The Baby Buffer – Mommy Blogger

01/25/2018

Jillian Guenter. I’m a 24-year-old wife and new mom to our daughter “Baby G”, as I refer to her in my blogs.  She is the new adventure in our marriage and the smile bringer to our everyday.  She is the main character in my stories lately, as she teaches me something new every day.  I love writing about her and the everyday happenings of mommy life, so I’m extremely excited to join this blogging group!

Babies get a bad rap for wreaking havoc on relationships.  And I’d be lying if I denied the fact that they bring with them a whole chest of tools designed to dampen romantic moments, divert attention towards themselves, away from anyone else in the room and provide last-second spit-ups on your only clean, somewhat sexy shirt.  Babies are their own form of birth control, there’s no doubt about it.  But relationship-wise, it’s not all bad.  In fact, something I like to call the Baby Buffer can be an amazing tool for relationships.

The first way the Baby Buffer can be effectively used is to break somewhat undesirable news in a way that is sure to get a more positive response.  Example A.  Person 1, let’s call her Mom, accidentally opens the Jeep door too quickly resulting in a small, almost undetectable scratch, while person 2, let’s call him Dad, is at work.  Person 1, aka Mom, knows that, although her eyes can barely make out this mark, it will somehow draw immediate attention to person 2, aka Dad, when he gets home.  She needs to think of a plan, and wha-la, the Baby Buffer can save the day.  When Dad gets home, Mom can conveniently be having a fun conversation with Baby in the high chair while she makes supper.  When Dad enters the kitchen, she can, in a cute baby voice, say to Baby, “Shhhh, don’t tell Daddy about the teensy tiny mishap we had today with the vehicle.”  Person 2, Dad, can then respond, with a cute Baby voice by asking the Baby if she will tell him how this teensy tiny mishap happened. Mom can remind Baby, in that cute happy voice, that it was just a little tiny scratch that appeared after tapping the door on the side of a shopping cart.  Daddy can then remind Baby, in a cute, loving voice that she and Mommy should be more careful opening doors in parking lots but that a little scratch is ok.   As Baby laughs and claps her hands to the attention she is getting through a happy sounding story, the Baby Buffer has successfully diverted a possibly tense conversation.

The second way a Baby Buffer can be effective is by providing a strong word filter and voice level capping system.  Enormous amounts of research point out babies’ ability to detect voice levels and intonations that are positive or negative.  As many parents do, we strive to use positive, gentle voices with and around Baby G.  With this comes a careful attention to the vocabulary we use around her.  It’s exciting and alarming how quickly she adds new words to her vocabulary.  The Baby Buffer heightens our careful sentence choices when talking to each other.  A teacher I had in elementary school once told us to let our sentences swirl around and down the twirly slide in our minds before we let them out, to make sure it’s what we wanted to say.  Our Baby Buffer is a slide from a five-story building.  Often, by reserving negative jabs or pokes at each other for later, the feelings end up dissolving and they don’t get said at all.  In being careful about how we speak around Baby G, we talk to each other with more love and respect as well.

The third way the Baby Buffer is useful is as a diversion.  We all have those days where a conversation, a situation or a general aura just isn’t going well.  It seems like these are the moments when babies come up with the most outrageous, hilarious ideas and the tension is broken.  In these moments, Mommy and Daddy may disagree on something, but their mutual love and affection for Baby makes them forget it all.  A shared laugh and group hug over whatever ridiculous attempt Baby just made, can boost a relationship like nothing else in the world.

Parenting is hard work, and it brings all kinds of stresses and strains you’d never have imagined pre-kids.  But Babies bring so much joy, laughter and fun that out-weigh the struggles.  And all the ways babies perpetuate love, is just another reason to love being a mom so darn much.