Picture it: Thunder Bay, Ontario. Early March. Seven degrees below zero. 8:30 a.m. Sun rising over Lake Superior. Air crisp and cold — I can see my breath. Sky rosy and bright. Rowan and I walking to his babysitter’s. We march along briskly, me in my down coat and mitts, hat on head, drinking a travel mug of hot tea. My three-year-old son wears his green Thomas the Train T-shirt, snowpants, boots — and nothing else.
It’s the culmination not just of one morning but of an entire season of struggle. Now that he can dress himself, Rowan prefers to wear only sweatpants, short-sleeved shirts (often three at a time; he rotates through a small selection of favourites that includes Thomas, a stripey polo shirt, and a rainbow tie-dyed number), and a purple acrylic V-neck sweater knitted for him by his great grandmother. Long sleeves are generally offensive, as is all outdoor clothing, especially hats, mittens, a fleece hoodie, and — today —his coat.
Every morning, it’s the same thing: the screaming, the chasing around the house, the distractions, the reasoning, the bribery, the attempts to “make it fun,” all in the name of getting the clothes on and getting out the door.
And today, I gave up the fight. After some extended negotiations, Rachel managed to get snowpants and boots on the boy, who then followed me around the kitchen repeating, “I’m NOT wearing my fleece. Umom, I’m NOT wearing my fleece. I’m not playing with YOU any more. I’m walking away. I’M WALKING AWAY.” I kept repeating, “I’m not talking with you about it any more, Rowan. I’m done.”
And I was. I walked out the door and fetched the stroller from the garage. Rowan walked out the door hatless and coatless. “I get warm in the stroller,” he said. “No way,” I said. “Only people who are wearing their hats and coats can get in the stroller. You’d better start walking.”
And so we walked, Rowan with his arms jammed down the sides of his snowpants so that he looked like a performer in Riverdance. Every so often, I’d say, “You look like you’re getting cold. Would you like to put on your coat?” And he’d say, “No THANK you. But thanks for answering!” Or he’d comment, “My ears are cold.” And I’d say, “Oh. Would you like to put on your hat?” And he’d say, “No thanks!” And I’d say, “I like your manners!”
Actually, it was a very pleasant walk. Rowan, armless, kept up a patter of conversation next to me — about the ice, how far we had walked, the forklift that drove by, how he would get warm at his babysitter’s, that Isaac is a baby — punctuating our occasional silences with, “It sure is a beautiful day, isn’t it?” He pulled his arm out of its little snowpanty cocoon to hold my hand at intersections, and then put it back.
It was also a very efficient walk. Because he couldn’t — wouldn’t — use his arms, Rowan couldn’t pick up stray sticks or clamber over every snowbank the way he usually does, activities that generally test my Zen ability to “be here now” as opposed to where I feel we’re actually supposed to be. Plus, I think he needed to keep moving in order to stay warm. We marched along briskly, me pushing the empty stroller, my three-year-old son chattering along beside me. Quality time. Cars drove by, and whenever I caught the eye of the driver, he or she invariably smiled, as if to say, “been there, done that.”
Oh, for summer. When we can swap fights over winter clothes for fights over sunscreen.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008
Sucker
The soose saga began shortly after Rowan’s birth, when it became clear that he was what the textbooks referred to as “a sucky baby.” In layperson’s terms, this meant that he liked to suck. A. Lot. And that he was kind of cranky when he couldn’t.
“Just give him a soother,” my father — who had arrived to help out for two weeks — kept saying. I’m sure he thought we were insane. Because we were. (This is the same man who recently put an end to end to our dithering about whether to let Rowan watch cartoons in the middle of the family visit by saying, rightly, “Just turn on the television! He’s sucking all your energy!”)
But we didn’t give Rowan a soother. We were anti-soother at the time, for reasons involving the “unnaturalness” of an infant sucking on a piece of plastic rather than a human nipple (or, in a pinch, a finger) and some cockamamie idea that a pacifier might interfere with his ability to express himself or explore the world orally. What amazes me now is not the relative merits of these arguments but rather that we actually had the time and energy — not to mention the desire — to form them in the first place.
So, instead, when he wasn’t nursing, Rowan spent countless hours in those first few weeks sucking on our fingers. At night, he would lie between us, bright-eyed and wide awake, and we’d take turns letting him suck voraciously on our various digits. This isn’t as easy as it might sound. It involved holding hands and arms aloft at strange angles for extended periods of time, which hurt after a few minutes. “Your turn,” I would say to Rachel, easing my index finger out of Rowan’s mouth and rubbing my shoulder or shaking my arm in order to ease the pins and needles.
Given that we already weren’t getting any sleep, this didn’t seem sustainable. And yet, we couldn’t quite admit it. Plus, we had taken a stance against my father’s parenting advice, and so we were committed. But I was quietly plotting. Pretty much the moment my father left for the airport, I offered Rowan a pacifier. He took it immediately and loved it. And we were all happy.
That is, until, it became clear that Rowan had become absolutely addicted to the soother. He couldn’t sleep without it, and yet lacked the skill to replace it when it fell out of his mouth during the night. Which meant that Rachel or I needed to replace it for him during the night — sometimes as often as every 45 minutes. Somewhere around five months, the situation deteriorated to the point where we slept in shifts, one of us in our bed, and one of us in Rowan’s room, where — when he wasn’t nursing — we lay next to him in the guest bed, holding the pacifier in his mouth while he settled and slept.
