At the Speed of Baby

I’ve been re-learning what it is like to pace life at the speed of baby. Babies learn things slowly, at least compared to most adults or teens. My grandbaby has spent several months slowly learning how to move his hands and be able to manipulate things with his fingers. It has been a joy to watch, but it reminds me to slow down and not to be impatient about how life sometimes moves very slowly. Watching him in the bathtub as he learns to understand the water and not be scared of it, then as he reaches for things and slowly learns how to play with them—this is a useful reminder to me that I don’t need to race and time everything as I have a tendency to do.

I love sitting out on my back lawn and holding the baby on my lap. He will just stare at the sky for several minutes, or flap his hands to figure out what the texture of the chair I am sitting on is like—something that hadn’t occurred to me as a thing of interest until he was there. It is very soothing to sit with him and let him turn each page on the board books that I’ve got from the library. He likes to turn pages now that he can and now that he understands that this is one of the features of books that he can do by himself. But I have to wait to let him do it as his speed.

When I take him to the playground near my house, I like to let him work his way down the slide himself. I put him at the top and he has to scoot forward or use his arms to push against the sides of the slide until he has created enough momentum to go down the slide. I try to let him be in charge of this himself. Some days he does it in a few seconds. Other days, it takes long minutes, maybe more than ten, before he decides to push himself down. He is enjoying himself, smiling at me, flapping his hands, figuring out the texture of the metal and plastic around the slide, noticing the dog as it goes past with its owner, then the runner as he goes by. I could call this a “distraction,” but really I think it is just moving at the speed of baby. No rush, just enjoying all of the parts of all of the things.

I’ve been telling my kids my new theory of spending time with a baby: there are only fun things. Changing a diaper is fun. Cleaning up spit up is fun. Washing a baby who has pooped extravagantly is fun. Cleaning up the banana that baby got half on his face, half on the floor, half on me—all fun. Even holding a crying baby is really, really fun.

I admit that sometimes, moving at the speed of baby is fast. When baby is screaming that he wants to have his bottle right now, he doesn’t want me to mosey my way to getting the bottle to his mouth. When he is scared of the dogs I am currently watching for my daughter, he doesn’t want me to slowly pick him up off the floor.

But also, part of my job is to calm him down, to hold him tight, to whisper to him that I’m here, to tell him that everything will be fine in just a minute. I help him go at a slower pace sometimes, too. I have found that since I started spending six hours a day with the grandbaby, my mood has improved enormously. I think there are many factors going into this, but surely one of the most important ones is just that I am not hurrying to get to the next thing on a long list of never-ending tasks to be completed. During my golden time with grandbaby, I don’t have things to do, not really. Eat breakfast and take a bath, yes. Make sure to get baby a nap when he needs it, but the other things—going to the library for storytime or to the playground or the Aquarium now and again—these are bonuses and completely optional.

Moving at the speed of baby has been really good for me to learn that slowing down and NOT doing anything at all is really something that all humans need. Even me.