Control

My wonderful mama has flown in from Virginia to stay for a weeks with us so she can help out with Isaiah. I never appreciated another set of hands around the house so much in my life. You'd think that between Nick and I, we'd have everything under control.

Shatter those expectations right now. There's no such thing as control when you're learning how to be a parent for the first time. Quite the opposite, you'll find that nearly everything is actually OUT OF CONTROL.

For example - let's take the bathroom.

Once the pride and joy of our house when we got a few things redone, but since Isaiah has come along, it has evolved into a banished and neglected corner on the second floor. It is in such dire need of a cleaning that even NICK said something about how we need to get control of that thing. By "thing," we're talking about the overdue scrubbing of the tub. Our BRAND NEW tub that we've neglected for months now.

Control is a funny illusion of life. We THINK we know what's around the corner because we anticipate problems, we logically hypothesize the risks and factors of every decision and, understandably, wait for the expected outcome.

Remember, though, that an illusion is something that appears to be real. It presents itself as something actual, something tangible, but it is, in fact, not.

It's like how I believe I have Isaiah's schedule in control and then, out of nowhere, he decides he's bored out of his mind and wiggles like crazy for an hour. He's fed, dry, and not tired. He's just wiggling. Wiggle, wiggle.

He wiggles out of his bouncer, he wiggles off the blanket on the floor, he wiggles out of my arms, he wiggles to the corner of the couch. And I think, "I can't control this boy."

Ah HA! Parenting lesson #827462 - NO CHILD IS UNDER OUR CONTROL, PARTICULARLY CHUBBY NEWBORNS.

And thus Nick and I feel out of control at times. We do our best to stay in routine, not make any plans and be nerdy 30-somethings with no lives outside our jobs and domestic responsibilities that include trips to Home Depot. We have learned that control is, quite frankly, laughable.

I thought I had control of nursing Isaiah and yet, still, every stinking week, something comes up. This week, for example, I developed a low grade fever on Sunday. My leg muscles were achy and my whole body was sore. I couldn't believe I was sick. Considering how neurotic I've been about washing and/or sanitizing my hands every time I touch an unsterilized door knob, I didn't think I'd catch any bug.

And as it turns out, I was dehydrated. I kept drinking waterbottles full of H20 and didn't have to pee at all. Miraculously (insert sarcasm there), the next morning my fever broke. I kept drinking and drinking and by the early afternoon, I felt as fine as a shiny new button.

How could I forget to increase my water intake? Nursing, working out, the weather is *just* beginning to warm up...hello? Water? More of it?

Before I admonished myself too harshly, Nick shared a story with me that made me feel oodles better...

The other night Nick woke up in the middle of the night because he heard Isaiah on the monitor. Nick thought Isaiah was just fussing around but he still got up to listen to the monitor more closely. He was alarmed, though, when he realized that Isaiah's breathing was making an irregular high pitched squeak, like he was having trouble breathing. As he started to move quickly toward the door, concerned that maybe Isaiah was sick or in a bad sleeping position, he noticed that the high pitched noise was moving with him, despite he was growing further and further away from the monitor.

"It was my own breathing," Nick told me. "It was my own freaking nose that was making those noises. I couldn't even distinguish my own self from a baby monitor."

Mhm. That's bad, babe, I thought.

So, you have a dehydrated and dizzy mom and a dad who can't hear his own nostrils.

Perfect.