Daddy Day Care: A Spoiler?

As I sit here with the world’s cutest and happiest baby cooing in my lap, I can’t help but think that we’ve been blessed with a spoiler. What’s a spoiler you ask? Quite a few parents we’ve talked to (even before we had Kayla) have made comments such as, “Oh yeah, we thought we had parenting all figured out with Bobby and Sue, but then we had Billy…”

Now that I’m getting used to living on less sleep, I’m beginning to think that Kayla is our spoiler, given us to cut our parenting teeth, and encourage us to have another. Let’s be realistic here, who wouldn’t want another precious little easy to care for baby? Before we had our first we had all sorts of doubts. Oh sure every parent tells, “You’ll know how to tell which cry is which.” I can take such statements on faith, but there’s a difference between expecting something, and accomplishing it.

We were given quite a few excellent books on parenting. Thanks to Jen’s friend Christina, our baby actually DID come with the baby owner’s manual. Jen and Eric gave us Babywise, which is also excellent. The What to Expect… books are also good. We read them all and referred to them often during them first weeks. They helped set our expectations realistically and provided us with an arsenal of tools to help us manage our new baby and integrate her into our life.

Now, 7 weeks into this gig, it’s easy to determine what her needs are. We know that each evening she’ll have her fussy time. To get her ready to eat, just uncover her for 15 minutes while warming up her milk. She’ll cool off and wake up ready to eat. Keep her awake for a half hour of “happy play time” and then warm her up and she goes to sleep. Now we’re listening to The Rolling Stones and I’m about to get a little work done during her nap. In short, life involving a baby is becoming predictable.

I mean sure, we did have to learn some new skills, but we expected that. Just as we had to learn new skills to thrive as a cohabitating couple, so too did we need to make changes and grow with this new addition. It almost seems to have been too easy. Is this the calm before the storm?