Parenting stuff – delete from feedreader if not interested. You’ve been warned. 
I don’t want to turn this into a ‘mom blog’ (whatever that means) but I will write about parenting stuff and about the kid now and then. I’ll try to put a warning like the one on this post for those who are skimming in a feedreader just so that if you’re not interested in the parenting stuff you can skip it.
So, just a couple of observations I’d been meaning to jot down. Backdrop: our kid is 4.5 months old now.
I have always tried to avoid telling small children, especially girls, “Oh, you’re so cute” or to otherwise emphasize their looks. My thinking is that it places an over-emphasis on appearance and is not something the child has any control over anyway. The challenge, of course, is that for very young children, they don’t do much, and so there’s not a whole lot else to comment on! We put TheLittleGuy in his sunglasses and a boyish outfit and take him out and we get all kinds of comments about how cute he is. Which is nice – anyone who says anything nice about my kid is immediately on my good side. But, I still try to avoid commenting on how babies look and instead try to focus on what they’re doing. Since I now have a better sense of what are appropriate developmental milestones, I can say things like “Look at how she holds up her head” or whatever. (Our guy was comparatively slow with that – he has a huge, heavy head.) Along similar lines, a few years back there were some studies that suggested that kids/people who were told they were smart all the time were more likely to give up on something if it didn’t immediately come easy to them. Accordingly, even though we know TheLittleGuy is a genius (and gorgeous to boot), we’re not going to tell him that. Instead, we say things like “Good job practicing [x]!” or whatever.
I still feel like an honorary member of the child-free tribe even though we have TheLittleGuy. That’s for a longer post, sometime. But I thought I would share some information to help dispel one of those mysteries about parents. There’s a lot of cutesy jokes about how parents of babies/small children are obsessed with poo. And in a way, it’s true. I can have lengthy discussions with TheGuy about TLG’s input and output. But that’s just it – it’s not that the parents have a brain transplant and all of a sudden find baby poo intrinsically fascinating. It’s that for many weeks and even months BabyOutput is one of only a very few pieces of actual data you get about how your kid is doing. And it does provide more information than you might think. So that’s my PSA for non-parents. It’s not about the poo itself, it’s about the information it conveys.
On another note, I know some parents get very offended when non-parents compare the non-parents’ pets to the parents’ children. We, as a rule, do not. I suppose if it were done to be insulting, we might, but not so far. My cats are still smarter and more capable than TLG right now. That will change, of course, but it hasn’t yet. My attitude is: Small mammals are small mammals.
And one more observation than I’ll stop for the night. When I was late in the pregnancy and kept muttering to anyone who asked how I was doing: “I want this kid out” people would say “Oh, but once he’s out and making noise you’ll want him back in!” That is definitely not true for me. I wasn’t sleeping well while pregnant so it’s not like nighttime infant care is a big change. And there is no way I would go back to being pregnant. It suuuuucked. It is much better having him out and about. By far.
With that, here is the gorgeous genius kid picture of the day (well, of a few days ago) with the Halloween bear that his Maine grandparents sent to him:
