This week’s featured guest blogger is E from Jet’s Journey. Her post shares her experiences of city living with an infant!
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Hello all! I’m E and I blog over at Jet’s Journey. I’m so excited to be here today! Thank you for hosting me, Emily!
Speaking of bumps, let me tell you about one major challenge in our lives. A city. A big city. A bustling, busy, loud, stressful, aggravating, what-are-we-doing-here kind of city.
We committed ourselves to be natural parents before J was born. One such commitment was cloth diapers. Lest I remind you, we live in an apartment…sans washer/dryer. Multiple times a week, we lug a very large, very heavy bag of laundry down 4 flights of stairs to the coin-operated laundry machines in the basement. Very discreetly, so as not to disgust our neighbors, I dump a wet bag full of dirty diapers in the wash. Doing laundry is not a challenge in and of itself – it’s coordinating with T to ensure it gets done every other day. Otherwise, you don’t want to mess with the mess in a wet bag. Yuck.
In order to not overwhelm our tiny home, we’ve had to make sacrifices in terms of our possessions, including baby items. We only have a few toys for J (I understand this will have to be revisited when he’s older) and we only used a small portable swing when he was a newborn. Now, we use his Bumbo and Stokke highchair…or plop him on the floor to wiggle and squirm. T and I have minimized our books, shoes, and clothing to create more room for him. I have come to realize it is not a bad thing to have to purge when the house becomes cluttered. It really does improve our quality of life in this small apartment.
Getting around the city is another stressor I could do without. J’s pediatrician is only 8 miles from our home. In any other town, this would take 10 – 15 minutes. Not here. It takes us 45 minutes from door to door, on a good traffic day. Those first early weeks when J visited the pediatrician often, we would spend hours in the car. I would have to plan nursing sessions around the travel and often opted to just nurse him right in the car. Thankfully, J is very tolerable of his carseat. T and I, on the other hand, do most of the screaming from our seats. City drivers are the worst.
While there are many, many more frustrations, I would not change these last 5 months for the world. I love that J’s first home is an apartment in a city. I love that we have to work together to get through these challenges – and we always come out ahead. We have access to museums, jobs, parenting resources, fantastic restaurants, a multitude of libraries, the arts…all things we might not have had if we moved away when we first saw that plus sign back in the summer of 2010.
So for J’s first year of life, we will stay in this tiny apartment.
We will live happily in this city.
We will take advantage of all that it has to offer us.
We will fight to stay positive.
But, most importantly, we will love living as a family of 3.
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Thanks so much for this great post, E! City living with an infant sounds like quite the adventure! If you’re interested in hearing more from E, you can read her blog or find her on Facebook. For more information on how you can be a guest blogger for Nap Time is My Time, please visit this page.
I seriously love this post!! I love the fact that you are natural parenting as well as your love for your city, I think it is fabulous to raise a kid in the city.
Coming over from E’s blog to read her post! It does sound like quite the adventure, but a happy one too. I think her family is learning a very critical lesson, you don’t need much to raise a baby, which I feel like people with space forget.