2013
To Sleep or Not To Sleep
I had a fairly significant epiphany a few weeks ago in regards to the never-ending saga of Fox not sleeping, and although I’m afraid the epiphany did not include any pass-alongable advice about actually getting my child (or yours) to sleep through the night, I feel like it’s worth mentioning because (a) it still might help someone and (b) I have a feeling I’m going to have to learn this lesson again and again, so I might as well learn it from myself.
Here it is:
I don’t just want Fox to sleep, I want him to sleep how I want him to sleep. Rookie mistake.
The corollary/solution to the above is that if I…er, if we can rein ourselves in and give up the fantasy that it’s possible to completely override this [crazy] infant’s biological set-up, we can actually get him to sleep just fine, provided he’s doing it the ways he can and does best (swaddled, in motion, in small increments, and stuffed with a pacifier made out of boob and attached to yours truly). This arrangement isn’t ideal for the rest of us but it is, nevertheless and all things considered, still SLEEEEEEEEEEP SWEET LIFE-AFFIRMING SLEEEEEEEEEEP, and we’re at the point now when that singular goal trumps all else. I don’t know whether I’d call this shift of paradigms resigning, giving up, coming to our senses, or letting the baby win, but you can call it whatever you like so long as it significantly reduces the incidence of hour-long crying jags at 2 a.m. while we try to convince each ourselves he’s totally just seconds away from soothing himself back to sleep even though he’s got a death grip on the crib rail and is bouncing up and down on the mattress like a caged chimp hooked up to electrodes.
Ideal: I want him to sleep from 8ish at night to 8ish in the morning without waking up. I want him to sleep in his own bed the whole time. I want him to sleep unswaddled. I want him to nap in the afternoon for at least an hour at a time, in his bed, unswaddled. Currently we’re 0 for 6 on most days, and it’s keeeelling meeeee. (“Why can’t you be more like your brother?”) That we keep shooting for these goals is what, I’m slowly coming to realize, is making the process feel like a nightly bout of shooting ourself in our collective parenting foot like morons. It has to stop.
Now…if I just want the baby to sleep, no conditions attached? That’s accomplished easily enough. In fact, it’s so simple it’s stupid. He likes the swing, he likes the swaddle, he likes the car seat, he likes our bed and its roll-up all-night open bar. We’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty, whoozits and whatzits galore. Thingamaboobs? I’ve got two. That’s all he really wants.
A month or so ago I was sent a review copy of Harvey Karp’s latest book, The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep (but this is not a sponsored review!), and as I read it (in random parking lots during Fox’s car naps) I kept waiting to find something useful about getting the kid to stay asleep without help. It seemed to be more about soothing than sleep training as I knew it (we Ferber-lited Wombat for three days before he claimed his the spot as the Best Sleeper Ever), and talking to people on Twitter confirmed that yeah, the Happiest Baby method is more about soothing and therefore contains lots and lots of soothing tricks and advice (and I recommend it to anyone who needs help in that area, especially if you’re having your first baby), but unfortunately we don’t need soothing tricks and advice, and that’s why I once shattered a parking lot nap by shouting “Baloney!” at a book. In short, I want to train my kid to not need me to soothe him to sleep, and I certainly don’t want to train him to expect it, you know? At one point the text said something like “You may have to do this technique fifty times in a row in one night,” to which my response was a less polite version of “Fuck that shit!”
Ahem.
Anyway, I already know how to soothe him. (Boob.) I know how to get him to sleep without any tears. (Boob.) I know how to make him go right back to sleep if (WHEN) he wakes up in the middle of the night. (Boob.) After weeks of twenty-minute crib snoozes that weren’t long enough for me to check my email let alone accomplish other pressing tasks like take a shower, do the dishes, or organize the entire house, I even finally figured out how to get him to take a decent afternoon nap: drive him around the greater Bay Area or let him sway to sleep in the swing he’s way too big for. (When he’s awake, he can rock back and forth in the swing with such force it shimmies across the hardwoods like something out of the Jetsons, which I’m guessing falls under the WARNING: DANGER section of the manual and not the SPECIAL FEATURES one.)
