family

Biking with a Baby for the First Time

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 6 Comments

Biking with a Baby for The First Time - Thinking about bringing your baby on a bike via a trailer? This is what happened on my first ride with my almost one-year-old. (Photo: Baby in a bike helmet)

Biking with a baby for the first time is often a “interesting” experience for both the cyclist and the passenger. No one is quite sure what to expect. I biked with my son – who is just under a year old – for the first time last Saturday.

Of course, he wasn’t riding the bike – he was in a trailer attached to mine. I told him he should say, “Mush, mush, mommy!” I suspect I shouldn’t repeat that joke when he’s old enough to understand it. It went about as well as I could expect for such a new experience. He was mostly neutral with the potential for a more positive reaction in the future.

Getting Ready to Ride with a Trailer

Before I stuck Sprout on the back of my bike, we did some preparatory work. My parents gave me the Burley Honey Bee for Christmas, which is similar to their basic trailer. It has the one major advantage of turning into a stroller when you unhook it from the bike. Burley is known for being one of the best when it comes to trailers, so I was pretty confident in the quality and comfort level.

The trailer itself was easy to put together. At least it was according to Chris, who did all of the work while I played on the lawn with Sprout. Getting it on and off the bike was somewhat challenging. I had trouble lining up the precise spot on the bike with the right spot on the trailer hitch, but I hope it gets easier with practice. My awkward efforts did demonstrate the trailer’s safety. I knocked my bike over and the trailer didn’t budge.

After the construction phase, I tested out my bike with an empty trailer. It added a lot of weight, making it almost as heavy as the bulky Capital Bikeshare bikes. Otherwise, it wasn’t all that different from my normal ride. My balance wasn’t affected at all, unlike if I had a regular child seat on the back. I was most concerned about the turning radius, which was much better than I anticipated. The only thing I needed to watch out for was the additional length. If I wasn’t careful, it was easy to bump the trailer over the curbs of shared use trails. That isn’t that dangerous, but it would be uncomfortable for my little passenger.

 Heading Out Biking with a Baby

Once Sprout woke up from his afternoon nap, we were ready to make our maiden voyage. We decided to bike to a Ben & Jerry’s about a mile away. I had a hankering for sweet dairy and the start of summer. (Plus, food-based rides are kind of my thing.) It was a good distance, long enough for Sprout to get a feel for the experience but short enough to be tolerable if he didn’t like it. If we really needed to bail, we could always walk home. Plus, Chris isn’t nearly as enthusiastic about biking as I am, so a couple miles was a good warm up for the season.

Before we could leave, Sprout needed his helmet. Not that he understood, but I explained to him that besides the safety reasons, my mommy would be very, very angry at me if he didn’t wear a helmet. (My mom regularly scolds her students at school to wear helmets. There Would Be Words if her own grandson didn’t wear one in the trailer she gave as a gift.)

He wasn’t happy about it at first, but once I adjusted it, he stopped fussing. I also put a rolled up towel behind him for support. Trailer seats recline so much that they push helmets forward over babies’ foreheads. But as I was just finishing my other tasks, I glanced over and saw him chewing on the helmet’s chin strap. Hmm – that clearly wasn’t going to do him much good in an accident. After another round of readjustments with accompanying whining, we were ready to go.

Once we started, Sprout seemed to accept of situation, even if he wasn’t pleased by it. Looking at him with my rear-view mirror, I saw that he didn’t cry at all. But he didn’t smile either. He looked somewhat surprised and confused more than anything else.

I can’t blame him – it’s really different from anything else he’s ever done. The ride is far bumpier and faster than the stroller and completely different from the car’s highly controlled environment. He has a similar reaction to most things that are radically new, including foods that he really enjoys later on. It probably didn’t help that we had to wake him up from his too-long nap, so he was a little cranky.

Riding with him wasn’t that different than riding with the empty trailer. The main difference was that it was 20 pounds heavier, drastically affecting my power and speed. Last year, when I rode the Tour de Cookie seven months pregnant, I was so proud of being able to pass the guy towing a kid in a trailer. As I pulled our trailer, I realized I had less of a reason to be proud than I thought! I’m usually far ahead of Chris unless I make a concerted effort to go slowly. But with the trailer, he was able to keep up without a problem at all. Pulling the trailer will just make me earn my sweets even more.

In general, the ride went just well enough for me to consider it a success. I hope they it will just be the first of many rides we have as a family.

