If at any given time you ask our bad cat whether she's hungry, she'll reply with a meow that clearly means "you bet I'm hungry--I haven't ever eaten in my entire life and I'm famished." If it's anywhere near dinnertime, the meow will be repeated until feeding actually occurs, each time more emphatically than the next. She also does this unprompted. Needless to say, we're now experts at ignoring our whiny cat, who we do, in fact, feed three times a day. (Our good cat, by the way, will at most squeak if she's very hungry.)
We've noticed when hanging out with our friends' babies that the bad cat has, in this way, trained us to ignore cries of all kinds. We can carry on entire conversations (or play games of chess, in Matt's case) while holding whimpering babies. That's not to say we don't help remedy the situation, it's just that we're starting to recognize that we're at risk for neglecting our own child. Of course, this doesn't exactly make us comfortable with ourselves!
We're hoping our instincts will prompt us to react differently--and better--to Baby Girl than to our cats (although we know there are times when our ability to ignore will come in handy). We're pretty sure they will. Fortunately, in other matters, our cats (or at least our bad one) have been a bit more helpful:
-We've mastered the ability to play simple, silly games time after time ("string game" is a favorite in our house).
-Out house is already half child-proofed, and we've already numbed ourselves to the possibility that our things can get destroyed if we don't keep them out of reach.
-We no longer fool ourselves that we can reason with irrational beings (this will serve us well through both the terrible twos and the teenage years).
-A trouble-making cat's cute, wide-eyed stare rarely stop us in our tracks.
-We have a head-start in fine-tuning discipline regimes (this is still a work in progress, though, seeing as we still have one misbehaving cat).
-We're already used to doing extra cleaning around the house.
-We'll be extra grateful when our child says her first words (something our cats have almost achieved, but not quite). As an added bonus, we've learned to interpret a variety of non-human noises--most of them mean "I'm hungry."
So we're ready for kids, right? Please don't everyone comment at once.
2 comments:
well, being able to tune out crying isn't necessarily a bad thing...since once they get older the crying is a good amount of whining that can drive you crazy if you really hear it all. so there you go. :)
Who knows - maybe you'll be lucky and Baby will be like Beanie, little and cute and perfect!!!
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