Things I don't love about parenting

Most of the time, I'm pretty surprised about the things that don't bother me about parenting. For instance, I thought I'd be really annoyed by whininess and clinginess, and surprisingly it doesn't annoy me all that much. I was a little worried about how I'd handle the ick factor - between diapers, vomit and adventures in feeding, everyone knows babies can be disgusting. But turns out, I have a really high tolerance for bodily effluvia and general disgusting mess. Tantrums don't really faze me, and moving at baby pace (ready to go! Ok, wait - where are your shoes, did you take them off? Where did you put them? Ah, I see, you hid them in your wagon. Here we go, back on....what's that smell? Ok, let's change the stinky pants and then we'll go! Ready? Let's see, diaper bag, check...well, we'll probably be gone long enough I should bring a snack. Just one minute, let me get a snack to put in your bag. All right, here we go! wait, where are your shoes?.....) is ok with me as well.

But there are a few things, I have to say, I really dislike about parenting. Overall, they're few in relation to the great parts, but still. The end of sleeping in, for example, no amount of cuteness makes that better. On Saturday mornings, when I take Owen to the playground at QUARTER TO SEVEN in the morning, I exchange sympathetic glances with the other dejected looking women with one eye on their toddlers and the other staring glumly into a giant coffee. your kid was tearing your house apart at 5:15 too, huh? I feel you sister.

Then there's the paying for babysitters. Not while I'm at work, that I can get behind. For some reason paying someone to watch Owen while we're working seems entirely reasonable and does not bother me, but paying someone to watch him so we can go out to dinner really bothers me. I'm not sure quite why this is such a sticking point with me, but most of the time I choose NOT to go out because I have having to pay a babysitter that much, even when we want to go somewhere and can afford the sitter. I suspect this has less to do with some essential elements of parenting and much more to do with my incureable tightwaddery.

And really, that was it, until this week. And then I discovered the doozy, the first thing I really, REALLY don't like about parenting.

First Andy was sick, then Owen was sick, and now I'm sick. Andy has recovered nicely, but Owen's and my sick has overlapped, which has never happened before and I've suddenly realized reeeeeallly sucks. A sick baby is terrible, but a sick baby plus a sick mom is REALLY terrible. Especially when baby has decided that he can only be comforted by mom. When your throat is sore and your sinuses are blocked and you have a headache that you think will probably kill you before it gets better, a sobbing, feverish baby at 2am is pretty much the worst thing ever. And turns out, you can't explain that you're not feeling well. Babies, they just don't understand. It's been two days now, and although Newton Wellesley Pediatrics assures me it's just a virus (not the swine flu, call me paranoid but I did check) I'm starting to wonder if we'll both survive.

If this blog never gets updated again, you'll know that not-swine-flu got the best of us.