Since I originally wrote this post, we’ve biked together as a family many times. Read about how I reintroduced Sprout the next year to the bike as a toddler and how my identity as a bicyclist has changed since I became a mom. Be sure to follow us on Facebook!

SaveSave

SaveSave

Risks and Rewards

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

I want Sprout to be a free range kid. I want him to be able to go to the park by himself, explore the neighborhood, and when he’s old enough, take the Metro into the city. I want him to climb trees and rocks. But right now, I kind of want to outfit him with a helmet.

In the last few weeks, Sprout has racked up the milestones: crawling forward, getting two teeth in, and pulling up to his knees (and today to his feet!). While the others pose their own challenges, it’s the last one that makes me gasp. Except for the continuing allure of the sproingy doorstop, pulling up on everything is his new favorite activity. In his opinion, the couch, our wooden and metal coffee table, bookshelves, his crib bars, the mesh sides of the pack-and-play, my pant legs and the wall are all excellent surfaces to conquer. At first, he didn’t know how to get down, so he’d just tumble over.

He’s fortunately gotten better at balancing, but that’s just made him bolder. He regularly pushes against the wall, leaning backwards to bat at the curtain, not understanding that leaning on and holding on are not the same thing. Perhaps some yearning for adventure was embedded in his genes when I rock-climbed early in my pregnancy.

We’ve tried to vigilantly prevent accidents, but have been far from successful. We try to prevent him from hitting his head on our hardwood floor by spotting him, but he always manages to fall in the one direction we don’t predict. He cries, then shakes it off quickly after a good hug from mommy or daddy. Even though he’s recovered after each incident and the pediatrician says not to worry about it unless he passes out, I still feel terrible every time it happens. I’m always convinced that brain damage is imminent.

I’m torn between wanting to encourage his adventurousness and protecting him, a conflict I know will only grow more challenging as he gets older. If I’m worried about him bumping his head now, how much harder will it be when he’s on the playground equipment or high up in a tree? Some of my most cherished childhood memories were doing things that are banned or at least discouraged during recess today. Even now, my outdoor hobbies involve some level of physical danger, from rock climbing to urban biking. My life is better for having these activities in it and I think his will be as well.

As Sprout gets older, I think the best compromise between these positions is to teach him how to take calculated risks. Rather than doing everything or nothing, it’s best to take a measured approach to risk. Thinking about your own capabilities, evaluating the difficulty of the action you want to take, and working to reduce the risk as much as possible can provide a framework for making good decisions in general. To go back to rock-climbing, I personally do not boulder (climb short routes without ropes) more than a few feet off the ground unless I’m confident in my ability to climb back down. If I’m going to do a route at the edge of my current ability, I use ropes, harnesses and other safety equipment to reduce the risk of falling. While it’s obvious how these principles apply to physical risks (no one wants to be stuck in a tree like a cat), they also apply to big life decisions. From taking a difficult college class to moving to another country, every major decision has risks associated with it. There’s always a possibility of failure, but calculated risks help you figure out how to minimize it and recover if you fail. Some people in my generation are having difficulty dealing with adulthood because their parents never let them make these big decisions at all, much less taught them the critical thinking skills to deal with the risks.

Unfortunately, Sprout doesn’t understand the word “no” yet, much less have the capacity for any critical thought. But now and in the future, we’ll be there to spot him when we can and hug him when he falls.

Past Reflections on Pedaling while Pregnant

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

So in addition to my guest blogging stint, a reporter actually requested an interview a few weeks ago! She had seen my Simple Bike guest post on cycling while pregnant and said she was writing an article on the same subject for the Santa Barbara Independent’s bike column. (If I knew newspapers had bike columns, I might have kept pursuing journalism.) Of course, I said yes. The paper published the article, which has a couple of quotes from me, earlier in the week.

Check it out: Pedaling While Pregnant – Women are Even Biking to the Delivery Room.

If you’re interested in the subject, I wrote a number of posts on my previous blog about my experiences:

Wonderful, Awesome, Amazing – But Not Perfect

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 11 Comments

“He’s perfect” has been my mom’s refrain about my son since the day he was born. While I adore my child, I wince every time she says it. It makes me want to yell out, “He isn’t!” Because to me, perfect is confining and static, the opposite of my vibrant, growing baby.

Imperfect isn’t bad, just flawed. It’s challenging, offering us space to evolve. Imperfections connect us so that we can fill in the gaps of each other’s weaknesses.

