Moving with a Baby: Top Five

Five Reasons Why I Highly Recommend NOT Moving with a Young Baby:

1. Everything now takes four times longer than it used to take, before there was a baby. Not just twice as long, but four times as long. Because as soon as your mommy brain fog has cleared enough for you to figure out the next project to work on, the baby wakes up, and the next hour is devoted to her. By the time she goes back to sleep, you've forgotten which project you were going to start on next. And if you're breastfeeding, it's time for your eighth meal of the day anyways. After preparing and eating the meal, the baby decides it's time to wake up for her meal too. Another hour devoted to the baby. After she goes back to sleep, you have to clean up the kitchen from your last meal. Only you don't know where your cleaning supplies are (in a box, somewhere). So you scramble around for the next half hour looking for the paper towels and dish washing soap, and just as you are about to finish cleaning the kitchen, the baby is up again. Another hour devoted to baby. By time she's back asleep, you are now ready for your ninth meal of the day. Entire days can be spent in this manner, and at the end of the day you realize all you've accomplished is locating the dish washing liquid. This is why it now takes four times as long to get anything done as it used to take. If you're lucky, that is. If you're not lucky (like if the baby is feeling crabby, or if you are feeling crabby), then it will take you six times as long to get anything accomplished.

2. All progress towards any kind of routine with the baby (read: any kind of sanity) vanishes. Like you just flushed it down the toilet that you are afraid of sitting on until it receives five coats of Lysol spray (because what if the previous homeowner had cooties?).

3. You will feel guilty for up-heaving your baby from the old home (the one she just got used to after being tragically removed from her warm, wonderful uterine home), and placing her into a whole new home, which might as well be a whole new universe in baby terms.

4. You will feel like a terrible mother when you find yourself torn between spending time with your baby, who needs you to talk to her and play with her and attempt to do tummy time with her... and spending time organizing your kitchen cabinets, hanging paintings on the wall, and cleaning that cootie-infested toilet, which still needs five coats of Lysol, before you destroy an entire forest since you are papering the toilet seat each time you sit on it.

5. Nobody, not even your mother, can care for the baby to your satisfaction. So even though you may have someone around to help watch the baby, it is still going to take you four times as long to get anything done, because you now have two people to watch: the baby, and the person who's supposed to be watching the baby. (Make that three people to watch, if you feel the need to watch your husband as well.)