Essential Baby blogger Joseph Kelly
When you first bring home a baby there are a lot of things going through your mind. In fact, that's an understatement. Your mind is a raging sea of fears, joys, anxieties, hopes, dreams, nightmares and 'list-making' type practicalities.
This is not the ideal mental state for making big 'change-of-life' type decisions. Knowing this, however, has never stopped me or Susie from rushing into a post-baby decision.
When we first brought home Maisie, we were the typical first-time-parents: we couldn't tell one end of the baby from the other (although we quickly worked out each end can be as noisy as the other). After a couple of months of not much sleep, the realisation dawned on us that our lives would never be the same again.
Confronted with this blunt reality, we did the only thing we could think of - we booked a holiday to the Gold Coast. I still can't fully recall how it happened, but somehow in between loading the car with all our gear and heading to the airport, we found ourselves at an auction for a house we'd never seen before. Fifteen minutes later we were proud home owners. 45 minutes after that we were boarding a flight to Coolangatta.
By the time Frances arrived, two-and-a-half years later, we had already out grown our "panic purchase" house. I was faced with a very male type decision: either knuckle down and face the renovate or relocate issue, or find something completely new and distracting to worry about. I chose to quit my job. By some remarkable stroke of luck, rather than by some sort of cosmic grand design, I was able to walk straight into a new job. To celebrate my continued employment (and the small matter of our new baby Frances), we travelled across town to have lunch with Susie's mum. As it happened, there was an auction for a house at the end of her street. We just thought we'd wander over for a look. Deja vu all over again.
Three months ago we brought home beautiful baby Rita. There was space for her in the house, and we knew to avoid auctions. There was space for her in the car thanks to all our pre-baby, non-stressed research into people movers. We also had, after a huge amount of trial and error, worked out what was the best pram for us and the kids. I was feeling pretty confident that we would avoid any post baby panic purchases. So on Susie and Rita's first night home, I went to bed leaving Susie to breast feed while she navigated her way through the internet. Thirty minutes later I was woken by Susie excitedly telling me she'd booked five tickets to Europe.
According to Susie, the Global Financial Crisis, coupled with the reduction in fuel costs and a slow-down in air travel had magically resulted in airfares that were just too good to refuse. In fact, Susie was genuinely afraid that she would be arrested if she turned down such ludicrously low priced tickets. Through Susie's excited depiction of our recently expanded family casually strolling through the Alps, I had a dim recollection of a pre-birth conversation where we both agreed that the first 12 months of child raising was a full-on time. So full-on that we would not create any additional stress during that period - no moving house, no changing jobs, no last minute 24-hour plane trips with a new born, a hyperactive 3 year old and an easily bored six year old. I'm positive we had that conversation...
So now it is exactly a week until we fly off to France, Ireland and Thailand. As excited as I am about the trip, I'm absolutely freaking out about the flight. Rita will be three months old, Frances will need an intravenous supply of Venergan and Maisie will no doubt be glued to a TV screen the size of a postage stamp. Is this the worst post baby decision we've ever made?
What post-baby decisions have you made that you regret? Is travelling with small kids the greatest mistake a parent can make? Comment on Joseph's blog here.
