Babies take up all your time.
Literally, ALL OF IT. You’ll wake up—sorry, your baby will wake up—and you’ll spend the whole day hustling, but at the end, you will have achieved absolutely nothing.
Remember when you dreamed about learning a language or scrapbooking your child’s first year of life? That won’t happen.
You’re not being lazy and you’re not the only one getting nothing done during the day. It’s just not possible.
You might start out your day with a grand plan for some sensory play because you spent four hours on Pinterest last night when you should have been sleeping.
While your baby is eating a piece of toast but not actually swallowing a damn thing, you start to set up a ‘small world’ tray with little animals and rice and some leaves for trees. It’s going to be beautiful and stimulating and you can’t wait to take photos for Instagram.
You get as far as taking out the tray and a bag of rice before your child hurls his toast at your hair, leaving a chunk of regurgitated bread clinging to your fringe. As you attempt to wipe the mounds of dough from yourself and the cupboard doors, your child backs out a log so toxic, the stink of it makes your eyes water.
You grab your sweet little darling for a nappy change and the death roll he performs as soon as you take off that nappy spreads excrement up your arm, his back, the wall, the blinds and, inexplicably, the floor outside his room. You’re not entirely positive there isn’t poo on the fan but you’ll deal with that the next time you need to turn it on.
You spend a good twenty minutes deep in poo removal and you think you’ve nearly finished when you turn and find your child has been keeping busy with the tub of nappy cream. You curse yourself because you should have realised he was too quiet, but you breathe through it, pick up your now fully creamed child and put him straight in the bath where you discover that nappy cream is like indelible lipstick, the stuff that only a special lotion will remove. The nappy cream has turned your baby into a moisture-repelling aquatic creature. The water beads and rolls off him like a duck.
You strip yourself off while he’s in the bath because you’re now covered in toast, poo and nappy cream and you’ve got a strict three-dubious-substances-maximum rule for your clothing.
The doorbell rings and you’re now convinced the postman is spying on you because he only ever rings the doorbell when you’re naked, breastfeeding or trying to get the baby to sleep. You ignore the door even though you know it means you’ll have to go to the post office to pick up the package later and that’s about as appealing as rubbing Tiger Balm on your eyeballs right now.
You spend the next 45 minutes trying to get clothes on yourself and your child and then realise it’s his nap time and you didn’t manage to fit in any sensory play at all.
So you spend nap time setting it up for him, as well as cracking out a quick clean of the bathroom and kitchen, which you manage to do in fourteen minutes flat because—surprise!—he’s awake again.
You manage to take one passable photo of him holding a tiger, which you will use for Instagram tonight (#smallworldplay) but you won’t mention that he upended the entire tray and you spent the afternoon cleaning rice out of the carpet and trying to stop him from eating it before you lost your mind and threw the whole, hateful small world crapshow in the bin.
You might have fantasised about all the hours you’d spend reading and playing with your child but, realistically, babies create work wherever they go. Those special memories you wanted to make will be exciting and special for exactly three and a half minutes before your baby’s need to seek and destroy takes over.
It’s not that you shouldn’t try to make those special memories; it’s just that you might want to lower your expectations and not feel defeated if one tiny little moment takes the whole freaking day.