Mine and my husbands Google history would make possibly interesting and definitely concerning reading from during the time our baby was a newborn. We literally Googled everything!! Every fart, every snuffle, every cry…the list goes on and on and on! We were unhinged!
“Where is the line between tired and overtired and why do we keep blundering, heads down right on through it?”
“Why does my newborn sound like a pig in a pillow case?”
“Why do I cry every time I watch an advert about nappies?”
“Is my baby breathing?”
The latter I Googled after checking my baby was breathing, lying down and getting up to check that she was breathing again, waking my husband up to make sure she was definitely breathing, flicking all the lights on….just for a very clear check… and then confirmed when the lights all woke her up and made her cry.
Turns out yes she was breathing. She proved that by very loudly crying for an hour. That was real…. real fun!
Our parents found it fairly comical, older relatives reminded us that humans have populated the earth quite successfully surviving for centuries before Google, that we were in fact, products of parents that didn’t have access to all of the answers at their fingertips.
Googling became second nature to us. We would be tying a question before we’d even realised we were typing a question!
“How many times should a baby poop in a day?”
“No….really….is it normal for a human being to poop that many times in one day?”
“Seriously….it cannot be normal for a human being to produce that much poop!”
“Why is my baby crying for no reason?”
“Can babies smell fear?”
“Can you die from sleep deprivation?”
“Why do I suddenly find Jeremy Clarkson attractive…..is this sleep deprivation?”
I cannot divulge if the last one was a question from me or my husband!
Thankfully, as it turns out, our behaviour was completely normal. I know because I Googled it. It’s easy to think in the middle of the night, when you’re deep in the trenches that you are the only one struggling. It turns out that pretty much every modern parent has done the same thing and I’m here to tell you that eventually, you do stop with the 3am Googling and everything will start to fall into place as though it was second nature. You will trust yourself more.
And don’t forget folks, that if it doesn’t, you can always mix it up a little with a bit of ChatGPT.