A Family of Sleep Freaks

I never intended to sleep with my child, honest. She came home in November and it was super cold and she was so small and fragile. She seemed chilly. She seemed like she could never settle unless she cuddled up to me. So I took her into bed with me and she slept and fed peacefully. The whole time, I worried. I worried that she would smother, and I worried that I wasn't doing the right thing. They say, you know, that if they don't learn to sleep in their own crib that they will be deficient in some way and they will never sleep through the night. Still, I couldn't quite let her cry it out. She just slept better in bed with me and I slept better too.

Then I went back to work. She was still breastfeeding. Even if I did wean her out of our bed, there was no way in hell that I was going to get up every two hours and go into her room to feed her, and then be able to get up and go to work every day. Now that I was away from her 3 days a week, I missed her, and she missed me. It was a tough transition. So we stayed together.

I thought that maybe when she spent time in the hospital, at 5 months, when she had heart surgery, that would give us the separation we needed to make the split. That it was a necessary split. That I should get her out of my bed because they say that's the "right" thing to do. I spent 5 nights in the hospital with her. Three of those nights she was in the ICU and slept by her bedside. I got up every two hours to pump, and to be with her. She was so drugged out that she didn't even know I was there. But I knew it. I was never going to let her feel abandoned in that strange place.

When she got out of the ICU, I sat in a chair, holding her all night long. She was attached to so many tubes and wires that it was so scary balancing them all to get her into my arms, but still I couldn't let her go. I didn't want her to sit in that steel crib attached to machines without her mother's touch. Some of the babies spent days or even weeks sleeping alone in those hospital rooms while their parents slept elsewhere and it broke my heart.

So she came home, and she slept with me still. I couldn't let her go, although she was getting older, and squirmier. And I was getting really sick of going to bed at 8:30 with her. I wanted to be an adult again!

Finally we tried a different trick. We started rocking her to sleep, and then transferring her to the crib. It was surprisingly easy! She would sleep in the crib for 4-6 hours, and when she woke in the middle of the night I'd take her to bed and we could be close again until morning. By then I was only breastfeeding her a few times a day. This was a natural progression and we were all very happy with it. It was so liberating to be able to have some time to regain my adult conversation, although at first we would just sit at the dining room table whispering to each other.

We went on like this for a long time, six months or more. Some nights were better and some nights were worse, depending on if she was sick or teething or going through something, but in general this was a happy arrangement, a good compromise. I stopped worrying about her sleep habits. She was getting 11 hours of sleep consistently, and a nap during the day consistently. I didn't care if she still slept in my bed sometimes, because we all agreed as a family that this is how we liked it, and it was no one else's business.

I, however, still don't sleep more than 3-4 hours in a row. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm up for hours, worrying, mind spinning, anxious about work or home or both. I have had this anxious insomnia off and on for years, but it seems like it's worse now that I have double the things to worry about. Even if the baby sleeps all night, I never do. I'm starting to think that 8 hours of sleep, in a row, is just a myth or an unattainable cruel lie somebody made up.

Daddy has his own sleep disorder problems. He doesn't go to bed before 2:30am, ever. This has been a real problem in our relationship because often my nighttime insomnia is kicked off by him waking me up by coming to bed. When he sleeps on the couch, I sleep much better. A Lucy-Desi sleeping in separate beds arrangement has never been an acceptable solution to me, and we've been struggling about this for years even before the baby. In fact, I'm pretty sure it contributed to us not being able to have a baby for such a long time. Now that she's here, it just contributes more chaos and frustration to the sleep mix.

Lately, Arli has taken a turn for the worse with the sleeping. Rather than this lasting a day or two and getting back to normal, it's been over a week now. She is napping inconsistently, if at all, and she is so squirmy at night that she can't get to sleep before 9:30 most nights. She has been waking about 6:30, so she's getting maybe 9 hours of sleep a night. And to top it all off, she's refusing to go to sleep in her crib for any reason, night or day. She's been sick, and teething, and we have been accommodating her by taking turns going to bed with her. Now that she's better, I do not want this to become the new normal! We are quickly becoming the Cranky Family, and it's not good.

As much as I want to hold and love and comfort my sweet daughter, I have not had a second to myself and it's driving me truly insane. I don't want to be impatient with her in the short precious time that we have together. I want her to drift off to sleep calm, secure and peacefully. Patience is what it takes to right the sleep ship. But when quality sleep is at such a premium, it's so hard to be mindful of that!

I think that what she's going through is normal baby stuff, and that she will eventually go to sleep on her own, get enough rest, and sleep in her own space when the time is right. I do believe this. But I also worry (and stay up at night worrying about it) that we will pass on our own freaky anxious bad sleep habits to her. You can be as big of a freak as you are comfortable with, but when the kids come along, you really have to take a look at all of that and be a good example. This is how our kids become our teachers, and help us to become better people. Or we crack up from the pressure and get locked up in a loony bin. I aspire to the former.

A Little Less Sugar Never Hurt Anyone

Every time I go to the doctor or dentist for Arli, they start telling me how much juice she should be drinking. "She doesn't get juice", I say, "I don't see any reason that a 1-year-old needs juice." They agree and support my decision. I think this is great, and it makes me feel that I am doing something right.

