7/1/15 The Evolution of Parenting

7/1/15
A few weeks ago a neighbor gave our daughter a bag of baby doll toys that her children have outgrown. Her kids are 17 now so the toys were pretty old, but in good shape.  In fact I recognize them from my own childhood. There's the baby sippy cup, the pretend wipe container (the one that looks like a Clorox wipe container), the pacifiers, and of course the medicine syringe because every baby should be comfortable around those. She doesn't know what any of them are, but she does recognize the bottles, so that's what she plays with the most.  And for some odd reason that's what makes me cringe. Not the white bottle. That obviously has milk in it. I cringe when she goes for the orange one. The one with OJ. The tooth-rotting fructose bottle.

We play pretend all the time. We pretend to fly in airplanes, row in boats, dance on "stage", and build castles with blocks (and then immediately destroy them). But I just can't suspend my disbelief when she goes to give her stuffed baby a plastic bottle of orange juice. "Oh honey, I think baby wants milk. You don't want her teeth to rot out of head before they even come in now, do you?" As if Xavier Roberts will come and take the baby away and back to the cabbage patch.

It's silly, I know.  It makes me think of how much parenting has evolved. You can no longer hold your baby on your lap while driving, use blankets in the crib, lay your baby on its back because it will get a  flat head, no wait... side is safer, no back is best! It's also no longer acceptable to smoke while pregnant, even though the old expecting books told our parents that smoking will give you a smaller baby (I mean, who wants to squeeze out a 12 pounder, right?). Good god, how did any of us survive?

I wonder what will change when my little girl is grown up and has a baby of her own. What kinds of irresponsible things that I've done as a mom will she point out and criticize and, hopefully, laugh at? Only time will tell. Holy shit, this is stressing me out. I think I'll go back to stacking blocks with her and knocking them over. So simple, yet so satisfying. And as far as I know, there aren't too many rules to that game that I can fuck up. Just one: what goes up, MUST COME DOWN!