The Hardest Part

2025-10-30

I think that being pregnant is really hard, it looks really hard. My wife has done it twice and both times seemed really hard. Being tired, eating more, getting heavier, getting morning sickness sometimes, hard to walk at the end, unable to fly, on and on. It is wild that a woman can go through that and at the end, fingers crossed, you get a baby.

And I am still kind of a new Dad, we have a 3.5 year old and a 1 year old, so perhaps this will change as my kids get older. But man the first year, and even the first two years are really really hard.

During the first 6 months the infant doesn’t sleep well, they are up every few hours. They cry a ton, it is their only way of communicating, they rely fully on milk for food, the mom has to pump or breast feed. It is just a poop, milk, crying chaos.

And I think that between the 6 months and 1.5 years it gets marginally better. The kid goes from milk to food. They can kind of communicate better but they still cry a ton. They get teeth which hurt them. Still very hard.

And it gets easier after that, they start to talk and point and stuff. You can tell what they want and they can communicate other than just crying.

And the point of this blog is that, it seems like a bit of a cruel joke that the hardest part of child rearing (so far) happens right after birth. I know this is probably a biological thing, and humans are evolved for modern life, but as a woman you carry this baby for 9 months, and finally it comes out of you, and then it starts out with the hardest bit of child raising. Kids start out the most difficult and then steadily get easier (or get difficult is different ways).

-Gary