When Your Baby Can't

At times being a mother can be the most frustrating job in the world. Everyone has a vision of how they want their child to behave and what they want their child to achieve and sometimes when that doesn't quite happen it can become frustrating.

Something I have noticed in some new, first time mums is the level of competition. I have experienced it within my family and within my friends, mothers who want to show off what their child has achieved and other mothers who can get quite disheartened when their darling baby hasn't achieved something as quickly as another.

I am not a big fan of competition. I fully understand that babies achieve their milestones at different times. So I'm not really interested in boasting about when my baby does and doesn't do things (unless it's to my mum or my best friend, because I know they're almost as proud of Logan as I am) but when you come to realise that your baby can't do something that ,what seems like, every baby his age and even younger can do it can get quite upsetting.

Logan took a while to learn to sit up. For a long time he just didn't seem that interested. It wasn't until he was 2 weeks off turning 7 months that he started to express an interest in sitting up. Even now at 32 weeks he still isn't the steadiest. He can sit up unaided for 5 or 6 minutes then he would rather just lie down. However when I was reading other blogs and seeing pictures on Instagram of other babies who were sitting up at 4 months I started to get really frustrated, not at Logan for not being able to do it but at myself for being so bothered by it. Only once your baby reaches 9 months and hasn't mastered sitting up should you mention it to your health visitor or GP and even then they might not be overly concerned if your baby is reaching all their other milestones.

If I was the same as every other woman my age I'd find myself really boring so why do we continually compare our babies and hope they achieve everything at the same time. I think it has a lot to do with the society we live in and our inherent need to be the best, the skinniest, the fastest or the cleverest (yes, I know that will never be me!) and we try and belittle anyone that isn't all of these things. I would hate my child to be brought up thinking he had to compare himself to anyone and be held to any other standards than his own. From now on I will stop being frustrated by the most mundane, trivial things and appreciate the uniqueness of my baby.