So in case you missed my Monday post, BABY BOY IS HERE! 🙂 He’s doing well! I’m doing well! The family is doing better than I expected… and overall, it’s been GREAT!
It’s been challenging, of course, but really, we’re doing much better than I had dared to hope for. A huge part of this is all the help we’re getting. Not only are our friends super wonderful and bringing us delicious meals all the time, but our parents have been awesome about coming over to help us out.
Having your first newborn to care for is challenging, especially since you’re figuring out everything for the first time. And, if you’re anything like us, you stress over every detail like crazy. I still remember freaking out a couple years ago when my husband opened up the car seat canopy to show off our sleeping baby girl in her car seat, when she was just a week old. I was sure she was going to catch someone’s flu or cold or something and almost had a meltdown right then and there. I know, ridiculous. I knew it was unreasonable back then, too, but… that’s the kind of stress I lived with the first time around.
This time, we had a group of friends over about a week after he was born and at one point, I literally did not know where my newborn son was. And I was totally okay with it. All this to say, having your first newborn to care for is stressful in its own unique way.
But having a newborn when you’ve also got a toddler running amok and requiring lots of your time and attention? That’s a whole ‘nother ballgame. Not harder, necessarily, but a different kind of challenge. The main drawback so far is that we cannot just “nap whenever the baby naps,” because unless my toddler is also napping, somebody’s gotta be up to watch her. This requires so much time and energy– two things parents of a newborn are generally short on.
Which is why I am SO GRATEFUL for the help we’ve gotten from our parents during these last couple weeks! So much so that I composed a list of ways to be awesome just like them. Partly as a reminder to future me, and also in case you are about to have a newborn and want to think of some ways your parents can help. Or in case you’re about to become a grandparent and want to know how you can be helpful to your grown children! Without further ado, my list (in no particular order) of Ways our parents have been super helpful with our newborn:
- Home-cooked meals. With the ease of ready-made meals and food delivery services, a home-cooked meal made by Dad is about 100x more appreciated than it was when I was actually living at home 15 years ago. The fact that I don’t have to menu plan, grocery shop, cook, or clean up is friggin awesome!
- In-house photographer. Anytime my mom catches the scent of a memorable moment about to happen, she whips out her camera and is snapping away photos, capturing bits of life together that would otherwise be forgotten in the long run. At a time when I mainly use my phone to keep track of baby boy’s eat/sleep/poop patterns, I’m glad someone else is taking the time to document this crazy phase of our lives! I also enjoy seeing photos from my mother-in-law after she’s spent a morning with my daughter, catching me up on the hours of fun I missed. I love seeing that my little girl is happy, even if I can’t be the one creating smiles with her every moment of every day anymore. *Nostalgic sighs*
- Babysitting. I think I’ve discovered a sixth love language: loving on my children. If you love my children and spend time with them and are delighted by them, then I feel like you are loving the very core of me! So I appreciate when anyone comes over and lavishes my children with attention… especially my toddler, who seems to be needing a bit more of it these days. My mother-in-law has been awesome about coming by regularly and on-call to delight in and play with our daughter, and I love hearing their singing and laughter downstairs even as I am drifting in and out of sleep in my bedroom trying to catch up on Zzz’s after those sleepless nights of nursing. I also really appreciate that my mom and dad have been taking her to parks, zoos, libraries and museums so she could continue to be active, play, learn, grow, and have fun during this transitional time!
- Chores. As much as friends offer to help with anything around the house, I don’t think I could ever bring myself to ask a friend to do my laundry or clean the bathrooms! But I guess since my parents already did that for me the first half of my life, I don’t mind asking them to help us out with these things now. As a bonus, my dad is an expert gardener and has done so much yard work for us that would have otherwise taken us months to get to… if ever!
- Errands. This one is kind of like chores. Although I have taken up friends on their offers to pick up groceries for us, I would only mention it if they were already heading to our house that day anyway. I would never ask them to go out of their way to bring my car in to my appointment to get the car seat installation inspected, like I asked my dad to do. And when my dad told me my tires were getting bald, he and my mom brought my car into Costco to replace them that very day, finding coupons to sweeten the deal and doing some grocery shopping for us while they were at it. SERIOUSLY. WONDERFUL. And then the next day they went back and picked up the car for me. I mean. That kind of errand is annoying even when you don’t have kids to work around, so the fact that they took care of this when we had two kiddos in the house really saved us so much time and inconvenience!
