But the Workout was Nice

Today Nora and Milo spent almost an hour in the childcare room at the Y and when I was walking down the hall to get to the room to pick them up, I could hear Nora's cry before I even got to the room. She was crying the high-pitched hysterical cry that she almost never cries, the one that I hear when I'm getting out of the shower late at night and Jake has been holding her for the last 5 minutes and she's been inconsolable and saying "mama, mama". So...yeah.

Apparently she'd been fine until about the last 10 minutes but had been pretty unhappy for that last 10 minutes. Milo was fine. So now I have some mixed feelings about leaving them. 

The people working in the childcare room are pretty good. They immediately knew Milo & Nora's names today and they hold the babies/toddlers when they start to get fussy or upset. They play with them. So it's not like Nora was sitting in a corner crying. She was being held and crying, but still, is that unacceptable? Or do I need to just toughen up and not raise a couple of overly-coddled kids? Parenting is so hard. I have never done anything in my life that has been so filled with uncertainty and constant second guessing. It's like, when I started doing this a year ago I was clueless, and now I'm a whole year into it and I'm still clueless!

There's been a discussion going on over at Dooce about whether parenting is harder or marriage is harder. It blows my mind that this would even merit a discussion. How could anybody find anything harder than parenting? Parenting is a hundred, a thousand times harder than marriage. Jake is an adult who can take care of himself. When he takes a dump, he cleans it up himself. He can feed himself and dress himself. He's also a nice, reasonable person who doesn't scream for no apparent reason at the dinner table just to hear the sound of his own voice. Jake doesn't wake me up in the middle of the night. I'm not responsible for his safety or his cognitive and emotional development. He pretty much just runs on his own. Being married without kids involved things like taking naps whenever I felt like it. Parenthood took all of that away in one fell swoop. 

Being with the kids is fun, funny, exhausting, delightful, and frustrating. Behind it all is this constant low-grade worrying that never ends. I think that some people are just sort of naturals at being parents, and they take to it like fish to water, and I thought that I would be one of those people and it turns out I'm totally not. It's all alien to me and I feel like I'm walking around in a pitch-black house feeling the furniture with my hands and trying to figure out the lay of the room without ever knowing if I'm going to stumble over a footstool. Marriage is nothing like that. It's stress relieving rather than stress producing. I feel like I know how to be a wife to Jake, but I don't know how to be a parent to Nora & Milo so I'm totally faking it all the time.

Above are some photos I took today of Nora exploring technology. I have so many more pictures of Nora than Milo because he naps so much longer than she does. I probably spend an additional hour to two hours with Nora every single day compared to Milo because he sleeps so much more than she does.