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The Baby Swing Dilemma

crossroad.jpgOnce again I find myself at a crossroads where my kids are concerned. On a side note, if you never saw the 80s movie “Crossroads” with Karate Kid’s Ralph Macchio, I highly recommend it.

Anyway, this crossroad decision involves whether or not to wean my oldest son away from the swing or not. With my first son, it was all about the swing. Swing at night, swing at naptime during the day, swing, swing, swing. With my youngest son, almost a year old now, he’s been actually very good about sleeping in his crib, only requiring the swing during the daytime and generally, any time we really just need him to calm down and rest.

This “calm down and rest” time also happens to occur every morning between 4:30 – 5:30 a.m. when we adults are still trying to squeeze a few extra minutes out of our slumber or trying to get ourselves ready for work unencumbered by a clamoring baby. However, I’m not immune to the fact that while this may work for now, sometime in the next additional pound or two, that puny Fisher-Price swing motor is going to go kaput like the two before it and we’ll be left hanging with a crying baby at 5:30 in the morning.

Personally, I’m a cold-turkey kind of person. When I set my mind to doing something, or stop doing something in this case, I just stop. I don’t dial it down gradually—nossir, I’m all about nipping it in the bud—and permanently!

CareerMom is not.

So unless I want to get into a mild argument with her over the swing, any attempts that I make to stop using it will be usurped by her at her earliest convenience. So I’m stuck over what to do. I guess like most things, you just cross that bridge when you get to it.

I also still have about 20 pairs of disposable earplugs if things get too bad.

Chris Souther's avatar

By Chris Souther

Chris joined the Air Force out of high school. After four years of supporting communications for the Department of Defense, the White House, and stations around the world, he left the military and moved to Atlanta. For the next six years, Chris continued working in the telecom field, eventually traveling around the country teaching companies like MCI, Nortel Networks, and Cabletron, how to do what he did.

When the dot.com crash happened, upon recommendation from his wife, Chris re-enrolled in school and earned his B.S. in Communications (PR & Marketing).

Since then, he was worked in network security, healthcare, banking and finance (and FinTech), general high tech (AI/ML, Cloud, IoT), and most recently, application development fields. Now, with more than 15 years of both Marketing and Communications under his belt, he helps organizations grow their business through the proper application of marketing, communications, and content.

And he blogs on the side. It keeps him sane.

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