It’s a good thing they’re adorable because parenting a baby is exhausting! Sleepless nights, sickness, feeding, laundry and naps that are too short mark the occasion. Organization skills are put to the test. The mountain of stuff you have to pack for a short day trip, piled all around your little bundle of joy is comical. These days I rely on the electronic calendar on my iPad to organize my life, but during the baby stage it would have been futile to keep it current. Your schedule revolves around the baby and things change per second, not per day.
It’s a complicating juggling act that gets further complicated if you’re visually impaired like me. On my newborn’s face, I didn’t notice her yellow shade of jaundice due to my poor vision, but of course the pediatrician did. When the winter months brought cold and flu to baby, reading the dosage on medicine bottles, and then finding the correct line on the eye dropper was very difficult. With extra laundry and heating baby bottles, appliances such as the washing machine and microwave were working full-time, like me. But I placed those little raised orange dots at the proper place on the dials to save me from straining to select the correct setting.
Since driving is not an option, planning ahead helps avoid bad situations. One morning, while my husband was working, I had to get up extra early, put the baby in the stroller and search for the grocery store that opened first. I had run out of baby formula! Due to Murphy’s Law, the farthest grocery store opened first. Later, I had friends that said, “You should have called me!” An accessible cell phone with all my local friends in the Contact list would have been useful during this time.
The overriding elephant in the room when raising a baby is dealing with all its challenges whilst in the sleep deprived mode. Every parent has that challenge. But when you’re visually impaired, exhaustion is not entirely due to sleep deprivation. Straining to read that line on the medicine eye dropper, computer work, watching your baby’s expressions, all the visual demands of daily life (ah, everything!) place you at the maximum side of the exhaustion spectrum. But due to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”, one tiny crooked smile back at you makes you want to continue to nourish him/her with food and affection. And it energizes you to do it all over again the next day. Sleep is highly over-rated anyways, right?
Get smart with the