In honor of the arrival of my new niece, I thought I’d go back in time to when N first arrived at the hospital.<\/p>\n
Having a baby when there’s another one already at home is a lot more complicated. Instead of just staying in the hospital until discharge time, I shuttled back and forth to make sure that C was doing okay. In retrospect, I’m not sure that was completely necessary – my folks were here staying with him – but at the time it seemed important.<\/p>\n
When checkout time came, my folks brought C to the hospital. He came in to see his new brother. There was a brief introduction, we had some more visitors, and then (finally) it was time to get ready to go.<\/p>\n
I took C and we started carrying stuff down to the car together. It took us a couple trips, partly because we had brought way too much stuff, and partly because my carrying capacity was diminished by the presence of the 22 month old helper.<\/p>\n
Finally, we were finished. We put the last pillow in the car, and I said "All done!"<\/p>\n
C ran around and hopped into the passenger side of the car. "Time to go!"<\/p>\n
As if he’d ever ridden in the passenger side of any car before.<\/p>\n
I smiled and said "No. We have to go get your little brother."<\/p>\n
He shook his head. "No. Let’s go."<\/p>\n
In the meantime, he was trying to figure out how to pull the seat belt down so he could buckle up. This gave me an excuse to pause while I tried to decide on an approach. I helped him buckle up – and decided on manipulation.<\/p>\n
"What about momma? Should we wait for momma?"<\/p>\n
He looked at me. "Just momma?"<\/p>\n
"No, momma and – "<\/p>\n
"No. Let’s go."<\/p>\n
Needless to say, we weren’t going to leave momma, nana, grampa, and baby N at the hospital. However, since words had clearly failed me, I reached over and tickled him.<\/p>\n
Honestly, I really wish that strategy would work as well with the rest of my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In honor of the arrival of my new niece, I thought I’d go back in time to when N first arrived at the hospital. Having a baby when there’s another one already at home is a lot more complicated. Instead of just staying in the hospital until discharge time, I shuttled back and forth to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,121,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-the-kids","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8BS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}