Real parenting

Many times in the past 9 1/2 months since parenting Bumpus, I have felt like this is just a warm up - that this is the easy part and the real parenting comes later. After all, he's just a little baby. My job right now is to keep him fed, clean (relatively), rested, and most importantly, safe. And I've done that. When we celebrate his first birthday in March (however we do it - and that's a whole other post-!) it will be all about having kept him alive that first year.

But soon comes the hard stuff. The discipline. The keeping him entertained. The teaching. The lack of portability. The need of schedules. The need of keeping adult things - and language - away from him. It's going to be hard. And it's going to be the beginning of the real sacrifices - as I've noted recently about not being able to travel with my band anymore.

A friend and I recently talked about suddenly discovering you've let your child watch inappropriate movies and TV - that one minute you're watching your shows and movies with a baby in the background; next thing you know that baby is a grown kid quoting said movies and TV and people around you say, shocked, "you let X watch that...?", they not realizing that you didn't intentionally take your kid to see that R rated movie, it was just on TV when they were too little to understand, and then you kept watching it even when the kid could understand. It just happens. I could see this happening to me, very easily.

Last night I had a moment of thinking I could make this travel for work thing work - in particular the New Year's thing to Sweden. I started googling about travel car seats and how to entertain toddlers on airplanes. And found many helpful articles...which reminded me what utter hell this is going to be. One thing that came up again and again - you simply cannot have a toddler on your lap, period. And especially not a boy. Girls may sit contentedly and play for a long time - boys absolutely will not. Boys will climb the walls. And I think I know enough about Bumpus at nine months old to know that he will be one of those who climbs the walls. So, back to Plan A. No traveling with the band. Sigh.

We have a gig tonight and I must tell my bandleader and it's not going to be pretty. I wish I could put it off but I've got a bunch of emails from promoters wanting to lock us in to this year's events, and they all are insisting on buying our flights RIGHT NOW, so unfortunately these decisions have to be made now for gigs even a year away. He's not going to take it well. Like me a year ago, he'll not understand why I can't just bring a toddler on my lap and get someone at the event to watch him for me while I sing, what's the big deal? Why can't I just leave my one-year-old with relatives for a weekend? All of those things seemed entirely possible before I had B. Now I understand how wrong I was - that my relatives are not set up to care for a small child for days on end, that travel with a toddler needs a separate seat on the plane, that you can't just hope you'll find a sitter once you get there, that car seats have to be installed and uninstalled, that food has to be cooked and kept cold or warm (you can't just feed your toddler power bars), that sleep patterns get impossibly ruined by jet lag, etc. He won't get it and he'll be mad at me, and resent my son even more than he already does. I'll never forget one night when during a gig he found out I had not hired our band for another event I was doing with partners (the partners wanted someone else and I was more than happy to not have to sing at my own event for once) and he refused to even look at me the whole rest of the gig. Yeah. This is the maturity level I'm dealing with here. So. I don't expect this to be pleasant tonight.

In other news, as I had feared the work on the attic is probably going to stretch into another week. I am already fed up and it's only been one full week and a few days around the holidays - now I'm looking at potentially two more weeks-! I know this is just the way things go and I shouldn't have expected anything else, but it did knock me for a loop a bit. That and a loan officer friend of mine private messaged me on Facebook yesterday after seeing pictures of my attic to ask me if I was doing this with permits, because without permits could make it a major problem to refinance or sell. And I know he's right; that's something I just pushed to the back of my mind, figuring I probably will never sell so who cares? But I hadn't thought about refinancing. I think I may have just screwed myself.

In good news, in a panic about not getting to travel EVER AGAIN I hit up a couple of girlfriends about trying to go to Hawaii sometime this year. I have enough mileage points for two tickets and a free stay at a nice resort, so it would be cheap. It's just a question of people working out their vacation schedules for work. I think we'll be able to do it, possibly over Memorial Day. It could be a blast - and with aunties to play with the baby I may even be able to enjoy the trip! So despite all the other not so great things going on around here, at least I have that to look forward to (and the attic will be done eventually, and that'll be great).