My little sidekick...

Since I was working and away from home for the better part of the day, I hated to be away from my son any other time. My husband started to get frustrated because he would be home all day with the baby, I would come home and he would want to drop him off at my mother's so we could go eat or go to the movies. Meanwhile my heart would break because I knew I had to give in sometimes and I hated not being able to spend time with him. But I had to realize that he had been cooped up in the house all day and I had to pay attention to our relationship.

I still wasn't able to let him stay overnight at my mother's house though. For one thing he wasn't sleeping through the night and I didn't want to subject my parents to the night waking. For another thing I wasn't ready. My husband wanted time alone but I told him that when the baby went to bed, that was our time alone. It was very hard to balance.

We do take our little one with us pretty much everywhere we go. That is fine with me. My husband is a coach for a local school team. I took the baby with me to their games. He was always so good. Never cried. Seemed to pay attention to what was going on. And he was even able to fall asleep amidst all of the noise. I took him to the first game and was very concerned about the noise. There were loud whistles and buzzers, not to mention the crowd cheering. I asked his pediatrician about it because I was worried that I damaged his little ear drums. She told me that a baby's ears are no more suseptible to damage than an adult's ear. So treat them the same way I would treat my own ears. If I would wear ear plugs, the baby should wear ear plugs. She didn't think a basketball game was going to do any harm but she wouldn't recommend taking him to a concert. We became regulars at his games and my son was always a hit.

We took him to restaurants, the grocery store, on picnics in the park, to friends and relatives houses. He was an expert at getting into and out of the car seat. He was still very small but he was getting heavier. I figured it was good exercise for me to lug him around all the time. And I figured it wasn't a bad thing to get him used to being in public. Never too young to teach good behavior when out and about. I always dread the day when he has a meltdown in public but it hasn't happened yet, knock on wood!