Archive for the 'bed time' Category

The Co-Sleeper Is Gone … And Time Marches On

Published
by
Melissa
on November 30, 2009
in balance, bed time, change, daycare, discomfort verus pain, inner peace, intentions versus goals, letting instead of making, motion, sense of self, the bigger picture, trust and you can't control everything
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3 Comments

Next to my side of the bed there is a large, clean(ish) patch of floorboards.  On the other side of that large, clean(ish) patch of floorboards there is room to open the drawers on the left side of my dresser.  In between there is space for my discarded shoes and socks to breathe without having to tussle with Mike’s.

What is not on my side of the bed any longer is the co-sleeper.

For those unfamiliar with this piece of modern baby-raising apparatus, the co-sleeper is a not particularly attractive crib-like thing that attaches to the side of the bed.  The idea is to more or less sleep with your baby while theoretically eliminating the risk of inadvertently crushing her.  (Couldn’t one still throw a sleep-heavy, errant arm on top of the innocent sleeping child? I wonder.  Best, I suppose, not to contemplate the possibility, as I’m not a limbs-flinging sort of sleeper anyhow.)

Given my love of the middle road, the co-sleeper is the perfect invention, a detente in the polarized sleeping-with-baby debate, a way to hush Lily back to sleep in the middle of the night without ever having to leave the cocoon of my down duvet wrapped around me in the hours since kicking Mike out of bed for snoring.

Just as Lily has grown up with the scent and sound of me sleeping a foot away, I have come to love the feel of her within arm’s reach.  I have become certain that there is nothing better upon awakening than propping up on an elbow to watch my angel sleep.  Except, perhaps, that moment when her eyes pop open and she greets me with a big, sunny morning grin.

Only now the co-sleeper is gone, the victim of increasing baby mass and the fact that I have been dying to get to those dresser drawers for eight months now and just can’t wait any longer.

And in that once longed-for space is a big empty hole.  Sort of like the one in my heart.

Continue reading ‘The Co-Sleeper Is Gone … And Time Marches On’

High Winds with a Likelihood of Anxiety

Published
by
Melissa
on October 9, 2009
in awareness, bed time, centering, chattering mind, discomfort verus pain, forgiveness, letting go, practice, respecting your body, sleep, surrender and yoga class
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There are those (my husband) who will think me a little bit nutty for saying this, but windy days breed anxiety.

One might suggest that I am simply looking for something other than my mother to blame my anxiety on.  And that may be the case.  But I have it on good authority — my acupuncturist, no less — that I am on to something.  Windy days make us feel ungrounded, scattered, and, yes, for someone prone to anxiety like me, anxious.

If I require more proof — which I don’t — I need look no further than yesterday morning, when the wind rattled the maple trees in our front yard and rained bits of debris on the tin roof while I held my puzzled, hungry baby in my arms sobbing, “It’s not your fault!  It’s not your fault!”

Anxious.  Crazy.  Indeed

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Turn, Turn, Turn … or Not: What I Learned at Six Months

Published
by
Melissa
on October 2, 2009
in Mama instinct, bed time, breathing, change, communicating, compassion, daycare, expectations, feeding my child, forgiveness, illness, intentions versus goals, letting instead of making, sleep, structure, yoga class and you can't control everything
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3 Comments

“Yep,” Mike confirmed the other day.  “Lily’s acting like a normal baby.”

He said this after our first sunny fall day in the park.  After Lily and I arrived with her pouting in her stroller because I decided that much as she was demanding it I was simply not up to the task of walking to the park with her in the Ergo.  After yet another night of our power struggle over when she got to wake me up to nurse (as opposed to just waking me up) and how many times.  And after I summarily dumped her in Mike’s arms and walked away to chat with some other adults.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with acting like a normal baby when you are, pretty much, a normal baby.  You get to fuss.  You get to yell at your mother for not holding you enough, not nursing you enough, having the audacity to put you down on the floor so she can, say, put on her sweater for a walk to the park.  And you definitely get to refuse to sleep through the night and not care that the books say by six and a half months you probably should be doing so.

I know there is nothing wrong with all of this.  I know — I think I know, I tell myself I know — that just because Lily can be a little grumpy with me now and then it does not mean that she will come to hate me in thirteen or so years.  She will hate me then regardless of what I do right now.

What I’m having some trouble wrapping my mind around, however, is the notion that there is nothing wrong with me responding to her grumpiness with less than perfect equanimity and nurturing sweetness.  There is nothing wrong with telling a baby at one o’clock in the morning that you want to sleep and she should stop crying at you.  Especially if you are offering a tone of voice and a back rub that are a great deal more gentle than the words you are saying because you know she can’t understand them anyhow.

In short, I spent the past several days beating myself up because Lily’s crankiness made me cranky as well.

