I guess if you don't have a 7-month-old at home the joke is a bit lost on you. It's not very original, either. Babies spit, pee and poop a lot.
Ours in particular has, on a good day, managed to pee off the diaper changing station several times within a few hours, usually either onto me, or onto a pile of clothes. He has also had trajectory poops that shot across the diaper changing station straight onto my shirt. And the floor.
And the spit up. Oh, the spit up.
All these are problems that solve themselves, by the way. He barely spits up anymore these days, his poops have grown less frequent, and it's been a while since I've bathed in baby pee.
(Also the little angel is holding a pair of glasses. Remember, glasses will be the most expensive toy your baby will ever play with, except if you're one of those snob parents who actually buy expensive baby toys. But at least they will love playing with those glasses)
No but this is exactly what I mean when I say western ideas of childrearing have moved so, so far away from childfriendly methods it's scary. For hundreds of thousands of years, babies and children would never sleep alone! Of course they wouldn't, that's dangerous!
Babies still operate on hunter-gatherer DNA, but modern parents expect them to be able to sleep in their own room in their own bed from day one because "it's safe inside the house and they have no reason to complain"
And then american parents in particular lock their children away at night and let them cry in fear for hours upon hours and they call it "sleep training" when in reality it's child abuse.
Babies need their parents at night. Training them to sleep alone will not make them more independent or mature, there have been studies on that. All it will do is teach them to sleep alone and probably have bonding issues for the rest of their lives. And then you wonder why anxiety disorders are so prevalent in our countries.
I slept with my mother on and off until I was about ten years old. I am as independent as can be. Sleeping with parents and/or siblings is so deeply ingrained in babies' DNA, they are literally programmed to do exactly that.
We expect babies to be mature and understand logic at an age that is several years too early, when developmentally it is impossible for them to understand what we want from them. We don't let them be babies and children anymore, don't acknowledge that they need other people around, all the time, to feel comfortable.
Co-sleeping, when done right, is one of the most powerful means of protection against SIDS, but because people listen to outdated studies done by doctors without children, they treat co-sleeping like the root of all evil of childrearing.
when the snivelling little boy you used to torture escapes and returns eleven years later, after having gone through a major glow-up and you're beginning to realise that maybe he's not so unattractive after all
reading Those Years in Quest of Honour Mine after erha 4 is like taking a big breath of fresh air after staying in a stuffy room for too long.
This novel is delightful! I'm actually laughing reading it!
The comedy of Yu She abducting Lin Si and threatening him with torture, just to get to Zhong Wan's childhood name, that's inspired.
Also, there's plot (very political but I'm still mostly following so far), side characters (Xuan Congxin my beloved) and one of the best premises I have read so far (Oh, you're spreading rumours about me? Alright, I'll make you act out scenes from romance novels about us then).