But if you ask my husband, or either grandmother, they think I'm being a ridiculous sugar nazi. There's no way to keep her away from sugar, they say. A little juice is fine for a child. I don't disagree with either of these statements, however, I do read. I read all the time about how obese kids are getting because of all the processed food and sugar in their diets, and all of the other health problems that come along with too much of these things. If I can, I'd like to give my one and only child a chance to lead a healthy life. And I don't have to ask anyone's permission to do so.

When she was 6 months old and just starting solids, my mother-in-law started feeding her some of the yogurt she brought with her for lunch. She was offended when I politely asked her not to. "But she likes it," she said. I'm sure she does like it. Babies like sweet things. But adult yogurt has a ton of sugar in it, it is probably artificially sweetened, and babies don't need that. It's not good for them. I don't care what they did in the '70's. Look at all the overweight, diabetic, unhealthy adults that grew up in the '70's. I don't want to raise one of those, if I can help it.

She got really worried that I was an uptight freak who was only going to feed my child tofu and millet or something (this was probably because of my former freaky vegetarianism!). She expressed to her husband that I might not even make her a cake for her first birthday! What kind of a mother would deny her child cake?!?

For the record, I'd like to say that Arli gets plenty of sweet things, like fresh fruit and whole milk baby yogurt, even some baby cookies or small bites of my ice cream. She also had a delicious (and healthy) birthday cake that I made myself from scratch that contained an entire cup of sugar in the recipe! She gets more processed food than I would like, due to the fact that sometimes she will only eat 5 tater tots and a rice cracker rather than any fresh food I try to cook up. That's just the way it goes sometimes. Processed food is fine, in moderation.

When she is older, I'm sure she will guzzle down all the juice she wants to, and eat popsicles and grown-up yogurt and cake from the bakery. But for now, she gets the healthiest food her mama can make, and her mama doesn't feel that feeding her less sugar counts as abuse. For now, her mama has the last word.

How Time Flies

Today a sweet young man I know turns 21. So what, you say? People turn 21 all the time. Sure, "people" do, but not the children of my high school friends. Although, this is happening at a greater frequency, and it freaks me out a little. Ok, it freaks me out a lot.

I don't think I like the implications of the math. I have reached an age where it is not only possible to have adult children, but once children become adults they, too, can have children. This means that we are all officially old enough to be grandparents. How can this be?!?

This might have been acceptable for my grandparents' generation. My grandmother had her first child at 17, and her last at 32. Her first grandchild was born when she was 36. She worked, too, but for sheer survival. There was no higher education or carefully calculated career development. She had kids because that's just what you did as a woman. There was no family planning.

My own mother was just shy of her 21st birthday when I was born, and I wasn't her first child. By the time my mom was my age, I was out of the house and in college. I could have started having kids then, but thank goodness I didn't! The riff-raff I made time with back then wasn't exactly daddy material. I got extremely distracted and I made her wait a very long time to become a grandma. Too long, if you ask her. Maybe she's right. I don't know.

I am experiencing life pass on by quicker than I expected. I don't feel like I'll be dead any time soon, but I'm at least half way to the grave already. And then what? I feel like there's so much yet to do here, although I don't know what that is, and my momentum is slowing down. I think I'd better make the most of it. Pretty soon, Arli will be 21 and I'll be 60. Will I have grandchildren by then?

You know, I don't even want to think about it. This is just crazy insomnia thinking anyway.

Happy Birthday, Michael! You have become quite a lovely adult. You still have a long life ahead of you and I know you'll do great things.

A Tale of Patience

It seems like she has more and more tricks every day. But as we know, tricks don't get mastered in one day. We might know this, but she is not yet savvy to this wisdom.

One day she was stretching her little leg up to get on the couch, and the next day she was climbing on with no assistance. It's amazing, and a little scary, to see such seemingly quick progress on major milestones. If she can do this today, what will she be climbing tomorrow? The shelves, getting in the bathtub, or attempting the fridge? Mmm hmmmm, that's exactly what she's going for. She's very ambitious! The status quo is just not acceptable.

With this ambition, however, comes a decent amount of frustration. I don't know if this is "normal" or not, but she gets really impatient and pissed off if she can't do something. I don't know if this impatience is something that she was born with, or something that I've passed on to her, or if it's just part of growing. It concerns me sometimes, though.

It's a slippery slope, like so many things in parenthood. I want to help her so she doesn't get all worked up, but I also want her to learn to do it herself. Just this morning she was playing with some photographs, and a couple of them fell flat on the ground. She doesn't know yet how to peel something so you can pick it up and this, in particular, drives her into a tizzy. I try to encourage her by saying "You can do it! Don't get mad." but it doesn't really help. I then show her how to do it and try to get her to do it herself with the other one. Eventually, she will master this trick too.

It takes an amazing amount of patience from my side as well. I think that maybe she is teaching me how to be a more patient person and through this maybe I can help her be a more patient person. I see how this cycle works, and I kind of love it. Baby steps indeed.