Continue reading ‘Turn, Turn, Turn … or Not: What I Learned at Six Months’

Not Everything Is Easier the Second Time Around

Published
by
Melissa
on September 15, 2009
in Mama instinct, bed time, being in the moment, change, chattering mind, compassion, inner peace, letting instead of making, sleep, structure, the bigger picture, trust and you can't control everything
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0 Comments

It is more than likely that I will spend pretty much the rest of my life debating whether Lily is such a patient, generous soul because I was in yoga practicing vasisthasana right up to the day before she was born or because, as the second child, she is doomed to my “been there, done that” approach to parenthood.

This is not, all joking aside, to say that I in any way fail to appreciate what a special human being she is.  Or that I love her any less than I love Jake.  Or, for that matter, that, when I’m being honest with myself, I give her any less attention than I gave Jake during his infancy.

It’s just that, now that I’m doing it for the second time, I’m a whole lot smarter about choosing what kind of attention I give her.

I mean, really, could six-month-old Jake truly not stand to be left alone to entertain himself for just a few minutes?  Probably, but I would have pulled my hair out before continuing to wash it had he screamed the way Lily has on occasion when I have taken a shower that did not fall during her nap time.  To my credit, I carefully open the shower door every few minutes to show her we are in the same room.  Though I’m pretty sure the message is lost the second I close the door again.

So, too, Mike asked me the other day how we knew Jake needed his bottles warmed.  Did I ever offer him the room temp bottle I so handily pull out of the diaper bag for Lily now that she is far too interested in new surroundings to nurse anywhere other than in a hermetically sealed room?  I am embarrassed for myself, but I have a strong suspicion that all those times we plopped a cold bottle in a cup of hot coffee at rest stops and counted ourselves clever for this less than adequate bottle warming solution may not have been strictly necessary.

The other night, however, I gained some much needed reassurance that I am not squelching the needs of my second born simply because I’m too lazy to expend all the needless energy I wasted on my first.

On this night, I found myself queasily reduced to a little sleep training.  And, I discovered, I was far more sympathetic to Lily’s cries than I ever was to Jake’s.

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Labor Day Indeed

Published
by
Melissa
on September 9, 2009
in bed time, being in the moment, expectations, grace, letting go, potty training, social life, stuck at home with a child, too much to do, trust, vacation and you can't control everything
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1 Comment

As you may or may not know, Labor Day is a celebration of workers — a “yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country,” according to the Department of Labor.

What I want to know is who figured giving people a day off from work was a break from their labor.  More particularly, I would like to invite anyone who thinks Labor Day is a nifty holiday to spend it with me.  Especially Mike’s bosses, who deemed that he had to actually go to work on Labor Day, thereby increasing my parental labor exponentially.

Yes, yes, yes, I know that my children’s caregivers deserve a day off from their work.  I’d deserve a day off too, if I actually had the kind of work where I had to wait for a day off to not work.

Nor do I mean to undermine the ideological underpinnings of the holiday, even though a good 80% of the country — including some recent Presidents — would if they knew it was created by the nineteenth century labor movement, which owed more than a little bit to socialism.

All I’m saying is that sometimes, when you have young children, a day off from work ends up being far more work than a day on.  Toss in an Apple Festival and the last day the JCC pool is open for the summer, and you have just the right elements to reduce a mother to a puddle of tears.

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How Can You Love Me So Much When …?

Published
by
Melissa
on July 10, 2009
in Mama instinct, Mommy time, awareness, bed time, communicating, compassion, daycare, feeding my child, forgiveness, grace, opening your heart and social life
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Lily and I are having a bit of a love fest these days.  We gaze into each others’ eyes.  We smile and giggle.  I marvel at the double dimples in her elbows and the figure-eight temple dents she inherited from her father.

And then, after forty-five minutes or so of mutual adoration, I whisk her off to daycare and plop her in someone else’s arms.  Getting to do so doesn’t make me love her any more; it just makes it easier to spend forty-five minutes telling her so.

But much as my daily three-hour-break from my baby makes me, if not a better mother, at least a happier one, it is powerless against those “I’m exhausted and you are making my nipples sore” moments.  Which are relatively rare, but still all too common.

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I Want to Go to Shabbat

Published
by
Melissa
on June 26, 2009
in Mommy time, bed time, centering, change, expectations, feeding my child, intentions versus goals, letting go, practice, structure and you can't control everything
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0 Comments

Shabbat starts in ten minutes.

In ten minutes, Jake will sing and dance.  He will yell, “Shabbat, shalom, hey!”  He will smile and mug and everyone there will tell me what fun he has in Shabbat.  He may even sit in another parent’s lap with one of his friends.

