One Year

Finn only has one birthday, but he has a couple of anniversaries, and today is the first anniversary of him coming home from the hospital.

Tired mom and tiny baby:

Tired mom and big huge baby:




I am home sick and totally unable to process lucid thought, so that's all about that for now. I'll be back when I can be more interesting.

"Sleep Crutches"

Sleep Barbie is big on "sleep crutches," or what she also calls "negative associations" such as breastfeeding, cuddling, rocking, and music as aids to get babies to sleep. She insists that "negative associations" as a term does not mean that the things are actually negative, it's just a term.

Right.

Things like cuddling SUCK.

But blankies and stuffed animals are ok. Though, if they need them to fall asleep, then they really aren't doing it by themselves, they are just doing it without you.

I'll keep leaning on my crutches as long as I need support, and as long as my boy wants them. I mean, if "negative associations" does not mean "negative," then "crutch" might not mean "crutch."

As it is, The Routine gets him to sleep by 8. Last night, he woke up at 8:53 (he's a single sleep cycle sleeper). He was back asleep by 9:09 and he slept until sometime around 1:00. Pete got him back to sleep and brought him to me at 3. It's progress by inches, and Finn is still a happy baby. He's eating at around the 3-4 mark, but we are focusing on the bedtime part of the routine.

The weird thing now is that we hardly see our baby. I mean, we still have some night-time parenting going on, but we get home from day care at around 6, feed the boy, start The Routine at 7, and he's asleep by 8. In the morning, we get up, get him ready, and head out the door.

The weekends will be nicer now because we can look forward to spending time with the baby.

Le Sigh

I haven't eaten yet today. I'm feeling sad. I feel like the people I work with think I suck. I feel like there are machinations going on behind my back. I'm dumb and pretty much useless. This morning, I was unable to approach a domestic situation from a rational perspective and simply had to be stompy and emotional about it, even though I knew that it wasn't helpful and that things would be just fine if I simply stated my case. I wanted to be mad. I feel like a warm, damp towel, flaccid and listless. I don't want to do anything, but crying sounds like a good idea. I am audibly sighing. Time is going by very slowly.

Sound familiar, ladies.

I better check my calendar.

Bed-time Story Review: Ten Little Teddy Bears

This is a turgid morality tale with a wholly unfeasible ending.

It is short, so I am going to include the entire story here.
See if you can get to sleep after this gruesome story wends its way into your psyche.

In "Jane Eyre," the Rev. Brocklehurst gives young Jane a pamphlet in which sinful young children meet their deserved ends. It's very Victorian.

This is similar.

With teddy bears.

Let's begin.
Can you read it?
"TEN little teddy bears/Think flying is their line./One flies off for evermore--/Then there are NINE"

I get it. I do. Teddy bears are cute, and now we are using them to learn our numbers.

But notice how all the bears sort of blur off into the distance? That's the scanner interpreting the story for you.

We are one bear down. He was apparently kidnapped by a random, Furry-obsessed aviator. He's gone, for evermore, Mr. Raven.


KATE should have known better than to get involved in a BOYS' GAME.

Two down.

Eight's demise is witnessed by children, thus doubling both his trauma and theirs.


Number 7 gets eaten by a freaking fish. What is UP with FISH?
Is this a Jesus thing?
Was this a Bad Little Teddy Bear?

In any case, I am starting to feel bad about reading this to my baby.

Swallowed by a fish.

Six left. Bad little teddy bears.

Ah. Here we are. Previously, our little bears have been "little," "jolly," "travelling," and "paddling," but now, it's time to PAY:

Greedy. They are licking and tasting the goods (hey, is this a KIDS' book?), and one is dragged away--just one--to an undetermined fate.

And now, the bears are foolish. Apparently, after you go below a critical mass of teddy bears, that's it. It's The Four Horsemen. The Seven Deadly Sins. It's All She Wrote:


All that is left is abduction by horrifying human girl children:


Car crashes:


And being eaten by monkeys:


And, aside from "whose freaking teddy bears are they anyway?" and "Why are they out unsupervised?" this is where I don't buy it. If kids are paying attention, they should be quite worried about the state of the previous bears, but WAIT! The White Guy has arrived to Save The Day:


Everyone is safe and well, no matter what the book said before.