I haven’t always held this attitude; it took decades for me to adopt. I’m a recovering perfectionist. My mom tells a story about me as a baby playing with a shape-sorter. After several minutes of fitfully cramming a shape in the wrong hole, I violently threw down the toy. While I became less physical about it, I maintained a philosophy that said, “If you’re going to do something, you should Do It Right.” Unfortunately, my version of “Doing It Right” meant I held impossibly high standards that even I couldn’t meet. A fear of not living up to my potential lurked in the background, a monster that could erase my hard work and expose me as a fraud.

Entering parenthood, I realized that this mindset just wasn’t going to work. Contrary to the parenting guides, there is no One Right Way. There’s Right for Now or Not Too Bad or The Best that I Can Do. Parenting is a slick, ever-changing thing, like one of those water worms that slips out of your hands. Every time you think you finally have a grasp, something changes, whether it’s your child, the situation, or the expectations.

Pursuing perfection locks you in, denies you the fluidity you need. One of my favorite parenting books, Babies in the Rain, compares raising children to a dance. In this duet, the child leads and you follow, always working together. But if you focus exclusively on following the rhythm, you turn it into a series of stilted steps. I know how unhelpful this perspective is in music; my jazz teacher was always telling me to experience the emotion rather than only paying attention to the beats. His response frustrated me at the time – how can I “let go” if I can’t even get the fundamentals right? But now, I can only think of how paralyzing this attitude would be in parenting.

Personally, the biggest challenge to my perfectionism has been sleep, that intimidating foe. At first, I approached the “sleep through the night” goal the same way I approach every major goal – by creating a individualized, step-by-step plan. I formulated a approach that started with not nursing my baby to sleep and over time, shortening the period of time I would rock him. Then I would move to holding him in my lap and eventually not needing to pick him up at all as he fell asleep peacefully in his crib. Hilarious.

His first cold presented the initial obstacle, and then the second and third ones came along. As I would do anything to help him (and me) get some rest, not nursing to sleep went out the window. Some nights he mistakenly falls asleep nursing and I don’t have it in me to wake him up. We’ve finally gotten to the point where he can fall asleep in my lap, but not until after several minutes of violently fighting it. Tactics that work one week stop working the next. And teething keeps finding a way to interrupt our progress.

In response, I’ve started shrugging my shoulders and carrying on. What else can I do? He doesn’t know or care that I have a plan. I want to follow the lead of my partner instead of dragging him around the dance floor.

Besides restricting your flexibility, pursuing perfect also blinds you to beauty. It catches you up in a whirlwind, never allowing you to see how much good you already have in your life. A recent article talks brilliantly about how “leaning in” ala Sheryl Sandberg, otherwise known as believing you can do everything if only you try hard enough, has made the author miserable. In the past, when I’ve tried to be perfect, I’ve just stressed myself out.

Fortunately, I’ve been more content post-baby than I’ve ever been. I love spending time with him, watching him just being himself. If I was preoccupied with being perfect, I’d be vacuuming the carpet instead of watching him peer under it with glee. (What can possibly be so interesting under there?) I’d be horrified with him biting the restaurant’s granite tabletop rather then giggling at his questionable taste. I would have been worried about his lack of progress when he was only crawling backwards instead of taking photos of him happily stuck under his crib. I wouldn’t let him grab or gnaw on his books’ pages and so not experience the joy of him learning to turn the pages on his own.

These days, besides the doctor’s appointments and other logistical requirements, I have just a single parenting goal. My husband, paragon of laid-back approaches, permanently added to our weekly To-Do list “Raise [Sprout] to be a good person.” Not perfect, just good.

I love my son too much to see him as perfect. And I love him too much to try to be perfect myself.

The Big 31

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Today is my 31st birthday. I don’t know how I expected to feel at 31 when I was younger, but I don’t think this is it. Perhaps the best word is hopeful.

I know most people make a big deal about their 30th birthday, but for me, the gap between 30 and 31 seemed far bigger than 29 and 30. Last year, I was on the cusp of life changes, five months pregnant and heading into my third decade. This year, I am thoroughly entrenched in mommyhood, my entire world influenced by the little being who entered my life last June.

Part of this difference is the speed of my life in the last five years compared to the five before. I had the same job and lived in the same city for the five years before this one (2008-2013). The only major change was that we bought a house, although that didn’t affect my daily life as much one might think. In comparison, in the previous five years before, I lived in five different neighborhoods on two different continents, held seven different jobs (including internships), graduated college, got married and earned my masters degree. Just thinking about that constant change is tiring! So having an upheaval in my life again after five years of calm made the last year seem much longer than the one before.

