Instant Gratification

Things have been a little quiet around the blog lately, I've been a busy adjusting to this whole parenting thing. Being a parent in many ways isn't as hard as I had thought it was going to be. Maybe its because I'm just such an awesome dad, or it could have something to do with Ruth doing basically all of the work. She has done an amazing job of adapting to motherhood and barely shows the stress of late night feedings, countless diaper changes, and all of the other demands involved. I try to help out when I can, and Sophia, for her part has made the whole parenting gig reasonably painless. She's a good baby (at lest in my uneducated opinion) and doesn't cry that much, and when she does she's usually easy to calm. She's just over 6 weeks now and already can smile, laugh and grab on to things.

Something that Ruth pointed out to me about Sophia and which is (currently) one of her strongest personality traits is that she's really into instant gratification. Not surprising in that she's a baby and they aren't know for their long term outlook on life. But Ruth and I were thinking that maybe she was onto something, we tend to be bad about putting off buying something we want or doing what we want to do. But we've decided that Sophia should be our role model and that we need a little more instant gratification in our lives. I think both for our sake, so we don't lose ourselves into parenting, but also for Sophia, we want her to grow up in a family that actually does things, goes places and has adventures. It is strange to think that as parents we need to make ourselves happy to improve our daughter's childhood. But if her parents never have instant gratification then what sort of environment will Sophia be being raised in? I think that is why Ruth has done so well as a mother, she understands that happy people make good parents. Depriving yourself because of your child (although often necessary to some extent) will only make you miserable, and humans have an amazing talent for inflicting their misery on those around them.

Enough of my night-time ramblings. Harvest approaches and I plan on writing something about that as soon as I get some more ambition up.