After nine months of waiting for your baby to get out from her haven, your womb, here comes another bigger responsibility of taking care, loving and making sure that your baby will thrive. Get ready for the bumpy but joyful ride of being a parent. Here come sleepless nights, loud and annoying crying and panic attacks as you take care of your infant. Responsive Parenthood: When Do Babies Get Easier? Let’s find out the answer to your weary question.
The First Handful of Months
Caring for your little one in the first months will be challenging. You should learn everything about the milestones which will help your life become easier. Remember that there is always a rainbow after the rain.
1. First three months
In the first three months, you will have no sleep at all. You can’t find the time to do all the chores effectively and efficiently. For sure, you and your husband felt like crying in these months. There will come a scenario where one is in charge of putting the baby to stop crying and the other one is in charge of the phone, searching for solutions on the internet or calling grandma to help them with the baby. You will do literally everything just or your baby to stretch his time for sleeping and do less crying.
2. First six months
In these few months, you have learned about the attitude of your baby. Maye learning what he wants when he cries at 2 in the morning, or how much he usually wants his milk. But mom, you are still exhausted. You and your husband became aware that you should keep yourselves sane all the time and support each other not to have a major breakdown. In this stage, adrenaline rush saved you in times of confusion and distress.
These months are the stage where you will have second thoughts of why you had your baby so soon. Or the stage wherein you will ask if this all shall pass. Well, that is normal. Saying that a child can be easy to guard and support is not that accurate. Because in every stage of their growth, is a new challenge for parents. And every challenge means new things to deal with.
Why Are Babies Difficult in Early Stages?
Besides the fact that a baby is dependent on their mother most of the time in the first six months, let’s dig deeper into the facts why babies are hard to tame in their first six months.
1. Inconsistent sleeping patterns and eating schedule.
Say goodbye to your eight hours of sleep every night. Because your baby’s tummy is smaller, they require parents to feed them more frequently. Hence, crying every two hours or so. Also, they still don’t have the idea on how to make themselves sleep. That is why they require their parents to do this for them.
2. The time to heal from childbirth
After having to pass on hours of labor, and hours of screaming and pushing, your body is now healing from the process and regaining its strength. The physical and emotional stress that you got from the process will cause several discomforts on this stage. Caring or your baby, doing the errands of diaper changing, sleepless nights and cleaning the house only made this stage worse.
3. Crying as the only means of communication
Babies don’t have his words yet for them to communicate. Thus, he only communicates with his mother through all the crying. Which is too stressful because you have to decode its meaning. Whether he wants his next bottle, he has poop on his pants or sleepy.
4. Your new schedule as a parent and a couple
Once you brought a new family member, everything changes. You will be shocked by the changes you had made with your daily routine just to make room for your little one.
The rainbow of babies getting easier
Hey. Don’t panic. In every rain and thunderstorms, there will come beautiful rays of a rainbow. Just like for your babies. There will come a time wherein you will be able to juggle your mom plates.
1. Being able to distinguish a longer or a shorter time of sleep
In your womb, your baby can’t detect whether its morning or night. So they have irregular sleeping hours. When thy come six weeks older, they will distinguish day and night, thus, processing that at night, their sleep should be longer. Always make their room dark but with dim lights. In this way, their sleeping hours will be stretch longer.
2. Getting the Moro Reflex out of their system
The Moro Reflex is the reflex we are all born with as part of our defense mechanism, but after a few months, we grew to pass it. This will be seen in your babies when they flex their arms and legs involuntary when they sleep. And this disrupts their sleep. In few months after they are born, this will be out of their system, thus making their sleep longer and uninterrupted by their cute arms and legs.
3. Holding their heads up
Baby’s spinal cord is not that strong yet after they are born, so there is a need for support every time they are carried. After six months, they gain control of their head support, thus, there is the chance to carry them with only one arm, making way for some stuff to do with your other arm.
4. Sitting and Crawling
There will come a stage wherein your baby will be able to crawl and sit on their own. Babies gain control of themselves so they are less irritable than they were before. They can now lift toys and make themselves amused by it. This is also the stage wherein you can distinguish what they want or feel when they began to cry. This can also mean that you don’t have to put them to sleep because they now have the ability to do it on their own.
5. Being able to eat solid foods.
Yeay. You finally reach the stage wherein you don’t have to always pop out your breast and feed your baby. This is a stage for you and your baby for they will no longer rely on your breast milk or formula.
From bumpy to normal ride again
Congratulations, you have now passed the early bumps of being a parent. As you finish this stage, there will be another one that will pop up as your baby grow older. Another challenge. Another responsibility. You and your partner will have to enjoy every piece of it while it lasts. After several years, you will have a toddler, to teenager to an adult. Parenthood will never be easy. You will just have to get used to it and master the art of parenthood.
Read also:
- When Does Parenting Get Easier?
- The Best Baby Brezza Formula Pro
- Stay Positive With These Bible Verses About Parenting
