A Strange Strategy
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Thursday, February 19, 2009 5:00 PM
I’m an optimist, and I generally expect good things out of life.
However, recently I have learned a useful lesson, and this is it:
Sometimes having lowered expectations can make otherwise insignificant events into happy surprises. Since in tough times it’s the small triumphs that keep you going, this is a good thing.
Over the weekend Blaise’s reflux ramped up and he quit sleeping more than one hour at a time. Bryan and I took shifts through the nights, but after just a couple of them we were exhausted. It is extremely difficult to sleep while caring for a baby whose idea of a good long stretch of sleep is 60 minutes.
Then on Tuesday night, the first night we started medicating him for the reflux, Blaise slept two stretches that were more than two hours long, each! That’s almost five hours of sleep with only one feeding in the middle. By normal standards that is not exceptionally good. But our expectations had been lowered, so it was a banner night!
Another example, of the sort that always makes me want to laugh and smack my forehead at the same time: Camilla came into the bathroom while I was taking a shower earlier in the week and informed me that she had - ahem - filled her diaper. “And it leaked, Mama! And there’s poop on the floor!”
Yikes! I jumped out of the shower, towelled off as fast as I could, and followed Camilla into the living room (which is carpeted, by the way)...
...only to find that the leaked substance was not the disaster my daughter had described, but merely the other, much less offensive, possible result of diaper leakage.
Now, normally I would not be excited at the prospect of a child wetting on the carpet, but in this case I was happy to see that wet spot. I had expected it to be so much worse!
During the next couple months while we’re getting through these newborn days, I’m going to try to lower my expectations about small things on a regular basis. I don’t think of it as losing my optimism; I think of it as setting myself up for more pleasant surprises. It’s a good strategy for making life feel just a little bit easier and better!
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