Fortunately, this has been one of the best years of my life. I’ve taken to motherhood even better than I anticipated. While I still sometimes panic at my incompetency, I feel much more comfortable in the role than I thought I would. More importantly, I absolutely love it. Once we got past the almost impossibly hard first two months, it’s kept getting better. Not every day is rainbows and even my baby can be pretty gross, but there are more times than not that I feel overwhelmingly lucky. I’m still tired almost All of the Time, but it’s usually the feeling of accomplishment, not desperation. Sprout is an amazing little person and I feel so blessed to be his mom. He even gave me a birthday present, although obviously not of his own accord. Last night, after four months of teething, he finally got one of his teeth in! (And he didn’t even bite me.) While some people regret the loss of “wild and crazy” times in their 20s or before children, I never really had that anyway. I’ve never drank much and hardly went out in D.C. because Chris worked weekend nights. In fact, now we’re doing more on weekends with Sprout than we did before he was born. We’ve already visited art museums, gamed with friends, and traveled home to our families. This summer, we look forward to hiking, camping, and biking. And although we see our friends less than we did, we still maintain those friendships. At my birthday party yesterday when I was apologizing for our lack of seats, my friend Leslie said, “Shannon, you don’t have a lack of seats. You have a surfeit of friends.” For someone who has always been socially awkward, it was phenomenal to realize that.

Besides the obvious, this year had a key difference from all of my previous best years – its potential. Most of the previous best years of my life, like my senior years of high school and college, came at the end of a stage of life. I had settled in, made friends and felt comfortable, but then needed to leave. Even a lot of the enjoyment during the year I got married was from living in the U.K. and attending grad school, which was only a year long. (I had a compressed program.)

In contrast, this year is the beginning of an era, just a preview of what is to come. I feel experienced, but far from old. And I’m genuinely excited to see what comes next.

To Schedule or Not to Schedule?

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

My mother-in-law recently commented that she was surprised at how “regimented” my husband’s and my parenting style is. I blinked and responded, “Really?” I tend to associate that word more with military school than our relatively laid-back life. While her use of that word was strong, I now understand after hearing her contrast her and our approach. Basically, we have a schedule for feeding him and sleeping (especially bedtime), while she did not. But it’s an strategy that works for us and I hope will continue to serve us well when Sprout grows older.

Currently, Sprout’s schedule is much more about providing discipline for us as parents than him as a child. If we didn’t maintain some sort of schedule, he’d hardly nap and turn into a very cranky baby. Similarly, he won’t tell us when it’s time for him to eat solid foods, so having an approximately scheduled time helps us remember. His schedule also keeps me honest as a mom. Having his bedtime routine start around 7 PM forces me to leave work promptly. The schedule creates time for play as much as it does the “essentials.”

Besides helping us as parents, I think having a structure will benefit him when he gets older. I’m a fan of the book Simplicity Parenting, which promotes creating a “rhythm” in your household. The author asserts that a schedule provides children with a home base they can return to when other areas of their lives are chaotic. For example, they know that whatever challenges they face at school, they can find comfort in having dinner with their parents.

But we’ll need to prevent ourselves from going too far in the other direction too. If Sprout follows my over-achiever tendencies, he’ll have a whole list of extracurricular activities. When there’s so much going on, it’s easy to overlook the most valuable time that occurs in-between organized pursuits. When I was in sixth grade, we had a lesson on study habits where the homework was to write out a schedule for your night. I wrote out my schedule to the minute, with activities even planned for the 10 minutes spent in the car. Did I, conscientious to the point of being a little obsessive, follow this schedule? No way. Because I didn’t schedule in any “non-scheduled” time to rest my mind or talk to my parents about my day. A schedule should be a coat that keeps you warm and enables you to explore the world, not a straightjacket that won’t let you leave the house.

Based on my philosophies and life experiences, I’m taking the same approach towards scheduling my parenting as I do my travel – being prepared for the “required” elements while making space for lots of free time and exploration. If you don’t prepare at all for your vacation, you spend half of your time trying to find a hostel or arguing about what to do next. You miss out on the best museum because you didn’t know about it or failed to make reservations. On the other hand, if you schedule every minute of the day, you miss out on unexpected pleasures not mentioned in guidebooks, like back-alleyways in Barcelona or ruined abbeys in Ireland.

