Parenting Milestones No One Talks About

4.07.2023


I love going to baby showers. The anticipation and excitement of celebrating a new baby is really fun, and I love seeing all the cute clothes and fun toys people buy. 

Especially for new parents, there are a lot of unknowns. I specifically remember a conversation with my mom about what a baby wears to sleep. I had no idea if they slept in a onesie and pants, in just a sleeper... should their feet be covered? Should they wear fleece? Long sleeves? A sleep sack? Swaddle? I legitimately did not know what babies wore to go to sleep!

Thankfully, you learn as you go, and hopefully a new parent has family and friends available to call for helpful advice. Everyone talks about what to do with a baby, but once you get out of the newborn stage, there are several delightful parenting milestones no one tells you about.

Losing Teeth

Yes, we've all heard of teething--those months of babies crying because their teeth are trying to cut through their gums. But let's talk about preschoolers losing teeth. It's a really fun six-month period of time involving a lot of blood and crying.

One minute, your six-year-old is casually eating a McDonald's chicken nugget, and the next minute they're screaming with blood dripping down their face. You don't know if they accidentally stabbed themselves in the cheek with their claw fingernail you forgot yet again to trim or if they bit their lip.

Neither of those, in fact. Their tooth fell out, possibly swallowed because we can't find it. This is a true story.

We've had a loose tooth pulled out at a dentist visit, lost a tooth in the car, at school, and one time R came out holding a tooth and said she pulled it out herself. At one point it felt like we were always either dealing with a new hole, a bloody wiggly tooth, or a tooth that was just starting to be wiggly.

R was certainly less phased the longer this went on, but the first half of the tooth-losing stage was not only traumatic for her, it was traumatic for us! The teeth get so wiggly they are basically hanging on by a single thread, but somehow they are still very much attached. I'll tell you from experience, they are hard to pull out and they bleed a lot! They're also just freaky looking when it's turned halfway to the side.

J hasn't lost any teeth yet, but I'm honestly dreading it.

Sleep

Everyone asks a new mom how their newborn is sleeping. 

Normalize asking people how their three-year-old is sleeping.
Mine is not, thanks for asking.

We recently moved F from a crib to a toddler bed to make room for G to move to the crib, and it is going about as well as this transition has gone the last two times, which is to say, amazingly not well.

If you have a child who just "stays in their bed when asked," I don't want to hear from you. F has finally decided to potty train, and he's a tricky trickster who realizes that if he comes out 85 times because "I need go pee," we can't very well tell him he can't go to the bathroom. Because MAYBE HE DOES. They've got a bladder the size of a fingernail, who am I to say no.

Except last night when I took him for the fourth time, he only stared at me while singing the ABCs.

He's basically an evil genius.

Growing Pains

Speaking of not getting sleep, once F finally does fall asleep, he is currently waking up 2-3 times a night crying that his legs and feet hurt. I fully believe him. I have a vivid memory of having growing pains as a child, and I know it hurt. So we get up and sit on the floor by his bed and rub his legs, which is the only thing that seems to help. Poor guy. AND poor us.

Everyone is all, "Aww, poor F." Yes, and let's not forget the parents! In a moment of dramatic desperation, I told Jordan, "People DIE due to lack of sleep." Why do people act like your newborn sleeping through the night is the end of the road? Let's be honest. If you have a child under the age of ten, you are most likely getting consistent sleep at night. (And if you are, I'm happy for you but also go away.)

Questions

I didn't realize how many things I didn't know until I had a preschooler. There's just so.many.questions. about everything all the time. And a lot of them are valid questions about how things are made and how they work. Apparently I'm just okay going through life as a dummy, because most of the questions end with me saying, "That's a good question. I guess I don't really know how that works." Sure, I could look it up or come back to it later, but I forget half the time. 

Also, have you ever realized how hard things are to explain? Even when I think, okay yes I DO know that, I still sputter around when trying to actually explain it. No wonder we all thought our parents were idiots. Obviously as an adult I realize my parents know actually everything, but I didn't fully appreciate this at the time.

The fun part of questions, through, is when they ask logical but hilarious questions. Example: I was talking to J recently about smoking and how it turns your lungs black. He thinks for a minute and then says, "Does sugar turn your lungs white?" No, but what a great question! I love how their little minds work.

One of my favorite quotes from J was when we were doing some family questions from a little Q&A game I'd bought my mother-in-law for Christmas.

Someone asked, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
J immediately said: In the mirror.

There's a lot more fun stuff, like catching vomit in your hands, wiping poop off carpet, and just in general becoming a super parent with a sixth sense for impending doom. Parenting is wild!

But I guess now that I'm thinking about it, maybe it's best we don't share all of this with parents of newborns. Stick to the easy stuff like what a baby wears to bed and silicone teething rings.

It's all fun and games until someone's tooth starts falling out.

・ DESIGNED BY ECLAIR DESIGNS