Original link: https://fourhappylions.com/posts/life-goes-on/
Unknowingly, Mk-II has grown into a large baby who is unfazed, unfazed, immovable, serious, and goes his own way, as is Mk-I. . . Uh, it seems like it’s still the same. Now that everything has temporarily stabilized, I occasionally feel that Life Is Good? (Then the weather turned cold and Mk-I was brought back from school. I don’t know whether it was flu or covid that infected the whole family and returned to its original shape.)
Sure enough, comparisons with each other are inevitable #
As mentioned before, Mk-II can (finally?) be put down at 8:30 pm from the early days of 5 months, then left without feeding for 11.5 hours until 8 am. After nearly 6 months, I successfully quit cold turkey and swaddled my hands at night, and became a mature and capable baby who can sleep in pajamas during the day and night. I just cry every day at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning. At this time, I turn him over and lie down and stop crying. As for whether he or she is sleeping in the middle of the night or early in the morning, I don’t care. Anyway, as long as he doesn’t cry and doesn’t disturb me, that’s fine. . .
In my impression, the time when Mk-I achieved this seems to be around 3.5 months? Er, no, it seems that TA took off the swaddle at about seven or eight months.
In this way, although I am not the kind of person who keeps a close eye on others and insists on comparing who is higher and who is lower, but I have two different instances of young humans on my hands, so it is impossible not to follow my own in the second week. Weekly comparisons. Since it’s a comparison, let’s compare—if the Mk-I wins when it comes to sleeping (<–how do you define “win” anyway?), then compare at the same period of development:
| project | Mk-I | Mk-II |
|---|---|---|
| Sleep |  |
|
| Weight | |
|
| Milestones | |
|
| Mom’s Mental Health | |
For example, in the weight category, because I have maintained a 2nd percentile weight since two weeks after birth, the Mk-II, which I nicknamed the “2nd percentile goalkeeper”, lost control at the four-month checkup and became 1 %goalkeeper. The doctor’s face was not very good-looking, and he even omitted the rhetoric that Americans like to say about praising cats and dogs. Fortunately, Mk-II is already our second child, otherwise I would definitely transform into a demon. I would search the Internet for solutions every day and feed him formula crazily. Now, I just followed the doctor’s instructions and silently picked up the small jar of complementary food for 4 months. I knew when the doctor recommended feeding avocados and bananas that the purpose was actually to maintain his weight with complementary food.
All in all, I was shocked when I compared it. Although the Mk-II also looked chubby, but occasionally I looked through the photos of the Mk-I from the same period (the weight was about 60th percentile), wow, it was really fat. In the same clothes, the thighs are tight, and the diameter of the thighs is actually larger than the length of the feet?
…Yes, the Baby Mk-I’s legs are actually shaped like this.
Let’s look at milestones again, because now they can only lie down, roll (roll?), and sit reluctantly, and the comparison is also very rough. The Mk-II turned over in less than 5 months, a week or two earlier than the Mk-I. The Mk-I at the same time (looking at the photos) seemed to be able to sit up slightly more upright than the Mk-II. And “speaking” means making various sounds of different pitches and pitches. Since there are no historical records to be sure, I think the Mk-II is probably earlier. However, a person’s life is as long as several decades, and the difference between sooner and later is only a month or two. What does it matter if it is sooner or later?
Although this will be said to save face (eh, from the following, it is indeed “face” in the literal sense), but what I am most looking forward to about the Mk-II is its appearance. In fact, after Mk-I barely took on the shape of a human (this is my own definition, about 5 months old and able to walk), it began to resemble Colin’s mother, and the older it grew, the more it resembled— —So much so that I often have misconceptions. Did Colin’s mother secretly reopen a small account at my house? (Could it be that Mk-I’s innocent eyes were used to record everything at home, and then the video was mentally transmitted through ripple interference and sent to a remote large mothership for analysis?) And Colin’s family is the most discerning. A strong feature is having dimples on the face, and the Mk-I is no exception. In contrast, Mk-II has started to smile more recently, and so far there is no sign of dimples on his face, so I am eagerly looking forward to it. Maybe this time it will be my turn to develop my genes. . .
One week program vs two week program #
Well, you can’t step into the same river twice. The person I was when I was a Baby Mk-I was very different from the person I was when I was a Baby Mk-II. Obviously Mk-I is better in the “report card” (<– She is indeed a qualified Asian mom. Even if she is a little person who only knows how to eat, sleep and play, she still needs to make a report card to see who is “excellent”) , I was much happier raising the Mk-II. Sure enough, it is because of experience, so the expectation has been adjusted long ago.
