Good parenting advice
A friend of mine, just had a baby. The irony of the whole thing is that she and her husband had been trying for about 2 years, and after that they started to get frustrated because they both really wanted a child. They looked into adoption resources and found a great agency and adopted a precious little boy who was about 3 months old. Well, not but a few weeks after they adopted him, my friend found out that she was pregnant. Needless to say, she and her husband were both shocked! They had believed that they would not be able to have children and here they were expecting child number 2. My friend was a little concerned about having two kids so close together in age and her mother kept trying to scare her, so she came to me for some parenting advice. I told her that at first it would be a bit challenging, but that having two kids close together gave them an opportunity to bond and experience a lot of things in life together. Also, in some ways it would make it easier, because their age range and interests would be similar and would allow for an easier planning of activities. Sometimes it can be difficult to plan family activities when children have too large an age gap that what interests one just bores the other, but she would have them right there enjoying their youth together. Well, she is really enjoying having two and when I went to see her, she was stressing over interviewing the people that the nanny agencies were sending her. She said that she really needs to find someone with a good deal of patience to handle two little ones at once. She is also looking for someone who is young and energetic and wants someone who will stay for a while, because she doesn't really want to keep changing nannies, she wants consistency for the kids. I told her those were really good ideas that she had as to what she was looking for, but I also felt that I needed to remind her that although she could find the perfect nanny they weren't going to be her, and she needed to keep a realistic perspective on the whole thing. I told her I would be glad to help her do the interviewing, and she said that she thought that would be a good idea. After all, two sets of eyes are better than one.