Hands Free Baby? Yes, Please.
FYI: I was not compensated for this review. This is my honest-to-golly opinion. Oh, and you should also know that at the end of this review is an opportunity for you to win a free ERGObaby Carrier System, so you can form your own opinion and see if it matches mine. (And if it doesn't you can be all like, "Um, that Claire Bidwell Smith is soo crazy," and I won't mind at all.)
Anyway, let's talk about baby-wearing.
Now that we're six months in, it's pretty funny to look back on those first few weeks of parenting. Greg and I just didn't get it. She wants to be held ALL the time? Surely not. Here, change her diaper. No, stick this pacifier in the mouth. She spit it out? Is she hungry? I thought she just ate. Try just putting her down in the bassinet. Ohhh no, that doesn't work.
The only thing that kept Veronica happy was if we just held her in our arms and walked around the house. Seriously. I know you people without kids out there are thinking we must have been doing something wrong. But you people with kids are totally nodding your heads. You know. The girl would not let us sit down. We had to be walking. It was like some new-fangled form of Chinese water torture; all we wanted to do was sleep and all she wanted us to do was walk.
When she was about 6 weeks old we discovered that the only way to get her to fall asleep at night was for one of us to slowly walk around the darkened house with her in our arms. At first she would look every which way, turning her head to take in the shadows around her. And then little by little her body would grow heavier, her arms slack at her sides and then eventually her head would nod, her breathing slowly evening out.
We had to take turns at this walking around thing because she's kind of heavy. You might not think 10 or 15 pounds is a lot to carry around, but try doing it for 30 minutes when you're SLEEP DEPRIVED. It's like you're moving into your first post-college apartment all over again and you're too cheap to hire movers so you totally assumed you would be fine carrying the futon up 5 flights of stairs, but now you're stuck on the third floor with that thing, trying to maneuver it around the bend in the stairs, and all you can think is man, one day I'm going to be like an adult and I'll pay people to do this for me. Yup, just like that.
So anyway, we had to take turns because she was so heavy. And maybe we got a little resentful of each other in the process since whoever wasn't doing the baby carrying got to lay in bed with a book, looking up every 5 minutes or so as the baby-carrying parent walked slowly past the door with Veronica. Usually whoever was carrying the baby would try to catch your eye as they walked past, shooting you a death stare that loosely translated as, Yeah, you enjoy that book for like 5 more minutes and then this is ALL you. Oh, those were the days.
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