He will not sit in my lap because I will not be there.  I will be home with my daughter who seems to have developed a weird aversion to going to sleep at the times she normally does.

For example, much as she may have been fretting and telling me she was ready for her usual 9:30 a.m. nap this morning, after happily nursing herself to sleep her eyes popped open the moment I tried to shift us off the couch.  We tried nursing again.  She pacified without eating and once again those eyes popped wide open the moment I tried to move.  She is at this very moment very much awake in her swing and not looking particularly primed to fall asleep.

Which makes me moan even more about missing Shabbat because there is no way I can get dressed and to Jake’s school with his wide awake sister in the six minutes remaining.

Instead, I must sit here writing about how I want to go to Shabbat.

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Is a Toddler in the Lap Worth an Infant Who Can’t Sleep?

Published
by
Melissa
on March 22, 2009
in balance, bed time, compassion, expectations, gratitude, sense of self, sleep, stuck at home with a child, toddler tantrums and you can't control everything
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0 Comments

I had a hour of heaven in front of the television last night.

Normally, I don’t think of anything having to do with watching television as particularly heavenly, unless it involves putting my pregnant feet up for an hour of total rest before picking up my son from preschool.  Those days, however, are no longer with me, and watching t.v. with an infant in my lap is neither satisfying nor a particularly good idea, as it seems to disturb her sleep, both while the t.v. is on and for pretty much the whole night afterward.

But I do like snuggling up with Jake to watch an hour of Sesame Street, as long as I enthusiastically yell out the numbers flashing on the screen in an effort to make it a learning experience.  Plus, it’s not really an hour, since many of the segments provoke a bored/demanding, “Watch Sesame Street, please” from Jake, which translates roughly as, “TiVo has destroyed my attention span.”

And so, last night, when Mike resorted to Sesame Street as a way to free himself to cook dinner, I decided I needed to be near my son as much as I needed to feed my newborn daughter, and I committed what the lacatation consultant I saw when Jake was an infant deemed one of the Seven Deadly Sins — breastfeeding with the t.v. on.

Not that the television stayed off for the first four months of Jake’s life, during which I was using an evil supplemental nursing system that involved a collection of tubes, bottles, formula, and the patience of a saint.  There’s only so long you can spend an hour and a half per feeding staring silently at the wall because your baby isn’t any  more interested in gazing up into your eyes as he nurses than you are in gauging, ad nauseum, whether he is swallowing properly.  But I don’t think I broke down for at least six weeks or so.  And I know I wasn’t watching anything quite as stimulating as Sesame Street.

Lily certainly didn’t complain or seem to register any difference in her dining experience.  And when she finished and remained wide-eyed I figured that was just a nice little bit of alert time that I’m trying to shift to my waking hours anyhow.  So I propped the moses basket toward what seemed to be a particularly fascinating lamp and invited Jake to sit in my lap.

Oh, how my world became complete when he accepted my invitation.

Jake, you see, has adjusted rather stunningly well to the new baby.  Sure, there are tantrums and Ignore Mommy moments.  But the clinging to Mommy and screaming as she tries to feed the baby that I had been dreading has never materialized.  Instead, Jake has neatly shifted his expectations of primary caregiving to his father.

And, in the process, broken my heart even more neatly than if he were making my life impossible by being less cooperative.

How lovely, then, to feel the solid toddler-ness of him in my lap, to be able to reach around once again to kiss his firm toddler cheeks, to wrap my arms all the way around his chest and squeeze as he puts his thumb in his mouth and moves in closer.

Lily tolerated all of this not-holding her for the rest of Sesame Street and a bit of Mama Mirabelle’s Home Movies, but I sensed something was shifting by the time Mike had dinner on the table.  Indeed, although I placed her in the sling and invited her to sit with us, the tectonic plates were already in motion, and the earthquake was about to commence.

Yep.  Mommy didn’t get to eat much of her dinner.  I forgot about those days.  And now they’re back.

Continue reading ‘Is a Toddler in the Lap Worth an Infant Who Can’t Sleep?’

Of Big Boy Beds and Co-Sleepers

Published
by
Melissa
on March 9, 2009
in bed time, change, chattering mind, following your heart, letting instead of making, motion, opening your heart, sleep, structure and trust
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0 Comments

I’d like to think our ability to get the co-sleeper assembled (albeit standing on its side in a corner of our bedroom until needed) somewhat balances out my cavalier attitude toward having Mike drive two and a half hours to Charlotte to visit IKEA on Thursday night — three days before my due date.

To be honest, my only concern about him taking the trip was that I couldn’t figure out a way to do it with him.  For all the laxity we’ve shown in actually preparing for the new baby, the one regret I have is not planning a day trip to Charlotte to visit Trader Joe’s.  A set-up co-sleeper I could do without.  Washed infant clothes? — they were washed a couple of years ago.  But a lack of tart dried Montgomery cherries to tide me through those shut-in weeks?  Akin to being without newborn diapers (something I am proud to report I purchased a full two weeks ago).