Today he took a two-and-a-half-hour(!) nap in his car seat while I sat up front and read a book just for fun. Here in the land of post-sleep-epiphany, I’m glad to say that now, instead of driving home and taking the car seat inside, which inevitably wakes him up and dashes all hopes of getting something productive done, I’ve learned I’m better off just letting him sleep in the car while I take advantage of that forced “me time.” A different kind of person might even use that opportunity to take a nap herself. (I’m writing on a new campaign for CafeMom, and one of my first posts is about how I ignore all advice to sleep when the baby sleeps because naps make me ragey. If this is you too, you are not alone.)
Anyway, that example is the perfect illustration of the New Way of Things. If the baby wants to sleep in the car, I’m going to let him sleep in the car, and I’m going to try reeeeeally hard not to be bitter about it. It’s exhausting not getting uninterrupted rest at night, but it’s even more exhausting spending every day (and night) negotiating sleep when the monologue goes, “Is today a good day to be an Enforcer, or do we really all just need to take the easy way out and get some rest however we can?” That kind of inconsistency will obviously kill any kind of training plan, and besides, the answer is pretty much always that we really all just need to get some rest however we can. Neither of us is never like, “Nah, tonight feels like a fine time to just let him cry and fuss and whine until we feel like digging out our eardrums with a grapefruit spoon!”
It’s a bummer that our non-sleep-trained kid is making us miss out on certain things (we can’t really go out on a date, and we’re probably cancelling our trip to the Mom 2.0 conference over my birthday weekend because we can’t leave a baby overnight with anyone we don’t hate, and I’m not keen on leaving my children with someone I do hate), but it’s also a bummer to keep applying sleep strategies that aren’t working, even though they were easy and magical for our naturally easy and magical first kid. And here’s where I’d like to say that if I ever assumed the cry-it-out technique only failed for parents who were doing it wrong, I was wrong to assume that. I still think Ferber is worth a shot (when it works, it tends to work FAST and MIRACULOUSLY), but if you have a baby like Fox who doesn’t cry it out but cries it up to 11, I guess all we can do is try our best to do our best, which is what all of us are already doing anyway, isn’t it? Fifty gold stars and sympathetic back pats for everyone!
2013
Between the Lines
My blogging fingers have been itchy while I’ve been busy doing other things like hosting parties, dusting my home and everyone I love with glitter, attending a child’s birthday celebration with twenty-six kids and their parents with my fly down the entire time (winning!), putting heavy things on Fox’s head to keep him from just standing up in the middle of the room like an actual biped or something (losing!), and composing blog posts dominated by nervous laughter as I reveal I’m, ha ha ha, OMGPREGNANTAGAINNOOOOOOO, hee hee hee?, although I’m happy to say that one stopped as soon as I could confirm it was a false alarm (OMGOMG). I’ve been doing a book project for work, sneaking in freelance blogging here and there, and trying to be very patient with the schizo spring weather, which is easier said than done some days, as I’m sure you can relate, even those of you whose “good” spring weather means the icicle hanging from the end of your nose is melting rather than embiggening. Although it never feels like the best use of my time to steal the baby’s naps to journal here when the dirty dishes are stacked eyebrow high and the cat box has actual cartoon stink lines wiggling off it into the air, I never, ever, ever, ever regret it. That whole bit about “warm family memories are more precious than a clean kitchen” (I made that up) turns out to be true (and not just because I made it up). I’ve been thinking about what has changed in the way I write here now compared to how I did a decade ago, and although I think the realization that it might have made more interesting reading when I was pulling significant stories from my past instead of just recounting what we did last weekend, and the one before that, and the one before that, I also know Future Me will be happy to have whatever it gets out of this tangle of brain translated into pixels, and you can bet your butt Present Me is happy to have these minutes of downtime put a pretty frame around the scenes that aren’t always so picture-perfect as they’re being created.
