Wasted

Truly youth is wasted on the young.

When you are young there are so many things you don't appreciate. You are so eager to rush headlong into adulthood that you never stop to realize how good you've really got it.

"No, Mommy, I don't want to take a two hour nap in the middle of the afternoon!"

"No, Mommy, I don't want to relax in my comfy stroller that is outfitted with a cushy sleeping bag insert to keep me toasty in the cold weather. I want to get down and walk on the hard concrete!"

"No, Mommy, please don't spoon feed me that delicious puree that you spent an hour painstakingly making from only the finest, freshest, organic ingredients. I want to pick up pieces of lint off the floor and shove THOSE into my mouth instead!"

Waste.

Sleep. When we are young, we think sleep is a waste of time. Live while I'm alive, sleep when I'm dead. Waste. Sleep is lovely. It is comforting, refreshing, peaceful and fun. A good eight hours at night...nothing like it. A nice nap in the middle of the day, a gift. But when we're little, we're either convinced we're going to miss something or we're so busy trying to do everything all at once that we can't imagine giving up even 20 minutes in order to shut our eyes and relax. Okay, some of us still have the problem as adults, but let's focus on the kids, shall we? As kids, we don't realize that when we "finally" don't have to take a nap anymore, it will be the end of a delicious era during which we were ENCOURAGED to do NOTHING. This will never come again and later in life when we are rushing from kids to work to kids to spouse to kids to errands to...we will miss those days and wonder why we couldn't appreciate the down time when we had it. We also don't realize when we're young that it is only because we have the ability to recover that we are able to pull all-nighters. Pulling an all-nighter in college makes you feel like a rockstar only because you can sleep in until 3pm the following day. When you are a working adult or, even more significantly, a parent, pulling an all-nighter is no longer awesome; it is a misery. It is a misery because a) much of the time you're not doing so by choice (enter screaming 10 month old) and b) There is no recovery time. Either you are rushing off to work the next morning or you are being woken at 7am (or 6am or 5am...) by a baby who doesn't get the meaning of "sleeping in". This summer, when Kayla was about four months old, I got called "old" for refusing to stay up til 3am playing beer pong. And I get it. Yes, we became parents and yes, that made us less likely to stay up drinking ourselves silly til all hours of the morning. Allow me to explain...Kayla has no concept of sleeping in nor does she understand "Mommy and Daddy are hungover, so you're going to need to quietly entertain yourself for a few hours this morning, okay?" All she understands is that she is still hungry in the middle of the night and she is still wide awake come 0630 and so "HELLO!!!!!! Attend to me." For any parent who has ever done it, tending to an infant while hungover...AGONY, no? Yes.

Laziness. Listen, I know that is easy for me to say this as my baby is ridiculously active and physically is tending to develop ahead of the curve. Were my baby to be behind in hitting her developmental milestones, I might not feel this way. But as this is my blog, I'm going to address how I feel. So, laziness. Listen up babies, this is the only time in your life where laziness will be a valued trait. This will be the only time in your life when someone will breathe a sigh of relief as you allow them to spoon food into your mouth, allow them to carry you for block after block in a big fluffy sling that they are wearing across their chest, allow them to tuck you into your bed for a mid-afternoon nap...Later in life, wanting to be spoon fed will undoubtedly be frowned upon, so, my dears, take advantage now while it lasts! Your parents, cruel as they seem, strapping you into the baby carrier when you could clearly crawl down the sidewalk yourself, would gladly trade places with you for a day. In fact, every time I go into the coffee shop, Kayla all snuggled down in her stroller-o-fluff, the barista says "God, isn't that the life?" And the answer is yes, yes it is. Of course, Kayla doesn't think so. She can't figure out why I won't let her crawl down the road, hands splashing in puddles of car-created muck, tongue lapping out at every stray piece of somethin'...she doesn't get why I insist on holding her or, at the least, snapping her up whenever she spies a discarded pigeon feather and decides that she simply has to know what that tastes like. And she should know that I am far more lenient than most moms I know. My friends gasp when I let Kayla crawl across the playground. "Oh my God, how can you stand it? It's got to be flithy!" Listen...it's either give the kid a chance to explore or stand with her desperately clawing at the air next to us, looking more and more perturbed, getting more and more whiny and getting closer and closer to launching herself out of my arms toward a death-defying five-foot freefall, so...

Plus, I sympathize with her. I get why it is frustrating not to be able to do whatever you want whenever you want. I feel the same way sometimes when I am cooking her third meal of the day and hear people headed to the bars. I want to run to the window, claw at the glass, beg someone to come and save me, but we can't always do what we want to do and so, I get Kayla's need for occasional escape and I choose to honor her desire for independence. After all, she would hardly be my daughter if she didn't think she could do everything herself.

But truly, Kayla, baby, I say this with all of the love, wisdom and understanding a mother can offer, quit rushing forward wanting to be bigger, older, more capable, more independent. You will have plenty of time later in life to be all of those things. What you are right now is so special and so fleeting. You won't remember it. How could you? But oh, if you could, you would look back on these days later in life and think "Wow...that was the best." Because it is. Some day you might not feel that you learn something new every day (I hope that you do). Some day you might not hold everyone around you constantly rapt, waiting to see what amazing thing you might do next (though you'll always hold me). Some day someone is going to tell you to get up and walk, to stop being lazy...some day...but not too soon. I won't let any of those things happen too soon, because you are my baby and I want to keep you that way for as long as I possibly can.

Though I'm willing to move on past the not sleeping through the night and the needing a diaper phases. I think those are a little overrated.