At any rate, I knew that if I did go into labor Mike would just have to turn right around and sweat out the drive home while I lay on the couch and hoped I had enough episodes of Sesame Street TiVo’d to keep Jake occupied.  More importantly, I knew I wasn’t going to go into labor.  I was just frustrated that I couldn’t take the chance with a leisurely two and a half hour trip of my own.

I also knew that if we didn’t get that king-sized, all-natural latex mattress for which IKEA charges about a third of what any place else we’ve tracked down charges by this weekend we would be sleeping in our old queen for quite some time to come.  Not a big deal.  Expect that our old queen is the only plan we had for getting Jake out of his crib and into a Big Boy Bed.

The plan, you see, was to pass on to Jack our old, off-gassed queen — perfectly suitable for a thirty-pound boy, a 150-pound teenager, and, somewhere along the way between the two, a parent on the nights when Jake is suffering illness or nightmares or just plain loneliness.  The Big Boy Bed, then, is just our own.

Or, more accurately, as it has turned out, our brand new, king-sized, all-natural latex king — a lovely expanse of sleeping space on which I will (theoretically, since I’m not yet sleeping on it) no longer roll downhill toward Mike’s considerably greater impression on mattress springs.  Yep, I can almost spot it there in Jake’s room from my jealous perch on our old, creaky, lopsided queen.

It actually makes some sense — our beautiful new mattress sitting cozily in Jake’s room while I continue to fight the pull of gravity every time I turn my belly toward the downward slope that leads to my sleeping husband.  See, a co-sleeper requires a bed frame — something to which the co-sleeper may be anchored so as to, you know, keep the baby safe.  Meanwhile, we decided that the bed frames being offered by IKEA: a) didn’t look so sturdy, and b) were unlikely to fit in the van Mike borrowed from his brother for the trip down to Charlotte.

So, until we find a suitable frame somewhere locally, Jake gets the cool, comfy mattress and I get to gaze longingly down at his tiny little body asleep in the middle of all that wasted space.

Continue reading ‘Of Big Boy Beds and Co-Sleepers’

The Road to Potty Training Is Paved with Good Intentions

Published
by
Melissa
on February 11, 2009
in Mama instinct, bath time, bed time, change, expectations, feeding my child, letting go, letting instead of making, potty training, practice, school, sleep, surrender, toddler tantrums, trust and you can't control everything
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0 Comments

Potty training is a big subject in our house these days.

Not because Mike or I have decided it’s time — Jake’s just 25 months old, after all.  But because Jake has shown an interest in it.  At least, he’s shown an interest in: getting our hopes up, testing my theory that all I have to do to raise him is follow his cues, and making his very pregnant mommy sit down on the floor to check the diaper he says needs changing many, many, many more times a day than a very, very pregnant mommy should have to do.  (It’s not the getting down on the floor that’s the problem, of course.  It’s the getting up off the floor again — which requires the help of the tub, a sink, the washing machine, and any other solid, immovable object I can use to hoist myself vertical-ward.)

What I find most interesting — and even of possible interest to those of you who have absolutely no interest in the subject of potty training — is that it’s turning out to be the greatest lesson in surrendering control Jake’s given me yet.

Potty training does not, for example, involve utter and crushing-depression-inducing exhaustion like the sleep thing.  It does not wrap me up in a deluge of hormones so great that often the only choice I had was curling up on the green armchair in a puddle of my own failure as a mother, the way breastfeeding did.  And the whole toddler tantrum experience — I sure like to turn the incidents into stories that become more amusing to me as I write about them, but Mike reminded me the other day just how trying they are when he said, “It’s hard for me to read about Jake’s tantrums.  I just want to let them go once they’re over.  You need to process them.”

Yep, processing is what I do, and the potty training process, while still a challenge, is proving to be a bit of an adventure as well.  I have no preconceived notions of how it will go — possibly because  Jake’s is the first diaper I ever changed and so perhaps I was, until a couple of years ago, completely uninitiated in the scatological functions of young children.  It is not too exhausting (other than the hauling myself up off the floor part) because it generally does not take place while I am trying to sleep.  And hormones, well, they’re all about the next baby at this point.

Instead, I can remind myself to take a step back, stop wondering why two kids in Jake’s class are potty trained but he’s not (okay, I do attribute it to them having older brothers), and let Jake lead me through the changes that will take place in his life no matter how I might try to bend them to my will.  Which, in this case, is not even so much as an impulse.

A few episodes to illustrate:

Continue reading ‘The Road to Potty Training Is Paved with Good Intentions’

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