Days Are Long, Years Are Short - Reflections of 2020 (Part 1 of 3)
What a crazy crazy year 2020 has been. Not just for the world at large (read: COVID19, US elections, etc) but also for myself. Let’s get down to it. This is the first of 3 posts.
1. Days are long, years are short
My boy Julian was born in Feb 2020 (Valentine’s Day!) and within a blink of an eye he is turning 1 year old next month. The transition to being first-time parents is huge for me and I think you can never be fully prepared for it. It’s certainly tougher than I had expected it to be.
For my wife, the toughest was breastfeeding. It was an emotional rollercoaster filled with the mother’s fear and guilt of not being able to provide the best (defined as breastmilk) for one’s child, “what’s wrong with me why is my baby not latching?” and “how come no mother ever mention how f*@king difficult breastfeeding is?!”. She started her breastfeeding journey from not having enough breast milk to pumping/expressing breast milk every 4 hours (and bottle feeding Julian - he did not latch ) every single day for first 6 months. Yes this means she had to wake up at ungodly hours of the night to pump and she’s not had proper full night’s rest. She is still pumping now and has since stretched the pumping to every 8 hours (partly due to oversupply of breast milk). My hats off to my wife and Julian’s indeed very lucky to have her as his mom.
If you ask me, the toughest part was putting him to sleep. My wife and I really struggled with it. It’s like you need the precise concoction of science, timing, patience, physical and mental endurance…..and luck. There are 1001 reasons why your baby is not sleeping - he is hungry, he has had milk but not burped yet, it’s too cold/hot in the room, the way you are rocking him is not up to his liking, the lullabies you sing to him are not up to his taste, and then there is colic in his stomach that’s making him uncomfortable, there’s the sleep regression happening in babies at their X month, Y month (go google them) etc etc….. and your baby has only 1 standard universal response to you - which is crying. So you have to play detective to solve this why-is-my-baby-not-sleeping mystery while rocking, singing, burping him sometimes all at the same time.
Within a blink of an eye, Julian is now 10 months old going 11. He is crawling everywhere and is super fast. He is showing signs of being super sociable, cheeky and mischievous (and yes we created an instagram account for him - click here). When he was 0-3 months old, there were times I thought to myself I wished he would be more responsive and I could play more with him. Now, I miss those days. Now I really understand when they say this - “children grow up too fast”. Beyond Julian, with watching daily COVID19 infected cases numbers, circuit-breaker and Work-From-Home (WFH) days, 2020 has felt like it has come and gone in a flash.
Days are long, years are short.
See Part 2 of 3: 2020 - The Most Unusual Year https://www.johnlimcy.com/blog/reflections-of-2020-the-most-unusual-year
