ATTENTION MOTHERS OF CRYING BABIES!

I don’t think there is any way to condition yourself to hear your baby cry. It’s not something you can prepare yourself for either, which is why there aren’t any “baby crying” self help CD’s on the market for new Moms. Sure, you’ve heard babies cry – on airplanes, in restaurants - but until it’s YOUR baby, it’s just white noise – something in the background so familiar to you, you don’t even hear it. Well, when it’s your baby, believe me, YOU HEAR IT. It is the most disturbing, distracting sound you’ve ever heard!!!!!! And unless you have one of those “perfect” babies – what are THOSE anyway??!! – your baby WILL cry. They will cry at first because they have no other way to express themselves. This is how they get their point across, and boy do they!

When my baby was first born, he would scream and cry bloody murder in the car. I KNOW, most babies fall asleep in the car. In fact, a lot of Moms go for car rides in order to put their babies to sleep. Well, not my baby. And the worst part about the car rides (from hell) is that we had to do so many of them. When Hudson was born, we were living with our in laws (that’s a whole different blog entry!) Our house was being remodeled and it wasn’t a suitable place to bring an infant home to. Very fortunately for us, we had somewhere else to go. But unfortunately for us, that somewhere else was far away. Our in laws lived about one hour from our house, without traffic. That’s an oxymoron since we live in LA – there is always traffic. So depending on what time of day we would commute between the two houses, the drive could take up to 1.5 to 2 hours. With a screaming infant in the backseat, you can only imagine the types of guns I fantasized about putting to my head on a bad day (that’s a joke by the way!)

Part of the reason we had to drive back and forth between the two houses so much was because I had to manage the remodel project and make sure everything was on track. The other reason why is because I had to get out of the house!