Wombat’s on Spring Break from preschool (margaritas by the pool bar at 10 a.m. wooooooooo), so I only have a few minutes before I have to go rescue him from Netflix (mini-plug for the new WiiU, which has a touchscreen, so four-year-olds can navigate the movie menu themselves!). I’ll wipe the drool off Miserable Teething Baby’s nap-wrinkle face, put on some pants, and then take the boys out for some old-timey Vitamin D, the kind that doesn’t come from the bathroom cabinet via medicine dropper. I can’t think of a better way to avoid the dishes and the glitter and the packing list for our impending road trip than to spend the afternoon in a park (unless there’s a real possibility of having a margarita by the pool bar, in which case I choose that).
Here are a few photos from our life lived in between the lines.
Deshaggifying:
Red, read:
St. Patrick’s Day:
Chick nest:
Simon almost worked here:
First school playdate (hi, Jessica!). They found some abandoned cake pops and were this close to eating them, although something tells me if I hadn’t stopped them the girl in the background would have:
“Gardening.” Well, digging in the garden, at least:
Spring:
Gratuitous munchfaces:
You know you have a true friend in the person who will spend Sunday morning reading to your bony-butt boy from the dictionary while he tries not to spill cafe au lait on her lap:
And, finally, a shameless promo of what has quickly become a beloved craft blog: here’s how we’re doing Easter eggs this year.
What have YOU been doing? (This is not a lame way to end the post–well, it’s not JUST a lame way to end a post–I really do care what you’re up to. Seeing how people spend their springtime is always a kick because some of you are buried in snow and some of you are walking on sunshine (whooooaaa) and some of you are having margaritas by the pool and I will try not to hate you. So please do share [your margaritas].
2013
These Colors Don’t Run (They Walk)
Ever since I saw photos of Amber after her Color Run last year, I knew the “Happiest 5K” was A Thing For Me To Do. I’m famously rubbish at life lists, so I didn’t bother declaring it a formal goal, I just closed my eyes and clicked when I landed on the registration page one afternoon. Closed-eyed clicking goes against my very nature, but/and it’s just exactly what I need to do every now and then.
Also equally against my nature and good for me? Running. This is where I’m especially glad for my half-pint tag-along teammates, who I hoped were obviously burden enough to convince the 9,996 other people at the event that I wasn’t “slow” and “out of shape,” I was “accommodating” my children because I’m “nice” like that.
Lordy but I’m slow and out of shape. All told, I jogged a grand total of about two minutes, made up of tiny spurts that lasted just long enough for me to remember that the sinus malady I’ve suffered valiantly for going on three weeks now makes my teeth hurt when I do anything more strenuous than tap at my phone with both thumbs like a science mouse pushing a lever for kibble. Meanwhile, Wombat took a break atop Simon’s shoulders every now and then, Fox fell asleep in the stroller while we were standing in front of a giant loudspeaker waiting for our wave to start (AND YET YOU REFUSE TO NAP AT HOME, CHILD?), and in the end we finished almost dead last, which meant nothing more than that the official color throwers were being extra generous by the time we passed their way.
I thought it was fun. Wombat thought it was the FUNNEST THING EVER. I’d painted our nails in matching rainbows (note his varied look-at-mah-nails poses), and I didn’t let myself think of the laundry until after we’d crossed the finish line as a messy, happy kaleidoscopic team. Afterward, I waited with the baby while Simon introduced Wombat to his first dance pit, from which they emerged drenched in ROYGBIV and joy, hands pink from powder and high-fiving strangers. Fox was lightly dusted with wonder. I was considering dyeing my hair permanently blue because why the hell not?
Sir? It looks like you’ve got a little something behind your ear.
It was pretty great. I don’t think I can honestly add “Ran a 5K” to my list of did-dos after this, but none of what that means–accomplishment, fitness, hipster cred–is what this was about.
Two final words: Technicolor boogers.
