Today, something strange happened. I finally opened up two of the baby-raising books I was given as gifts before my baby was born. All of a sudden, my 11 weeks of hands-on experience felt completely wrong. I felt like a failure of a mother. Here I was spoiling my precious baby boy and doing everything the books said not to do. He naps on the sofa, he feeds on demand (even if it's every hour), he gets rocked to sleep, and he breastfeeds for comfort. SO WHAT.
Hundreds of years ago, no one had these books. When a baby was born, the mother had to use trial and error to fend for herself. I wanna go out on a limb and say that I think God meant it that way. If there was truly a step-by-step guide for parenting a newborn, you'd think that God would have included it somewhere in the Bible. Why do certain people think they are the authority on parenting when every baby is different?
Googling my parenting "issues", I found that I'm not the only mommy who feels this way. Someone posted this question on babycenter.com: How can I get my baby to nap? After reading through the answers, I came across this post that was SUPER encouraging to me.
