expectations and realities
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Category
Fashion & Style
I have to tell you a little story about that jar of Vaseline.
It arrived a few weeks before Bear was born, from their lovely PR team. I looked at it and thought, cool, a bedazzled Vaseline jar -- just what his nursery needs! (Proof on Instagram here!)
Then I looked online, just out of curiosity. How much might a bedazzled jar of Vaseline cost?
The answer?
Five hundred dollars. (Seriously.)
Basically, Bear had just been given Kim Kardashian's Vaseline jar. It's a treasure. That jar of Vaseline is literally more expensive than any single item in his nursery. Forget the designer bedding, the crib, the rug, the Tiffany piggy bank. The most valuable item our son owns is now a jar of Vaseline.
No problem, right? How hard can it be to take care of a jar of Vaseline?
Ha ha. That was my pre-newborn self talking.
Because... you want to know what happened to that five hundred dollar jar of Vaseline in the first week that he was home from the hospital?
This:
Yup, because, see, Bear hates having his diaper changed. He hates it so much that, periodically, I pause mid-diaper change to remind him, "I am not actually murdering you, dude. Please calm down."
He hates it so much that he basically loses control of his limbs, sending everything near him crashing to the ground.
Including, sadly, his most valuable possession.
So, that top photo? That was my expectation of what a newborn would be like: all sweet little toes and chubby legs.
The next one? That's the newborn that I wasn't quite expecting, the one that cries over nothing and pukes directly into my hair seven times a day. (The one that peed on me twice yesterday, sigh.)
The last five weeks have been a crazy, wild ride, and there are literally thousands of things that I wasn't expecting that have totally blown me away. No matter how prepared I was (and I was!), the reality of having a real, live baby in our house is completely different from my expectation of it. Sometimes it's wonderful and sometimes, many times, it's truly a challenge.
But before he arrived, I had no idea the depth of the love that I would feel for him, how strongly I felt it at first and how much stronger it grows every day. And I would take the reality of our crying, flailing baby (even puking in my hair) over all the perfect imaginary babies out there.
And who knows? Maybe in a few weeks, that jar of Vaseline will go on sale and we can replace it.