One to Two

Going from one to two kids was way easier than going from none to one. I don’t remember exactly how I was picturing maternity leave while I was pregnant with Zuzu, but I’m sure I thought I would do things, like cook and bake and exercise and maybe even get to know the neighbors or volunteer somewhere. Then the baby came, and my only personal goal was to take a shower every day. That’s it—just make sure I shower. If I did a load of laundry, I was triumphant. If I did a load of laundry and took Zuzu out for a walk, I bragged about it to Anders. If I did anything at all before noon, I felt like superwoman.
    That was when Anders started cooking. My lunches were consisting of peanut M’n’Ms and Cheez-Its, because it seemed like every time I pulled out turkey for a sandwich or starting slicing an apple, Zuzu was crying. And I was hungry. So I reached for whatever would get calories into my body the fastest. And dinner, if left to me, was going to be more of the same. So Anders quietly began reading food blogs and experimenting in the kitchen, and then suddenly he was a gourmet, and now he’s serving things like turkey milanese and crab legs and paella and I am not complaining.
    The house got gradually messier. Specifically, the two catch-all places in the house, our bedroom and the workshop in the basement, became close-the-door-and-pretend-it-doesn’t-exist zones. We were stacking up mess faster than I was putting it away. I didn’t understand when I was supposed to be doing things like cleaning.
    Slowly we figured out how to do life with a kid. It was different, messier (the basement has never recovered), but it was a natural, us-plus-baby rhythm.
    Then Bear came along, and life pretty much continued like normal. There was the brief physical recovery after his birth, and my family was here for that, first my sister, then my parents, cooking dinner, washing all the dishes, doing all the laundry, putting away the Christmas decorations. When they left, I resumed doing three loads of laundry in a day without needing to shout this fact from the rooftops.
    It helps that Bear is such a good baby. Know what also helps? A bouncy seat. I didn’t have a bouncy seat with Zuzu. I plop Bear in there all the time and he stares at the frog that dangles down from the handle, and I can pump it up and down with my foot while doing dishes or whatever.
    And to be honest, I’m also much more lackadaisical about letting Baby #2 cry while I finish slicing that apple than I was with Baby #1.
    But mostly I think it’s because the mental adjustment has already been made. My daily plans are kid-oriented now anyway. They’ve been kid-oriented for two years. And I love it. I go to bed at night thinking about play dough recipes. I have no idea what I thought about before kids, but play dough is better. Life with kids is great.
    I don’t know if it would work this way if I kept having kids, but I do know that Bear entered a family with a mom and dad, whereas Zuzu entered a family with just a girl and guy—an untrained, untried girl and guy whom she transformed into parents. I don’t mean we aren’t still naive and learning as we go, I just mean that pre-parenthood and parenthood are different worlds, and I live in the messier, wonderful world of parenthood now.