What is love? Baby.

The lack of recent posts is attributable to the kitten's renewed protest against sleep. I think she's a bit excited about learning how to sit up and is generally disinterested in anything else - food, sleep, bathing...

So I'm a bit sleep deprived and busy keeping her entertained. We have done some sleep training to help her settle and I will write a bit more about that later. In the meantime, I wanted to post about something that people keep asking me when I meet up with them for the first time after having a baby.

Most of my friends are not parents, and they always wonder "what it's like". Such a vague, general question. I've been trying to come up with a succinct and comprehensible answer, and today it finally clicked in my brain. Ok, it's not as succinct as I'd like, but it's pretty good for someone as verbose as me.

Yes, it has something to do with A Night at the Roxbury. You know the song? What is love? Baby...

Don't sing the rest. That's it. What is love? Baby.

You know when you first meet someone and fall in love, it is all-consuming. You spend all your free time with them. You don't hang out with friends as much. You obsess about whether you're acting right and whether you're pleasing them. That is just like being a parent. It consumes you; you obsess.

But there's another side to falling in love. Everything they do is so wonderful and the tiniest gestures from them make you so happy. You think they're perfect in every way, even when they're imperfect. That is also just like being a parent.

The last thing is, with a child, that initial period of crazy love doesn't fade the way it might with a relationship. It hasn't gone away for me, and I'm pretty sure it never will.

Ok, I don't know if any of that made sense now that I've written it out. It does in my head.