One Month and Beyond

My newborn is a bit over a month old and now I’m remembering why having a newborn is so difficult. Even though I’ve had two other kids, they are a lot older now and sometimes the difficult times seem to just melt away with each passing day. My newborn is now trying to remind me why it was so hard every day to have a newborn, which is jogging some unwanted memories :)

I think at a month old, my kids become a lot more aware of the world, and they understand what they want. All my kids are very stubborn. It’s almost as if it is genetic and innate in them. I look at other newborns and infants, and when they don’t get what they want, they do cry, but not as loud as long as my kids. My kids can cry for hours and hours straight even past a hoarse voice. They will cry until they’re sweaty and tired, but will not give up until they get what they want. With my older two, they still show shades of this every now and then through tantrums and I’ll take those over the newborn/infant phases any day because you can at least reason with them. You can’t reason with a baby that doesn’t understand much of anything. You lost the game even before it started.

I say all of this because witching hour is a common theme nowadays and is throwing off the schedule that we tried to have in the evenings. It’s harder and harder to predict when the baby will be hungry and when the baby will want to sleep. Additionally, the baby can now stay up longer and longer, which makes things even harder because when he is not entertained, he will let you know about it! You have to take the hard times with the enjoyable times though. There is no way to dissect the two and if I wanted to time travel to a period where my kids were so little to enjoy a few extra cuddles, I better prepare for a screaming fest afterwards!