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There’s no way to prepare for how much your life changes when you have a baby. There’s an entire industry built on making people feel prepared, but when you bring that baby home, you’re starting a brand new life. And no matter how many books you read, you have zero clue what you’re doing.
One of the biggest changes I struggled with when we had our first child, Caroline, was the fact that my time was no longer really my own. All those hours you spent reading, or playing video games, or going to the gym, or just idly staring at your phone? They’re all gone, and replaced by this little human that needs you to feed, change, and just kind of hold them all the time. And once they finally go to bed and you can breathe for a minute, oftentimes you’re too tired to do anything mentally engaging. You’re tapped out, and the stuff you used to do to relax and recharge is now too much to consider on top of your parenting and work duties. When Caroline was a newborn, the only TV show we could watch was Great British Baking Show. It didn’t require that we paid attention to a plot, we could pause it at any time and come back to it, and it was just so calm and nice. The thought of watching a plot-heavy show was simply more than we could handle at that time.
Slowly but surely, balance does return to your life. You figure out what you’re doing as a parent, and eventually those leisure activities do come back. Your time still isn’t really yours, but things are more predictable and reliable, and eventually you aren’t afraid to start something because of the possibility your kid wakes up early from a nap. And as weird as it seems, you forget what life was like before you had to juggle children on top of everything you did before.
Sounds good, right? Well, when a second kid comes along, it all goes out the window again.
(Go Bills)
One good thing about having a second child is that, theoretically at least, you know what you’re doing this time around and won’t make so many silly mistakes. When Caroline was a baby, we tried everything under the sun to help with what was probably some pretty normal spitting up issues. These ranged from normal remedies to the absurd, and at one point I found myself trying to gently pour formula into her mouth from a shot glass. It went about as well as you’d think. Anyway, we won’t be trying that again this time.
But even with the benefit of experience, having to wrangle two kids presents an entirely new problem that has a familiar feeling: all that free time I had gotten back is gone again. You can’t take a break if you get frustrated with your energetic and highly opinionated toddler because uh oh the baby isn’t going down for a nap when you thought she would. You’re always “on”, and that wears on you after a while.
But, you adjust. I’ve had to scale back my cooking to more simple, straight forward meals that don’t require intensive prep or hands-on cook time. I get my prep work done ahead of time when the kids are napping. I’ve learned that lots of dishes don’t suffer at all from being prepared ahead of time, and I don’t need to make things difficult by trying to get 2-3 different things finished at the same time. And I know that no matter how hectic and abbreviated things feel right now, it will get easier.
Humans are resilient creatures, and the added difficulty of balancing the needs of two girls under three is nothing compared to the joy I get from spending time with them and seeing them grow.
For New Year’s dinner, I wanted to stretch my legs a little and make something I hadn’t tried before. We made a big dish of traditional stuffing for Christmas dinner, so that was off the table. My wife suggested scalloped potatoes, which neither of us had eaten in years, and I went with this recipe for hasselback potato gratin.
Reader, I cannot endorse this dish strongly enough. I managed to slice 7 potatoes on a mandolin without severing a digit, which is always a nice bonus, but it was fairly simple to put together. You reassemble the potato slices into stacks so it’s not technically a true hasselback potato, but that’s not something I’m going to lose sleep about. The gruyere and parmesan cheese combined to make a deeply flavorful cheese sauce (along with a bunch of heavy cream, of course) that was complimented by loads of fresh thyme and black pepper. Once you had the dish assembled, it’s just a matter of waiting for the potatoes to cook all the way through. Adding additional cheese on top after it’s already been in the oven for a while made for a wonderful textural contrast, with the top getting nice and crisp while the inside stayed soft and creamy.
If you want cheesy potatoes, this dish is 100% worth the effort.
Yum! Made something very similar for Thanksgiving AND Christmas, but mine had leeks!
GBBS was our newborn show too. It's soothing, it's segmented, and you really don't have to learn the participants names until there's like six left (there's always a Norman, if not in name, in spirit)