So this is just some sort of crappy heaven metaphor?

Oh for crying out loud.

The Routine

I was just sitting with the boy in our room, going through the last bit of my part of The Routine, snickering about how many things I was doing wrong, according to Sleep Barbie.

I was nursing him, and I let him fall asleep.
Music was playing.
His crib is in our room.
I put him in his crib pretty much mostly asleep.

I don't know how long he'll stay asleep; last night, it was four hours, which is practically a record. But then he was awake for an hour and a half, making up for it, I guess.

He had his short bath at 7:00, then diaper (I am using his preemie diapers as night-time inserts) and p.j.'s, then boob snack with story, and this is where Pete usually comes in. Finn must have been tired (he took three very short naps today), because he fell asleep readily. It could be that he is already getting used to The Routine (I can't write that without thinking of "Friends.") because he started crying when I closed the door to the bedroom with us in it, but then he settled down pretty readily.

This is one of those times when The Books tell you that you should go to bed, too, but I am going to write a bit, pump, drink some Guinness, and watch some Sex & the City because Thalia knows, I haven't seen enough of it.

Now What?

It's 8:27. He's asleep in his crib, though I have no idea for how long. I don't feel like knitting; I don't feel like cooking; I don't feel like cleaning. No reading. No drawing. No watching TV. I don't even feel like writing. But I don't want to do nothing.

I am kind of stuck.

I must be tired.

I think I should probably go to bed.

Too bad I don't know how to put myself to sleep.

bye bye, sleep lady

I took the book back. I exchanged it for a new story book for the boy about a hibernating bear and bought a copy of "Where the Wild Things Are" to be donated to a kids' reading program.

I think this was a good idea.

The Sleep Lady was pissing me off.

It's not going to work for me, and I'm not going to do it. Letting him wail while I watched was terrible, and I think, confusing for him.

The more I thought about it, the more I decided she was full of crap. At least for me. It may well work for loads of parents, and she's made a ton of money off of it, but she will forever be "Sleep Barbie" for me just because of the picture on the back of her book. Her comments about having her daughters sleep for eight hours by the time they were eight and ten weeks old with the "and yes, I breastfed both of them," strike me as snarky, and most of the reading I have done has said that babies that young are not supposed to sleep that long. I also got tired of her looking down her nose at AP-ers and co-sleepers, even as she tried to say that she is open minded. She's not. Again, we are not parenting by any book, but I don't need to take advice from someone who clearly thinks that we are kind of dumb for letting our baby into our bed.

So screw her.

And pretty much, screw all of it.

I am back to where I always have been: he will probably not sleep through the night until sometime after he is weaned, and it does not mean that he has a problem. We have been progressing with getting him into a routine, and things have improved. If he still needs me in the middle of the night, then he still needs me. I'm his mother. It's too bad that evolution has not caught up with our stupid schedules, but there you have it. I don't think that letting him scream, with or without me, is going to make anything better, and I don't want to do it.

After all, very little of the sleep advice out there has anything to say about premature babies, and as far as I can tell, no one has looked into the long-term effects of hospital stays on the sleep patterns of babies. Finn was jostled and prodded every three hours for his entire third trimester. Now he never sleeps much longer than three hours at a stretch. It could be a coincidence, but as long as everyone is putting thoughts into my baby's head and making all sorts of other pronouncements, I'll just add that one to the mix.

Last night, we did a bath at 7:00, then a night-time boob snack during which I read "The Cat in the Hat," then a little crib play time, and Pete took over. He was alseep by 7:47, and would have slept until a little after midnight if Pete had not decide to go in at 9:31 and get some laundry to fold. Even then, the boy was back to sleep in 13 minutes. Yes, I keep track that much. I heard him at 3:00 and then at 4:00, I went and got him. He nursed and then we slept until 7:15. Or, he did. The old cat woke me up, meowing for breakfast.

I don't need a book by someone who is not a sleep expert making me feel bad for not letting my baby learn how to sleep, which is what she thinks you are doing if you don't do what she says. I need to listen to how I feel and listen to what Finn is telling me.