When is it the right time?
By: Sanjeev Gadgil
Tags: Parenting, Baby

A baby is a whole journey. Now that I am in here, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t a dad. Umm well that’s a lie, I do fondly recall the time :). Time was never a worry, and even if it was, it could always be worked around since all of it (or at least 90% of it) was my own time.

I think the biggest part of having a baby, is that now you are no longer working according to your schedule. And for someone like me (and I can vouch that I am like most of us), this means a lot of adjusting.

For everything else, like “oh you will have to clean the poop”, or “oh you will need to wake up at night”, or “oh you will need to rock them to sleep”, all those don’t matter. Those don’t take a toll on you the way the time takes toll on you. All your “I will stay up at night and complete this”, “will wake up early and complete this”, “yea I can have dinner later as well” will be down the drains in a jiffy. No late nights (unless the baby keeps you up), no lavish four course meals cause you just won’t have that luxury.

At times (I really should stop lying) it does get very frustrating. Especially after the novelty has worn off and it starts to take a toll on your day to day. You recall times when you would sit and do nothing, watch your favorite tv shows through the night completing a season sometimes, come back home, have a bite and just fall on the bed and sleep. You find yourself reminiscing the time when you could play music as loud as you wanted, drop a utensil without fear of waking someone up, not having to walk around tiptoeing in your own house lest you wake the small giant up. But I can vouch for you, that keep working on it, and you will get used to it.

I keep myself amused by trying out new things with the baby everyday, trying to make her understand of my presence by doing little silly things, trying to humor her (which is easy but not too easy as well, its tough to find new things daily). Look up things which you can try with your baby at different ages in their life, and try those. Its absolutely worth it to understand and maybe learn how we grew up and so on.

Its bitter sweet. It is not all fun and games. Sometimes you are just very moody and somehow my daughter just picks on that vibe and becomes extra irritable that day. It gets completely too much to handle. But I think this way she has taught me to calm down, and even at this young age, she has been the most successful one to try my patience. I just am realizing the effect it has had on the rest of my life. I am surely so much more patient in my everyday life, I have become insanely efficient with my time, and I try to do everything that I missed out on when I am baby sitting in the time that I get when I am not tending to her. And I have started planning way in advance which was totally not a virtue I had, since I always wanted to live unplanned (except for the baby ;))

I am sure you will learn all these things when in the journey, but I will surely say this. It is frustrating, and you will ask yourself all the questions such as “was this the right decision”, “maybe we hurried into it” and so on. But believe me, this is it, accept it and steam through. There will be a bad day/night sometimes (or more, specially between 3–6months), but the next day will always be better. :) You have made the right decision, it is just about going through with the best intentions. If you are thinking of putting it off, unless you have a really good reason, don’t. If you want a kid, and aren’t sure when the right time is, I can promise that it is NOW. The other things will sort themselves out, but you will need all the energy, all the flexibility and all the hormones that you have within you right now to get through this.