Beginning out as a parent for the first time can be an utterly terrifying prospect. You have spent the last nine months preparing for this arrival but, in reality, nothing can really prepare you for exactly how much your life just changed.
When The Boy arrived the only words to describe how I felt were, other than total adoration obvs, complete blind panic.
How was I ever going to look after this tiny, wriggly bundle?
How would I manage to bathe him, feed him, even get him home without actually killing him.
He was so precious and, goodness, so so small.
The responsibility of not only keeping this little dude alive, but also trying to make him happy, was immense.
In the first few months one of the most difficult things to handle is the lack of communication. He would cry and I would have literally NO CLUE why. Is that a hunger cry, a tired cry, an ‘I need changing stat’ cry? To differentiate does come with time but in those first few weeks, impossible. The fact that I had been pumped full of morphine and sleep deprived for a week probably wasn’t helping either.
What also does not help is that you have no idea of how much they are actually aware of what is happening around them. Other than the fact he could smell my boob or, to be accurate, virtually any maternal boob at twenty paces, the rest was anyones best guess. What could he hear, what could he see? Now I maybe should have been slightly ahead of the game here. I am an optometrist by trade.
Truthfully, from my university lectures all I could recall was something about stripes. I invested in a million stripy toys…that mostly jingled too as I didn’t know where to start with hearing.
I wish I had known about this. VisionDirect have put together this amazing tool to give you a little more insight into how your baby’s vision will develop. You MIGHT not need a million stripy toys.
Give it a whirl.
Oh, and the only other thing I could remember, if their pupil looks white you need that checked STAT.
Disclosure: This post is brought to you in association with VisionDirect, however all words are my own.
I’d never really thought about how much a baby can or can’t see and I hadn’t realised just how little they can see as newborns. Poor things! Thrust into the big wide world, unable to see and unable to make themselves understand.
I know it’s crazy isn’t it? They are even more vulnerable than they look as newborns! At least it improves so quickly.