Like everything else in parenting, it seems like scheduling is a matter of flexibility, finding a way to raft the river by working with the ebb and flow of our family, not against it.

Reading Where the Wild Things Are as a Parent

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 8 Comments

"Re-Reading Where the Wild Things Are as a Parent" Some books resonate with you as a child and then again in a totally different way as an adult. (Photo: Young man reading Where the Wild Things Are to a baby under a baby gym.)

When my husband was three, my mother-in-law was convinced he could read. After all, he flipped through the pages of Where the Wild Things Are as he spoke the words out loud with perfect timing. But it just happened that he loved it so much that he memorized the entire thing, word for word.

While I never memorized it myself, Where the Wild Things Are too holds a special place in my literary canon. As a teenager, I remembered it fondly, along with Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland.

But then a series of events illuminated how much the book still speaks to me, especially since I’ve become a parent.

Continue reading →

And you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?”

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Title from Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

Sometimes, I feel like a fraud. While I walk around pretending to be an adult, I am unqualified to hold the title. I have a good job, own a house, am married, and am a mother, but it’s all a facade. Lately, I’ve forgotten to do important errands at work, lost the thread of conversations, and even left my wallet at home during a week-long vacation. I feel scatterbrained, navigating my way through my messy house and life.

This feeling particularly scratches at the back of my mind when I think about my parenting skills. How on earth could they trust me with such a precious life? (I’m not sure who “they” are – perhaps a mysterious cabal of tsk-tsking old ladies that write parenting manuals.)

That voice is especially loud when I’ve made some dopey but innocent mistake. One such example happened at my sister-in-laws’ wedding last weekend, held at her fiancee’s family’s house. The plan was to have Sprout at the ceremony, then put him to sleep in an upstairs bedroom. With the baby monitor in-hand, we would be able to rejoin the party and celebrate. While I was fairly confident in this plan, I checked on Sprout about an hour after I put him to bed. Opening the door, I was startled to find the hostess of the party cradling my baby! She explained that her oldest son had heard him screaming and failed to calm him down. She then took Sprout from her son and rocked him back to sleep. Horrified that I didn’t hear him, I swallowed back tears, thanked her, and then almost grabbed him from her arms. Even though I knew that no long-term harm had been done, the drum-beat of failure pounded in my ears.

When an incident like that happens and Chris tells me, “You’re a great mother,” part of me can’t accept it. It feels like he and the rest of my family are trying to allay my insecurity, just saying it to make me feel better, regardless of the reality.

So it was reassuring to overhear my mom bragging about my parenting skills to my in-laws over Christmas dinner. I took Sprout to the living room to put him to sleep while everyone else stayed in the dining room. I don’t know how the subject came up, but I caught pieces of a conversation about our parenting. In it, I overheard my mom say, “She’s so selfless” referring to me more than once. Hearing it second-hand made it so much more real than if she said it to me directly. There’s a parenting technique of “gossiping” to your spouse or children’s toys where you tell them how great the kid is so that they overhear you but you aren’t directly addressing them. I doubt my mom was doing that on purpose – I’m not three years old – but it had the same effect. Hearing that my little slip-ups haven’t tarnished my overall parenting was a relief.

Now, when I screw up – which is of course, inevitable – I’m going to try to hear my mom’s proud tone instead my judgmental one. I would never say the things I think to myself to someone else, so why do I judge myself that way? Instead, I need to approach my failings with the same grace and patience I try to extend to others.

I also need to remember that parenting – and life in general – is a learning experience, which inherently involves failing. Last week, I said to Chris, “I don’t feel at all like an adult. I certainly didn’t graduate adult school.” To which he responded, “Well, yeah. Do you know what happens when you graduate adult school?” After a brief pause, I replied, “You die?” Considering the alternative, I don’t want to graduate quite yet – I still have plenty of learning to do.

Home for the Holidays

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

We had a wonderful first Christmas with Sprout at both of our parents’ houses, full of warmth, good food, family togetherness, and presents. His favorite part appeared to be ripping apart the wrapping paper, although he preferred to eat it than notice what was inside the boxes. He also enjoyed both sets of his grandparents fawning over him, staring at the glittering Christmas trees, and grabbing at my mother-in-law’s animatronic, waddling Charlie Brown toy. Even if he didn’t get enough presents to spoil multiple children, he’d still be so blessed by the number of people who love him. Of course, that means Chris and I are as well, for which we are very thankful.

