When Perl started moving about in me - which I could feel very early on - I described her cartwheeling around in there like "I had swallowed a kitten".
Having never fancied babies, I was a little nervous about having my own. But I raised many a cat, so I figured if they are anything like kittens, it'll be easy.
Babies are like kittens. True.
Try to cut the claws on them and they turn into a ball of waving limbs impossible to catch.
They both fall asleep in my lap.
They both purr, though people call it snoring when babies do it.
They both try to catch shadows and sun reflections and get frustrated when they can't.
They both get their own toys but prefer to play with whatever the toy arrived in.
They both enter modes throughout the day, play-mode, cranky whining because they're hungry mode, sleep-mode and heart attack first then "life s great because I just pooped" mode.
They're both very suspicious of water and that whole "take a bath" idea, but if you hold them safe and take it easy they'll both come around.
They'll both knock things over and try and throw themselves off furniture giving me heart attack scares at least once a day.
See - they're just like kittens. ;)
Best buy before baby: The ImseVimse cloth diapers. Works great, the only thing I hate about these is that everyone who has no experience with cloth diapers keeps complaining that they must be hard to use, attacking the idea and expecting me to defend my choice. Pain in the arse. Let's break it down.
Paper diapers need to be put on and changed - Cloth diapers need to be put on and changed.
Paper diapers are thrown in the bin - Cloth diapers are thrown in the laundry box (sealable) dedicated for them.
Paper diapers need to be thrown away - Cloth diapers need to be thrown in the washing machine.
Paper diapers must be bought at a shop, trekking with huge packages when you are already dragging home loads of food - Cloth diapers must be taken out of the washing machine and dried.
Yeah the "work" here is the same. Plus, cloth diapers save lots of money, Mother Earth and help with earlier potty training. And that's not even mentioning the scares like, Disposable Diapers Linked to Asthma, and TBT Found in Disposable Diapers (tributyltin - a chemical compound which is known to disrupt sex hormones) which is the main reason I don't want that crap wrapping my daughters privates. Women give up all sorts of dangerous substances, smoking, alcohol, and aspirins and are warned about eating fish, meats, and eggs, and told to stay away from lovely cheese during their pregnancy. Then they wrap their babies up in TBT? It makes no sense to me - even if it turns out to be bunk you play the "better safe than sorry" card a lot during the pregnancy and breastfeeding, why not when it comes to the diapers?
easy-to-use
It's not like there is no alternative. A cheaper, easy-to-use alternative at that. So stop giving me grief about my cloth diapers, please. The hardest thing about them is people's attitudes toward them, their negative ideas on "how much work it is" being their main topic of conversation. This always coming from people who have nil experience with cloth diapers. Sorry mates, but don't knock what you haven't tried. Please.
Crappiest buy before baby: The BABYBJÖRN® Diaper Bag. Big, round, supposedly easy to grab things out of, the bag has never been able to close as the magnet doesn't work (this happened twice to a friend's bag as well) and the round shape of it just makes it clumsy.
I have to put it underneath the pram where it's hard to get to when taking her for a walk and when I'm pram-less it's just a big round dead weight on me, getting in the way and slamming into things. A big clumsy bag is the last thing you need when you are dragging a baby around. It drove me up the wall, and I've now replaced it with a computer bag from Muji.
Good luck to all those who are with kittens and babies. ;)
