Old parents luurrrrrve to impart their wisdom on newbies. Pour out all the advice and wisdoms, saying unhelpful things like:
“Sleep when the baby sleeps”
Pffffffft.
Actually most parents these days know how annoying advice-giving can be, and the most useful thing is to let the new parent just talk. Talk as much as they need to. To another Adult.
Now if that old-time parent doing all the listening really wants to earn some extra friendship points, they would make the newbie parent laugh. Mentally stepping back and looking at the ridiculousness of the mayhem is what makes it bearable.
But seriously, these are actual skills you will need to work on as a new parent:
- Cooking your entire dinner with half a hand – you will need the other seven fingers to stop fights, keep kids from burning themselves and get blue-tak out of your two year-olds eyelashes RIGHT NOW!!!
- Getting used to the taste of frequently microwaved coffee. Or room temperature coffee (blurrgh) . Choose your poison. I prefer the radiation flavour.
- Becoming an expert translator for your child’s made-up words, for example, ‘Plemp’ might mean ‘Whack’ today. But it might mean something else tomorrow.
- Getting used to never finishing a sentence again when talking to another adult. Even if you do get to come back to the conversation there’s no way you’re going to remember what you were talking about.
- Removing glitter from porridge.
- Sifting through vacuum cleaner dust to retrieve THE MOST PRECIOUS plastic bead in the world.
- Holding in a wee because “Breakfast in Bed” isn’t quite ready yet.
- Repeating a sentence for the 50th time WITHOUT sarcasm, irritation or volume. I swear, it’ll be the first time they’ve heard you say it.
- Reframing your disaster of a day somehow as success to stop you from weeping yourself to sleep.
- Doing yoga with an extra 15 kilo of toddler clinging to your torso.
- Training one ear to dial down the volume of the ‘noisy’ child so you can tune into whether the quiet and devious child has opened the knife drawer.
Looking back with my youngest nearing six years old, the only thing I would say to a new parent – if they asked – would be to:
Laugh as much as you can
Thanks!