Having a child means having to relearn old things. They don’t know how to eat or drink, or basically do anything useful. It’s rather impressive how useless human beings are as babies. Luckily we have such large brains, because without those, our inability to care for ourselves would leave us at the bottom of the animal food chain.
However, now that I have Maverick, I’m excited and daunted by the task of being the one to teach him these things. I think about some of my favourite sports that I want to teach him. Like skiing.
How am I going to teach a kid how to ski? Where do I start? What if he hates it? Is he going to be warm enough? So many worries about something that is supposed to just be fun. But the fun comes once they learn these new skills.
Maverick learning to walk started by having him on his belly, so he would strengthen his neck by lifting it up.This led to sitting up, then crawling, then walking. We have to start so far back and build these fundamental skills to be able to have them complete the task.
Now I can’t stop Maverick from running around the house.
These more basic skills seem rather long-winded, taking months to complete to get from potato-stage-baby to walking toddler.
The more scary notion of potty training has started to fill my head, of how disgusting the process will be. Not only disgusting, but probably very frustrating. I mean, how do you even teach a toddler how to wipe themselves? I’m not looking forward to teaching this task.
Then as you think about the future you wonder how long you will be able to teach them old things or if you’re even able to remember how to do certain things. Like math homework. How many grades can I still be able to help him before I start forgetting how to do the quadratic function? It’s not like I’ve used all these skills in my life, so I have to relearn them to teach them.
Having a child can seem rather daunting when you think of the 18-plus years you have to try and ensure that you create a decent human being.
