone is a Critic)

From the moment you discover you are expecting, your new life begins and you are subject to your first decisions as a parent. There are the early ones: what you eat, drink, and do can greatly affect the little creature you are incubating. Pregnant women are told to avoid a whole plethora of things - sushi, wine, certain cheeses - and encouraged to add prenatal vitamins, extra water and lots of fruit and veggies. Oh how I missed my soft cheeses. Any who...Pregnant women should also expect everything they do and everything that they put in their mouths to be subject to criticism. I ate (mostly) healthy foods when I was expecting Baby Lovely, however I did give in to the occasional fast food craving (and midnight bowl of cereal, or twelve. Ahem.) I remember being at work 38 weeks pregnant, having had a very stressful day, and going through the Wendy's drive-thru for lunch. While I was relishing my frosty and French fries at my desk one of the employees came into my office and commented how that wasn't good for the baby (this man was a good 75 lbs overweight, mind you.) And so it began...once the baby arrived it became much, much worse.

There are so many decisions that you will have to make as a parent, and it seems that literally everyone has an opinion on all of them. Scheduled c-section? Selfish. Natural childbirth? Unnecessary pain. Co-sleeping? Unsafe. Letting your child "cry it out" (or CIO for those in the know)? Cruel. Don't get me started on breastfeeding vs bottles. You don't have to solicit these opinions either. I have had several women ask me where Baby Lovely sleeps and if I breastfeed. This seems like a perfectly reasonable conversation to have with the woman behind me in line at Target, right? Yeah.

As Baby Lovely is our first, we have pretty much been figuring things out as we go. So far this is working for us - we have a healthy, happy baby and occasionally I get more than five hours of sleep. The only thing that all of my parenting decisions have had in common is that I have done what I thought felt right, even if it didn't follow "the book". I'm going to start a series on Mondays on some of these choices and how I arrived at them, whether or not they were on purpose. Let me put up this disclaimer now : these are only things that have worked for us, with Baby Lovely. Every baby is different, just like every parent.  Since no mommy post would be complete without a grinning infant, see below for my adorable, possibly teething spawn. 

No Giraffes were harmed in the taking of this picture

PS - I do have pictures where Baby Lovely is not in her exersaucer, it is just much easier to take pictures while she is contained.  That thing is great.