OUR LIFE: KP & Robbie: BABIES

BABIES...We watched this documentary with the Alkema's a few weeks ago. I've been thinking about it ever since. Rob and I are surrounded by babies. In our ward 24 women were pregnant together last semester. You can just imagine what sacrament meeting is like--there are babies everywhere. I have to comment on how cute they are all the time just so I can see Rob's eyebrow raise on his nervous face.
This last Sunday we took Tavin to church just so we could fit in. I felt so proud to hold "our baby." He was so cute and so well behaved. My favorite part was when he laid down beneath our bench singing "wobbie, wobbie, uncle wobbie." It was pretty quiet but it made us laugh.
I had the benefit of holding a cute little toddler without doing the dirty work. Pushing out a child has always been one of my biggest fears. Here I have friends who can tell me all about it and those fears have been validated. Recently Rob and I were talking to our friends who had been pregnant in Central America. She had her baby there! They reinacted the whole scene for us, yelling in Spanish. It was a
Babies had me thinking about parenting styles and cultural standards. I noticed when I was in Russia some strong differences as well. Some things that we do are done only because that is what we have been taught to do either by our parents or by other sources of our culture.
My mind always thinks back to a lecture that Dr. Miller, one of my psychology professors gave. He talks about our motives or things that we do "for the baby." He says first we have to get the room ready for the baby. That means that we need to paint a pastel color, get them all of these toys, and set up a mobile over the crib. He says that first of all, babies can't see color until about after six months and even after that, probably doesn't even care what color the walls are. Most of the toys that babies like are not ones that you get from the store but random stuff in your house. And lastly, the mobile things are arranged so that the toys are dangling right side up so that parents can see them. The child only sees the bottom of the toy spinning around. His lectures always seem to make me laugh. He does draw attention to a certain point. Do we really do most of this stuff for the kids or are we validating that we are good parents by buying all this unnecessary stuff? Babies seems to argue this point as well, as it shows babies surviving in the wild with bones and sticks for toys and being perfectly happy.
For school, I have been assigned to read a book on behavioral skills. The book is called The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child. I am really enjoying what Kazdin has to say. It's all about working on the behavior of not only the child but also the parent. One of the points he makes is that we as parents are teaching our children to be defiant because we are not good examples, let our kids get what they want after poor behavior, and we don't positively reinforce good behavior enough with kind words, hugs and tend to give snide remarks instead. Remarks such as "wow, that was great behavior why cant you do that all the time." I've been learning about myself without kids. How I demand or reinforce poor behavior with people I interact with because I don't have any children of my own.
Eventually when we do have kids, I realize that the tables will have turned. I see family members and friends of ours parenting and they are doing their absolute best. Being a parent is a lot of responsibility. Being a wife is a lot more than I imagined. I'm still figuring out wife mode. To all you mothers out there, I salute you. Life is not a cake walk for you, there is a lot that you feel you probably didn't sign up for but just like wifehood (which is much easier than motherhood, I am sure) at the end of the day, it's all worth it because really your family is a beautiful thing. The family is everything to a woman.