- Adjust to the new ways. Whether it’s the latest recommendations to have babies sleep on their backs, keep the crib free of blankets, or to avoid screen time, it really means a lot to us that our parents are willing to do some things differently than how they raised us… even if it goes against what they knew to be tried and true 30 years ago! For my parents, this is also meant being accommodating in the way that they loaded dishes into our dishwasher, following our strict rules about exactly which cutting boards are used for what foods, and other things that we happen to be especially particular about. One shining example of my parents adjusting is how they have handled my toddler’s potty training. Yes, we started the process earlier than most people probably do. The book we used (Oh Crap!
) warned me not to mention that we were even attempting potty training to anybody until we had successfully finished. Well, we have successfully finished, and that is largely thanks to the help of my parents, who followed my instructions on potty training to the T. It was no simple feat, either! If you have followed my blog for a while, you probably have a sense of how detail-oriented I can be and how insistent I am on things being done consistently. We only started potty training her about a month before the baby arrived, and many experienced mothers warned me that she was going to regress as soon as our newborn was born. It wasn’t just a warning- it was a promise. I appreciated their thoughts, so that I could set my expectations and not be too frustrated when it happened. But my parents were so vigilant to stick with the potty training program that not only did she not regress, she made progress! It was definitely not a method my mom or dad were used to or had tried before, but they went with it and I’m very thankful that they were accommodating to what we wanted.
- Don’t insist on what works for you or what you think is best. This one goes hand-in-hand with #6, “adjusting to new ways.” Grandparents, you might be right. A lot of times, you probably are. But we young people like to think we did our research, or that the latest recommendations are best. I know it’s arrogant and naive, but at this sleep-deprived phase in our lives, we really don’t want to argue the point. We just want to sleep and rest easy trusting that somebody is taking care of our child in the way that we believe is best. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a mom stressing on a discussion board about how her mother-in-law refuses to follow her schedule or program for the baby, and insists on doing things her own way. It’s a huge source of stress for new parents, and something I am hugely grateful that I have never had to deal with.
I’m sure there are a hundred more ways our parents have been awesome that I have failed to mention, and I wish I could thank them for every one of these things. Our parents have been beyond amazing for us and have helped make this transition from a family of three to four a wonderful one. Of course we still face challenges and man, the sleep deprivation is real… but like I said before, this phase has been so much better than I had ever thought it could be, and a lot of this is thanks to our parents. I wish awesome parents and in-laws to every new parent out there, and I hope I remember how to be awesome and helpful to my children someday!
9 responses to “How to Be an Awesome In-Law”
Meet JoEllen
Subscribe via Email
Top Posts & Pages
Categories
Your parents sound like angels!! I hope to have help like this with the new baby. Already terrified of how it will be toggling a toddler (who rarely naps) and a new one!
I seriously don’t know how we would have gotten through the first couple weeks without their help! I hope you have help around, or at least a good meal delivery service for those early (and totally sleepless) days/nights!! Congrats!!
?
🙂
Congratulations on your new bundle of joy! What lovely parents you have.That you can hear your little girl and her grandma singing as you drift in and out of sleep is the sweetest! Love your soft writing style too!
Aw, thank you so much :). Yes, they’re the best!
Such wonderful parents – I’m glad you’re having an easier time of it! (And I’m so gonna look up that potty training book.)
I’m not gonna lie– it was not an easy process… especially not when you’re pregnant. Lugging around the pregnancy weight PLUS trying to carry your toddler to a bathroom saying, “HOLD IT! HOLD IT!” is NOT a great way to spend your eighth month of pregnancy. BUT HEY it’s in the past now, so I can now be glad we did it since we are now reaping the benefits of the pre-newborn training! :] I will say though, it really worked, and I think was a speedier process than usual. Let me know how it goes!!
What a wonderful, touching post! Congratulations on your new-and-improved family! 🙂