Babies Are Easy Toddlers Are Hard

In the months after you take your first beautiful baby home you come to realise just how right those people that say having a baby is the hardest thing you’ll ever do are. Then as that baby becomes a capable and ambulatory toddler you start to realise that actually that baby phase was a walk in the park.

Before toddlerdom all you had to worry about was feeding, cleaning, getting your precious one to sleep and the occasional illness disrupting the routine that you worked tooth and nail to establish. But now they’ve become toddlers they can walk and climb with an insatiable curiosity and a complete lack of understanding of the many potential boo boos that surround them.

It is up to you to keep them safe with what seems to be an endless tirade of “NO”s and “Don’t Touch”s. Take your eyes off of them for a minute and they’ll have the back off the TV remote (The one you struggle to open) and be sucking on Energizer batteries like they’re cola lolly pops.

Toddlers have two modes. Asleep mode or full-on non-stop play mode. Assuming they’re healthy and have a good sleep routine the Asleep mode is easy enough to deal with but keeping a toddler safe, entertained and happy whilst in full-on non-stop play mode is a full time occupation and extremely tiring.

Don’t get me wrong though, in spite of all this I love having a toddler. They are innocent, trusting, wonderful creatures and whilst that endless desire to investigate and the need to play constantly is exhausting for the hapless parents it is also very endearing. Personalities really start to emerge and their imagination starts to flourish. You see them learning at an incredible rate, gaining new knowledge and skills, acquiring new vocabulary at such a rate you’re sometimes left wondering where they picked some of it up from.

It’s not just the toddler that learns though. Parents also pick up a lot of new knowledge. As a new parent you soon learn that children really are really hard work you also learn a lot more about yourself and what’s important to you and what really matters. Then later as the parent of a toddler you come to learn that actually having a baby that slept for most of the day was the easy bit. It certainly didn’t feel like it at the time but it was. It’s once you reach this point that another thought dawns on you.

It’s not going to get any easier. It’s going to keep getting harder.