We also had the good fortune of being able to attend the wedding of my sister-in-law and her new husband. There’s nothing more wonderful than being able to welcome someone you love into the family!

Unfortunately, I think this next week might be a bit of a let-down for Sprout, as there will no longer be relatives endlessly eager to entertain him or sparkly lights. New Years is going to be a very low-key affair for us – we’ve never had anyone look after him who isn’t directly related to us and it’s certainly too late to find a babysitter. But I’m not going to complain about a nice, chill day off.

How were your holidays, whether you celebrated Christmas or not? What do you look forward to for the New Year?

Tis the Season for Family Traditions

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

Every family that celebrates Christmas has its own traditions. So far, Chris and I haven’t had much of a chance to create our own – he’s had to work during Christmas Day the last several years. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to be the year to set our own either.

One of the most beloved traditions of Chris’s family – or at least his dad – is “executing the tree” at a tree farm that shares his name. My father-in-law adores tromping out to the middle of nowhere (otherwise known as “west of Saratoga Springs, New York”), picking out, and cutting down his very own Christmas tree. Invariably, it is always brutally cold. And yet, they still have the annual pilgrimage. Of course, this year, Granddad wanted to bring his beloved grandson along over Thanksgiving break. What’s a family tradition if it doesn’t include the newest member of the family? Because I wanted to spend as much time as possible with both sides of the family, I also invited my parents along.

So we all piled on layer over layer of clothing and drove out to the boonies. We dressed Sprout in his brand-new snowsuit, which makes him look like a cross between the Michelin Man and the little brother in A Christmas Story. He gazed at us in puzzlement, wondering what this bizarre swaddle was. Between the suit, the fact that we stuffed him in the baby carrier (not his favorite), and the fact that it was the coldest weather he’s ever experienced, he was utterly befuddled. He wasn’t the only one – much of the time, my mom was wondering why she was there too. She enjoys spending time with my in-laws, but there’s a reason my parents stopped cutting down their own tree a decade ago. Fortunately, we caught the tractor-drawn wagon on the way back to the parking lot after cutting down the tree. After inching along to avoid falling on ice with my baby strapped to me, my back was quite relieved.

The best thing about the cold is getting out of it. Fortunately, the tree farm has a little lodge, where we drunk hot chocolate, ate grilled cheese, and listened to a guitarist sing James Taylor. It almost made stomping back and forth across the frozen earth worth it. Seeing the farm’s adorable snow-white reindeer was also a little magical.

If “executing the tree” is all about North Country-style stubbornness against the weather, my family’s big tradition was all about child-focused coziness. It was actually a whole bunch of traditions combined into one big one – the advent calendar. My mom – who is absurdly crafty – sewed me a frilly, red-and-green fabric advent calendar when I was a little girl. Starting on December 1, I would run downstairs every morning and pull a little piece of paper out of that day’s pocket. Each card had a little clue on it, teasing a different surprise each day, either an activity like seeing the Christmas lights in the park or a little present like a Christmas pencil. Pulling out that card was the highlight of my December days. On Christmas morning, I shuttled back and forth between the calendar and the kitchen, waiting for my dad to finish making coffee so I could pull out the final card and open my presents. When Chris and I started talking about Christmas traditions a few years ago, I was very insistent on doing an advent calendar for our child.

Now, I’m rethinking my principled stand. I have no idea how on earth my mom managed to come up with 25 different clues and surprises. Thinking about it, I have trouble coming up for seven things for one week! I may resort to a modified version of the calendar, where we have clues with activities for the weekends and something simpler for the weekdays. At least I’m reassured knowing that even my mom improvised a little. Since then, she’s confessed that she regularly switched the cards around when she didn’t have something ready for the next day.

Considering all of the effort our families put in for Christmas, I feel rather ashamed of our accomplishments this year – not many at all. I’ve finished most of my shopping and we have a wreath on our front door, which we bought from one of my favorite charities, H.O.M.E. But inside? Nothing. When we realized that we would only be home for two weekends in all of December, we even decide to not get a tree. Dragging Sprout out in the cold, pulling out all of the ornaments, and putting them all away just seemed like way too much time spent for not enough enjoyment. Even when I had a snow day off from work, we spent it playing with Sprout and building a snowman.

Fortunately, Sprout doesn’t care about our lack of decorations except perhaps that he won’t have all of these lovely, delicate things to stick in his mouth. We’ll definitely need to raise our standards in the future, but for now, the most important thing is not to stress out about more than we need to. With a new baby, we have plenty of other things to worry about.