Missing the baby days
Parenting

Missing the baby days

I might be mad to write this but every now and again I really miss the baby days. My little girl is very nearly a toddler, it feels like she pretty much went from baby to child overnight. Every day she is doing something new. Her latest skills are climbing up on the sofa and getting off by falling on her head. As well as confidently using her walker to walk up and down our hallway, and now very nearly taking her first step. Which has got me thinking, when did my baby become this confident little person who can now nearly walk independently and puts so much energy into climbing and throwing herself off the furniture?

When did it happen?

It is like she has changed in a blink of an eye. Gone are the sleepless nights when I would long for more than 1 hours sleep during the 4-month sleep regression. Now my little girl is sleeping through, and sometimes I look back and I miss the nights when I would have to go to her cot every hour throughout the night to comfort her back to sleep again. She was a baby, so tiny and defenceless and just wanting comforting when she woke up hungry or didn’t know how to put herself back to sleep again.

During the nights we would play white noise or Ewan the Sheep all night long to enable her to sleep. Looking back now I think that the playing of the white noise was more of a comfort blanket for us, to feel the security that playing the fuzzy crackle over and over again worked and kept her sleeping. Sometimes hearing Ewan the Sheep now brings back memories of waiting for her to sleep, whilst I would sit and watch Luther on my iPad.

Sometimes I find it hard to remember her face when she slept on me after breastfeeding all day long. I do have a picture of her sleeping milk drunk, but even looking at that I find it hard to remember what she actually looked like. Some days I would love to go back to these days, where I spent hours sitting on the sofa watching Netflix and Homes Under the Hammer holding a tiny baby for hours every day.

I loved it when she made her first noise or gave me her first smile. Or when she cooed at me from her bouncer or play mat, hitting a hanging toy for the first time. Her tiny eyes staring up at these brightly coloured shapes above her. She would sit for hours in her bouncer watching everything I used to do, and then eventually fall asleep whilst I rocked her with my foot.

Although my days are much more fun with my daughter now and we have a whole new world of walking and talking ahead of us, I would still love to go back in time and enjoy another baby day with her, to soak it all in and take a snapshot of her in my memory. I struggle to remember the early days due to lack of sleep, exhaustion and relentless feeding.

When I’m asked about what I did on my maternity leave I can remember the groups we went to, and meeting up for endless coffee and cake, however I can’t remember what we did on the days that we were at home, and what my daughter looked like without looking at a picture of her.

If you’re in the dark days of the sleep and constant feeding, I promise you it does get easier and those days will pass. Enjoy and absorb as much of it as you can, before you know you’ll have a confident toddler on your hands.

Claire x

I wrote this post to first appear on Meet Other Mums.

2 Comments

  • Steph McGee

    I miss those moments and my youngest is only 8 days. I made a Sunday roast yesterday, why, I’m not now sure. By the time I got back to my sleeping baby, my heart was breaking realising he had not been in my arms for 2 hours! Ever the evaluation queen, I have reflected, learned and am instigating positive change – this week I am not cooking, AT ALL. #fortheloveofBLOG @smhypnobirthing

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