I was at the park with my children a few months ago when I heard one mother with a baby giving another sleep advice.
"Oh, our baby is such a great sleeper because we sleep trained him," she advised in a wise voice.
"He's been sleeping through the night for months."
Her exhausted friend looked dubious, but said she might try it, since her baby woke up four times a night.
I had an urge to join the conversation, but I bit my tongue and kept moving. I have a terrible habit of giving advice and butting in, and I'm trying to curb it. I mostly fail, but my youngest son, Edward, is helping me along in this endeavour. He excels at proving me wrong and making me question everything I thought I knew about raising kids.
After four children, I thought I was an experienced parent of little ones, and therefore had the right to dispense wisdom and advice. I had been greatly helped by an older, wiser friend when I first had Alex, my oldest son, and I wanted to pass that on to my friends who were just starting their families. Plus, people did ask me for advice in areas where I had a lot of experience: breastfeeding, recovering from surgical birth, wrangling a baby and older children in public.
Problem is, I tend to give advice about everything: sleep, manners, clothes, screen time, teaching public behaviour. I have good intentions. I want to be helpful to the new parents around me. Sometimes, though, I must be just annoying.
Eddie, however, has given me my comeuppance. He is a human dynamo, a loud, opinionated, charming, funny and brash two-year-old. He does not do quiet. He does not do still. He does not do "no" very well. He hits and kicks and bites sometimes. While we do our level best to teach him to be gentle and respectful, many of the methods that worked with our other three do not work with Eddie.
Let's be honest: He puts me at my wits' end.
Taking Eddie to Mass, for instance, is more exercise than worship. With my other children, we took them from birth and sat in the front. They learned to stay in the pew and be fairly quiet.
Naomi used to dance sweetly in the side aisle to the music. Eddie's personal mission during church is to make it to the centre aisle and run for the altar, laughing hysterically as a parent trails him.
The parishioners now help us out by catching him if they can. We spend a lot of time in the cry room.
Eddie sleeps well if his father or our family's nanny, Jovy, puts him to bed, but fights it for hours with me. I was the pro at putting the other kids to bed; I even got our troubled sleeper, Alex, to finally start going to sleep early, when he had been a night owl. But Eddie's bedtime antics sometimes make me cry.
When Clayton is away for work, Jovy sometimes takes pity on me and puts him to bed while I deal with the older children.
I'm trying to change my attitude about the way Eddie challenges me. When I first had children, I accepted the fact I would stretch and change and grow. I accepted it might be hard.
But after a while, I got into a groove with the smaller kids, expecting challenges only when we reached new age milestones. How silly of me.
Eddie reminds me that children are all individuals, right from the first moment. All kids have things in common, but they are all as unique as we adults are. What works for one might not work for another.
That doesn't make me wrong as a parent, and it doesn't make me right when something works for my kid, but not for yours.
So please, if I or anyone else starts spouting off unwanted advice, remember none of us are experts, and feel free to ignore the noise.
Most of our intentions are kind, but we may not understand your reality.
And some of us eventually learn our lesson from small, sticky-fingered teachers.
Cindy.MacDougall@ gmail.com
