As I look my newborn daughter I realize she is a lot like my other daughter at her age. It is amazing how identical they look. When I put the outfits my oldes daughter wore at that age on her, she looks identical to her. When I look at old photos of my daughter who was born almost two years ago, I am completely amazed that my newborn is a splitting image of her. So, during a late night feeding I started to think - is this my second chance? Do I get to start over and do things right that I may have done wrong before or is this a completely new child?
The interesting thing is that I have different plans this time for things that I may have done wrong last time- for example, when it comes to sleeping, I would like to develop better sleeping habits with this child because the eldest daughter is a lost cause. I would also like to develop better eating habits for this child because that is another area of concern with our oldest. So, you ask - how do I plan on doing this? And you are thinking to yourself "well, every child is different and this is not your first one!" True- true. I know all children are different but all children are trainable if you start early enough. Children are a reflection of their parents and how we react really does affect the child's behavior. In any case, my newborn is too young to be trained just yet and she is still trying to just gain fat and weight so she can sustain herself for 6 to 8 hours at night. Night versus Day is a whole 'nother battle. We will need to be her eyes and ears and help her understand day versus night because she has no clue. My goal is to start at a reasonable age and this depends on the child. The child will give us clues as to when she is ready to be sleep trained and so on. I have missed the clues my first daughter sent me. There was a time when we could have easily trained her to eat better but that time has now passed. We could have sleep trained her but we chose not to mainly out of laziness and exhaustion - we just chose to stick her in our bed and make life easier for me (I was breastfeeding her), and for dad.
I am not sure things will be that much different in our second chance but I certainly would like to try and obviously, we will adapt to this kid and depending how she responds to our second time around as well.
