Hey, you're new! I love new people, welcome.

You may want to subscribe to Baby-Log via RSS feed or via email. Thanks for visiting!

Before and after the BabySpeaking to my friends who don’t have kids yet, I often imagine this picture – there is a one-way door leading to a passage, childless couples are standing before it and those who have babies and kids are on the other side.

There is no chance what so ever for people “before baby” to understand what the heck those freaky parents are talking about before they walk through that door. But then they can’t get back to the way they were thinking before – it’s a one-way door.

I have a new friend, she is 5 months pregnant and the things she says, thinks and does take me 2 years back, when I was at the same point of my life.

Before
I had no intention of changing my habits or my weekly routine. For example, we were used to doing the laundry once a week, it fit well into our life, it was cheaper (in a sense that one full load is more economical than two half loads). I just couldn’t understand why should I change the rules and start doing the washing every second day. Can’t I just buy enough clothes for the baby to wear the whole week and then wash them all at once?

After
Practice showed that it doesn’t work that way. It still made more sense to wash baby clothes every 2 days rather than buy a bunch of wonder-suits he’ll grow out of so quickly.

Before
I was dead serious about going back to work 3 months after the birth. I figured that after those 3 months at home with the baby I will be glad to make it someone else’s problem and escape back to work, to the grown up world, where your work is
a) paid
b) appreciated
and where you don’t get yelled at for no reason.

After
Time proved me wrong. Here we are, 19 months after my baby was born, and I still take care of him most of the time. I do work – from home, to keep him close for as long as I can.

Before
I was saying “This baby is coming to live with us, not the other way around, so it better behave and fit into the way we do stuff”.

After
Guess what. He’s changed everything – the way we live, think, behave, sleep, eat, everything. We have built our life around his routine. When he’s asleep friends can’t come over, our trips are timed so that he’ll get his afternoon nap, etc. A sworn take-away eater and a notorious disaster in the kitchen, I started to cook and it turned out that my son actually likes my cooking. I had to give up the high hills- try running after a toddler in those things; it’s an accident waiting to happen.

Before
I didn’t think I was meant to be a parent.

After
I think that most of us were born to be parents. It’s just that many of us don’t know it yet.

Can you see yourself in this post? What did you think before your babies were born? And how did they change you?