Toddlers

This section will be an exploration into the world of a toddler.  Even though I have been through this a number of times, it always marvels me.
I will let you in on one of my deepest regrets.  I did things very differently with my first four children than my last one.  Partly because my life was so different, but also because I have learned with age.  Boy, that makes me sound old!  What I mean is that so often we hear people say that we take a test to get a license to drive a car, but not to have a baby.  It takes time and experience to be a good parent.
With the older children I was so busy taking care of all of them, the house, the laundry, and trying to find ways to keep my sanity.  Now that I want to look back and share their toddler-hood, I can't remember a lot!  In fact the biggest memories are of people marveling over how organized the kids rooms were.  Oh, they were, but at what cost?
The thing I would do different; I would have spent more time watching them.  Experiencing what they do, seeing things through their eyes, and building memories.  With my 5th child I am doing just that.  I was taking college classes, Child Psychology and Abnormal Psychology, the semester right after her birth.  This in itself was a wonderful thing, as I used her as a point of reference related to what I was learning.  But more importantly, I was watching her.
The hardest thing for me to accept, was when I tried to remember when my 3rd child rolled over for the first time and I had to look it up.  It opened the door to all the memories I couldn't remember.
So, if you walk away from reading this with nothing else, stop, look, and remember.  The old saying is so true, "stop and smell the roses".  Now I do that with all the children.  The memories of their toddler years are there, but it does take some memory jogging to find them.  Thank goodness I kept baby books on them.  But that does make me stop a minute.  The baby book on my 5th child is not well kept up like the others were.  I wonder if that means anything???

If you find this page through a search engine, click here for Toddler Home