Thursday, August 8, 2013

Ways College Prepared Me for Parenthood

Aside from those who go to college purely to meet their significant others, most of us don't realize how much college prepares us for parenthood.

I'm definitely not talking about classes.  What little I remember about my child development class, didn't really help me with bringing home a newborn.  This may be different for others with different majors, but I wouldn't know.

It's the real life situations from college that prepared me.  Here are the ones I found most relevant:

5.  How to cram a lot of junk into a tiny space.  We've all had that hellaciously small dorm room for at least our freshmen year, sleeping on a bunk bed with our knees to our chest.  Then, 10 years later you get pregnant and are blessed to get tons of big items you can't use for months.  What do you do with it?  You learn how to stack and stack high.

You also make a visit to IKEA, which was a huge eye-opener a few years too late.  Great examples for later, though.

Not only does it teach you how to cram, but it also teaches you how to live with less and really narrow down your bare necessities, which leads me into the next item....

4. How to live on a tight budget. Who knew brussell sprouts went well with bananas?  You do - because of that last week of the semester cramming for finals on your last dime, knowing all you had to do was survive with enough money for gas to get home (and yet you still had enough for a cheap mexican dinner).  You also now know that Angel Soft may not be Charmin, but it still gets the job done.  Truth is, you wouldn't have experimented with nearly as many products in the grocery store if you weren't on such a tight budget.

And now you know how to do the same for your kid.  They don't know that no one else mixes vegetable beef with prunes, and they certainly don't care.  Oh, and by the way, does that cheap formula do just a good a job as that expensive name brand of supplying nutrients?  Why yes - now that I can quickly scan the nutrition facts - yes it does.  (E-mailing skills also helped secure a money-back guarantee if baby C didn't find the taste agreeable.  Skills that were honed in college.)

3.  Being messy is ok.  I honestly owe this one to my experience as a camp counselor during my summers in college.   

Baby spits peas in your hair?  Eh, I've had worse.  Baby sneezes banana through her nose?  I've seen a camper put long strand of carrot in his nose and pull it out his mouth - I can handle this.  Baby poops a multi-colored rainbow?  There was much worse done in the dorm's community bathroom.

This also goes hand-in-hand with a new mom's new shower schedule.  Been a couple of days since your last shower?  I've gone a week, and we were outside hiking a lot.  I'm not proud of it, but it gave me some perspective.  It's definitely gross to go a few days, but I'll always know that could be so much worse.

2. The more clothes you have, the less laundry you have to do.  Out of clean underwear with no time or energy to wash?  Go buy some new ones.  Or in this case, how many onesies can she wear in a week before we have to do a load of laundry?  At one point, we could go almost 2 weeks before we had to laundry for baby girl.  Then we had to start using bibs.  I'm currently considering buying a new chunk to extend our laundry capabilities.  Those things go quick with 2-3 meals a day, although she's luckily keeping drool during playtime to a minimum.  Our new idea is just to feed her in just her diaper.

We owe much of the excess clothes situation to grandparents and friends. To date, we've only bought 2 outfits for her. The rest are from others, which has been awesome. Thanks everyone!

1.  Coping with sleep-deprivation.  The parenting class said to not be surprised if you only get a few hours of sleep a night, and they made it sound scary.  I imagined accidentally falling asleep while holding her, or nodding off while bathing her.  Because that's when it would happen, of course.  During some incredibly vulnerable or high-risk situation.

Well, turns out it's nothing compared to the little to the completely sleepless nights spent in college doing whatever kind of tom-foolery we were up to (mostly Phase 10).  And sleeping when baby girl slept made me even livelier than I was in college.  I felt pretty well-rested, comparatively speaking.  Don't get me wrong, I was tired, but not near as tired as I was pulling all-nighters writing papers or finishing projects at the last minute.

So here's to college - a place where you push yourself to your limits and come out having learned something either about yourself, or your major, or both.