This Mk-II was raised by us as our last little friend. Every morning when I start a new day, I think, “I will never need to deal with young people of this age from today on!”, so I don’t bother to find a routine anymore, and just keep it casually. So it doesn’t forcefully enforce many rules like Mk-I – although EASY also has follow, there is nothing you can do about it when sometimes going out on weekends conflicts with nap. So much so that I am traveling everywhere on the weekends, and the schedule is even more stressful than in the middle of the week. Every Monday is the time for adults and Mk-II to rest at home after sending the Mk-I to school. So now I have come to the conclusion: the biggest helper to keep the baby from crying and having a regular schedule is not anything else, but time. This is the so-called “it’s better when you get older”. Other parenting methods are only marginally effective and allow parents to survive this difficult period.
The Mk-II also enjoyed a lot of kisses and cuddles that the Mk-I did not enjoy. Now when I hug him, no matter when and where, Mk-II always accepts it softly and quietly, and will smile at me when he is in a good mood; Mk-I depends on his mood at this age. . At the same time, after raising Mk-I, I feel that (from my experience so far) I have some understanding of the behaviors of children of all ages, so what new things can Mk-II do (eating hands, turning over and crying when sleeping) , we are all used to it, and even compare it to the similar situation of Mk-I back then.
A phenomenon that once confused us is that after the baby has settled down – at 4 or 5 months old – he will start to get high, making such a movement that his head, arms, and feet are all raised. His expression is as calm as this seal, so cute! If you touch your baby’s back, you will feel tight under a layer of soft fat. Wouldn’t your back be very tired? (The posture of the seal in this picture is called banana pose, because if you tilt your head and feet up, you will not get cold, and there is a lot of fat on your belly, so you are not afraid of the cold.)
However, although Mk-II enjoys the service of a senior caregiver with several years of work experience, because this service is not one-to-one personalized like Mk-I, it is difficult to say who takes advantage. Now that I have multiple children, I begin to feel that each child has his or her own destiny – the time of their arrival, the family’s financial/emotional situation, their own personality, and the social environment they encounter, all of which together determine their destiny. Opportunities and later life. No matter how hard parents try, there are not many things they can consciously change for them. Speaking of which, there are not many people in the world who have the power to have full control over their lives – except for those rich people on the list who can be rich and willful, aren’t everyone else just drifting with the flow in various situations? So it’s best to make a mental cut now. Whether your child will be successful in the future (<–how do you define “promising” in the end?) has more to do with him and less to do with me.
Well, if you accidentally cultivate a serial killer and cause harm to society, you won’t feel responsible. (It’s not okay in the first place!)
Another one? #
(Thank god) Nowadays, Mk-II is generally very quiet except when crying. Look around, eat your hands, scratch your feet, hum and haha when you are happy – that’s about it. He won’t ask why for five minutes straight, nor will he hold on to your thigh (Mk-I: I don’t!). I cry less than before. I usually only open my throat and howl a few times when it’s almost nap time, when I’m tired, or when I fail to fall asleep and can’t go back to sleep.
To my own surprise, after giving birth to Mk-II this time, the issue of having another baby was raised even before menstruation had returned. Although I used to be a person who didn’t want to have a Mk-II right away , I also said over and over again that I didn’t want to have a third child . But now that the Mk-II can sleep through the night and the Mk-I is in a stable period, it seems that having another one is not out of the question.
The reason is quite simple – there is not much time left for Miki players. After all, human women still have physical limits. . . Now I feel like I have seen a limited time deal that will end on the 30th of the month, and today is already the 28th or 29th. Even though I bought this thing once last week, I still wonder whether I should take advantage of the promotion. It’s not over yet, so I went out to buy it and stock it up to avoid regretting it in the future.
. . . But there seems to be no need to do such stupid things just to get a deal. After all, you save 100% if you don’t buy it. In fact, after giving birth to the Mk-II, I finally crossed off one more item from my life bucket list: “Build a family with two children”, and there were almost no other active/passive life goals left. However, “Earth Online TM “, a large-scale scumbag MMORPG game, requires that you must wait for the time set when opening the account before you can exit the game (and it doesn’t tell you how long it will be, which makes it difficult to plan), so after picking up In the free time, it is much more fun to engage in hobbies and travel around the world than to work early in the morning and stay late to raise children. Unless the Stockholm complex is so severe that raising children has become a hobby (surprise!).
At this time, when I go to the grocery store or department store, I always look out for families with three children. That said, in the area where I live, white families with three children are not uncommon—one of my neighbors, as well as my previous homeowner, both had three children and a dog. I privately call this configuration the “life-saving configuration”. After all, it is probably not very friendly to parents’ life span. 
