u/Effective-Ad7463

My son will be 2 at the end of the month and starting a Montessori program. He’ll be going two full days a week. There’s children there that he knows, I’ve seen incredible growth in these kiddos, and I think he’s ready and will truly benefit so much from all this.

My biggest anxiety right now is how to help prepare him for the napping environment. I’m a full-time SAHM, so currently I give him about 3oz of milk in a little sippy cup and rock my sweet baby to sleep while I sing to him then transition him to his bed. He’s sleeping in a crib currently (not tall enough to climb out but getting close) and his bedroom is dark but not completely blacked-out, and I also run a fan in his room for some white noise. So that’s all very different to napping surrounded by other kids and toys in a cot with a blanket and a pillow in a new environment. The one consistency is that nap time is the same there as it is at home.

He already has trouble napping at my parents house when he visit - this bed is a full-sized mattress with a mesh toddler gate around it in the room with all the toys.

He is fully sleep trained for bed time but nap time has been another story.

Anyways. How can I help start preparing him for this transition? Do I convert the crib to a toddler bed? Do I cut out the cup of milk? Do I need to stop rocking him (which would honestly kill me but whatever is best for him is what I’ll do). I’ll take any and all advice pretty please

And it’s lowkey upsetting. I’m a mom to a 23mo perfect messy wild child little boy. He’s incredible and fun and exhausting and wears me out. I only just started making mom friends. Im 31 and none of my friends have kids.

I’ve put myself out there and managed to scrounge up a mom friend who introduced me to her other mom friends. These women are actually perfect and SO welcoming to me and my son. They have it all together. They have these sweet well-behaved children and these daily schedules they seamlessly follow and clean lovely homes and they bake and craft and are soooo calm and well-regulated and are just everything I wish I could be. But I’m not.

I’m a very unstructured, go with the flow, make a mess and worry about it later, barefoot, doors open all day, dirt tracked in the house, chasing after a naked toddler, outside in the mud, make it up as I go along type of person. Even on my best days when I do manage to have a few “structured” days in a row.

It works for us, although I’m almost always an anxious stressed out mess on top of it all & always internally panicking & flailing to get basic chores done. So maybe it doesn’t really work but we get through the day and have fun and destroy the house.

I’m not trying to be someone I’m not. I’ve never been anywhere close to how these women are but wow do I feel like SHIT about myself after we hang out. Not like they mom shame me at all, nor do they try to make me feel like shit on purpose they’re genuinely nice people, but they do try to give me advice when I don’t ask for it and it’s like damn… am I just fucking up my kid? Am I raising him in a way that’s not setting him up for success as he gets older? Is it that obvious I’m just living in catch-up mode?

So now I’m just in a self-critical spiral getting emotional at the state of my house while my baby naps. And I want to try to find a balance of being more put together, feeling like a proper “mom” but still being myself. And idk what that looks like. It’s just so hard not to compare yourself to other moms. I can role my eyes at the “perfect parents” on social media but when it’s real life and it’s time after time seeing how other people live and raise their kids I cannot help but be like wtf am I doing and why can’t I do it like THAT.

These women were actually born to be mothers. I was not. The homemaker stuff isn’t my strong suit but neither is anything else so I’m just winging it and doing my best. I just feel so inadequate and I often feel like my son deserves so much better than me. Sometimes I wish I could go back and just not have any mom friends and live in my chaos bubble with my son again and not feel so shit. Idk I’m just venting. It’s hard. I just want to be the best mom I can be and I’m so scared I’m f*cking it all up.