What to Expect When Your Friends Are Expecting
What’s the best (or worst) gift anybody got you when you were about to have a kid? I hear that tiny little baby shoes are actually sort of useless because kids grow out of them so quickly. Is this true?
Mike:Baby shoes are definitely a common gift, because it’s objectively hilarious and adorable to see tiny versions of shoes adults might also wear. We received many pairs of tiny Converse All-Stars for our daughter, and we appreciated them all, especially since they were in a wide range of colors and shapes.
Kristin: I like hats with ears. I am a big fan of hats with ears. Anything that makes a child look more like a puppy, I think. It’s hard to think of a terrible gift, but I don’t really like baby shoes. At least not ones with laces or anything. And yet I love baby socks. Baby socks are the best. They’re so small!
Best (or worst) piece of advice you got? Preferably these are things I can lift and then re-use in my own social life to impress my other friends with kids.
Kristin: Oh, well. So I’m the kind of person who hates all kinds of advice because I’m an obnoxious dickhead who is pretty sure that I know what’s best for me at all times. But while, for most of my life, I’ve been able to just tune out annoying advice, when I was pregnant and then when I had a new baby, it was terrible. People would question my decisions to drink coffee, to cross my legs, to sleep on my right side instead of my left, what kind of birthing method I was choosing, whether or not I was using cloth or disposable diapers, etc. It was the worst. This is the time to just keep your mouth shut around your friends, lest they hate you forever.
Mike: One of the most important things I realized about this whole thing actually came as a result of receiving so much contradictory advice from other people. I remember being at the hospital in the days after my kid was born, and one nurse would come in and say something like, “You should never wake a sleeping baby!” Then when her shift would end, another nurse would come in and be like, “She has to eat every two hours! You definitely have to wake her up!” Everyone was always so adamant about everything, but there are so many vastly different opinions on basically every single parenting topic you can think of that I immediately came to the conclusion that almost nothing matters as much as you think it does and as long as you are not a total idiot, everything will probably just be fine.