. But once I actually discovered a Chinese family with three children. The three of them were placed in the shopping cart. When I looked inside the cart, I saw many furry heads.
That’s probably what it feels like! (This is the three hamsters in Pokémon.)
Miki: (putting down chopsticks in front of the dinner table). . . But she might still be dead.
Mk-I: Why didn’t you give birth?
Miki: (seriously) Because our family has no money.
(Colin snickered on the sidelines. It was so presumptuous, I wanted to throw a piece of chalk at his head like a middle school teacher, “I’m talking about you, and you’re still giggling!”)
Mk-I: Oh, is it because I paid for school?
Miki: (Surprise! I usually use the excuse “daycare costs money, you will lose if you don’t go” to coax him to go back to school immediately after he recovers. Has it really been remembered?). . . Yes.
Mk-I: (seriously) Then we can go buy some money.
Miki: . . . (At a young age, I realized clearly the class of my family. The money in TA’s family was bought by the adults who sold their time and souls)
Well, there are ways to live richly and richly, and there are ways to live poorly even if you are poor. I have no pursuit of quality of life, but if I add one more person, 
My guess for the previous bottleneck is that parents don’t have time to take care of and/or pick up and drop off after school classes. Of course, it is not impossible to hire people to do these things, but this reduces it to a problem of not enough money – alas, not enough money is probably an NP-hard problem in the accounting world, and all difficult problems can be transformed into “no money”. word. . . Then again, how could after-school classes be mandatory? Now that we have the Internet, isn’t it the same as doing things at home?
In short, after becoming familiar with the huge workload of parenting, I don’t resent having one more person in the family – everyone has their own thing to do, and that’s fine. I don’t want my family to go down the path of “only one child becomes scared –> he has worked hard since he was a child and finally climbed up a certain vine, and his parents feel superior to others –> after his child graduates, he will work in a factory as a respectable white-collar worker and screw high-end screws every day.” route. Compared to hanging around in that snobbish circle that despises me all the time, I feel like I have enough money and am happy, so that’s fine.
However, the embarrassing thing about the third child is that many commercial family packages only have room for four people, and it will cost more to accommodate the extra fifth person. For example, my family’s car can accommodate only 4 people (including child seats), and if there is one more person, I need to buy a larger car; I can no longer fit in the same row or two rows close to each other when flying; Burger King’s family meal also consists of two large burgers+ Two junior burgers. Even my square dining table only has 4 sides where people can sit! (We are running out of quilts…) In short, ten years ago, I judged a rich person based on the house he lived in; but now if I want to judge who is a truly rich person, I will judge him based on the (dare he has) Want?) How many children.
On the other hand, not that I’m too bragging. . . I sometimes think that if there really is reincarnation, if he opens his eyes and finds that he was reincarnated in my house, the result of this reincarnation card game is not bad. Although he is not a wealthy person, just looking at the two points of “born in a developed country” (but arguably the United States is just a wealthy third world country) and “both parents have a bachelor’s degree” can probably rank the world’s population. The top 10%. Although there is no way to guarantee that someone with such a background will be able to live a life without worries about food and clothing, this factory setting is already relatively reliable at both the social and family levels. After all, if you go to Douban’s “Parents Are Harmful” group, you will find that not many lucky people grow up in a reliable environment.
Don’t deny TA’s feelings #
One day I opened a new bottle of sauce at the dinner table. I tasted it and said it was a little salty. Mk-I immediately said not to try it because of the saltiness. At this time, in order to let Mk-I at least give it a try, Colin casually said: “Try it, this is not salty.”
As a result, I was the first one to protest. When I was little, I hated adults fooling me the most, saying things like “you’ll know when you grow up”, “the police officer took you away”, “just one more bite and it’ll be over”. It is obviously salty, but it is too low to lie to Mk-I for the insignificant purpose of “let him have a taste”. I am an adult now, so I know that after a few rounds of persuasion to eat at the dinner table, it becomes a game and test of strength – if you eat, you will be an obedient child, if you don’t eat, you will not give the proposer face.
But unfortunately, this kind of denial of Mk-I’s feelings in order to achieve one’s own ends happens surprisingly often. For example, before taking the flu shot, Mk-I asked, “Will the injection hurt?” When Colin casually said “no,” I quickly corrected him. If Mk-I really believed the lie that injections don’t hurt, when the time comes to actually get the injection, not only will he feel pain, but he will also feel betrayed.
If we give another example, it will become a Colin denunciation meeting, so let’s stop there. (Although “Don’t deny your partner’s feelings” is something that can be found in any qualified parenting education book, but if you can’t internalize the content, it will be in vain.)
PS A friend of mine recently gave birth to a baby and wrote a review . Alas, it’s hard for everyone.
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