In short, the “passy” had become what for Rowan sleep experts referred to as a “negative sleep association”: he assumed he needed it to fall asleep. And, they all said, if we ever wanted our son to sleep through the night, we’d have to break that association. We opted for a “no-cry” method of weaning him off his addiction: getting rid of the ubiquitous soother during the day and then, at night, faithfully easing the pacifier from his mouth as he fell asleep so that he would learn to conk out without it. Although the book promised improvement within a few days to a week, Rowan did not improve. Finally, after much negotiation and heartbreak too tedious to detail here, we opted for the “cry” method of weaning him off his addiction. Which meant putting him down for the night without his pacifier and letting him cry himself to sleep until he learned how to sleep without it. This was much more effective, if gutwrenching.
And so we muddled along, moving from the insanity-inducing realm of no sleep at all to the merely exhausting and cranky-making realm of getting up once or twice a night to the bliss of sleeping through until morning. Somewhere along the way, though, we (okay, Rachel) gave the soother back. In spades. Rowan, who by now had the manual dexterity to pop the pacifier into his own mouth, ended up sleeping with five or six of the things scattered in the crib, one always at hand in case of emergency. In the mornings, we’d go in and pick up stray pacifiers from the floor and between the crib and the wall.
Oh, and he developed an equally passionate attachment to his security blanket.
Things continued pretty much along these lines for a couple of years. “Soose and blankie” — always together, like chocolate and peanut butter, Scotch and soda — became fixtures of Rowan’s sleep. They also provided us with leverage (“Come upstairs for soose and blankie!” “You can have soose and blankie after you eat lunch!”) and a good source of comfort for boo-boos and scary situations. Every few months, we’d shell out $8.95 for a new package of two to replace the lost and the worn-out pacifiers, all the while telling ourselves that one day (but not today) they would have to go.
Eventually, the inevitable happened: much to the grief of toddlers and preschoolers across North America, Playtex stopped making Rowan’s brand of choice. I picked up a package of the closest reasonable facsimile thereof, and offered one to my son. He spat it out like some kind of wine connoisseur: “That’s not a real soose,” he said disdainfully. “That’s a baby soose. Give me my soose.” And I did.
Eventually, we were down to just one “real” soose. And it was getting kind of grotty. That, coupled with the fact that his dentist reported that Rowan’s jaw was slowly moulding to the shape of the plastic nipple convinced us. And so, one night, a couple of weeks ago, I cut the tip off the nipple with scissors. There would be no going back. The idea was to cut back the soose a bit more each night until it was gone.
Rowan took one suck and spat it out.
“My soose is broken,” he keened, over and over, covering his eyes and rocking back and forth like a professional Greek mourner. “My soose is broken. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy is my soose broken?”
I explained that that was what happened: that as little boys got bigger and bigger, sooses got smaller and smaller, that they broke and went away.
He didn’t seem to find my explanation particularly comforting, but he didn’t flip out, either. Bedtime proceeded fairly normally, punctuated by the occasional moan of “My soose is broken.” And then he fell asleep.
He slept with the soose under his pillow for a few nights after that. And then Rachel threw it in the garbage. And that was that. It’s the end of an era.
Isaac — God bless him — has never been interested in pacifiers. Instead, he cuddles up with a blanket and sticks his thumb in his mouth and goes to sleep. And, twelve years from now, when we have to shell out for the orthodontic work to repair the damage that thumbsucking has wrought, I will do so happily. Remind me of that.
“Just give him a soother,” my father — who had arrived to help out for two weeks — kept saying. I’m sure he thought we were insane. Because we were. (This is the same man who recently put an end to end to our dithering about whether to let Rowan watch cartoons in the middle of the family visit by saying, rightly, “Just turn on the television! He’s sucking all your energy!”)
But we didn’t give Rowan a soother. We were anti-soother at the time, for reasons involving the “unnaturalness” of an infant sucking on a piece of plastic rather than a human nipple (or, in a pinch, a finger) and some cockamamie idea that a pacifier might interfere with his ability to express himself or explore the world orally. What amazes me now is not the relative merits of these arguments but rather that we actually had the time and energy — not to mention the desire — to form them in the first place.
So, instead, when he wasn’t nursing, Rowan spent countless hours in those first few weeks sucking on our fingers. At night, he would lie between us, bright-eyed and wide awake, and we’d take turns letting him suck voraciously on our various digits. This isn’t as easy as it might sound. It involved holding hands and arms aloft at strange angles for extended periods of time, which hurt after a few minutes. “Your turn,” I would say to Rachel, easing my index finger out of Rowan’s mouth and rubbing my shoulder or shaking my arm in order to ease the pins and needles.
Given that we already weren’t getting any sleep, this didn’t seem sustainable. And yet, we couldn’t quite admit it. Plus, we had taken a stance against my father’s parenting advice, and so we were committed. But I was quietly plotting. Pretty much the moment my father left for the airport, I offered Rowan a pacifier. He took it immediately and loved it. And we were all happy.
That is, until, it became clear that Rowan had become absolutely addicted to the soother. He couldn’t sleep without it, and yet lacked the skill to replace it when it fell out of his mouth during the night. Which meant that Rachel or I needed to replace it for him during the night — sometimes as often as every 45 minutes. Somewhere around five months, the situation deteriorated to the point where we slept in shifts, one of us in our bed, and one of us in Rowan’s room, where — when he wasn’t nursing — we lay next to him in the guest bed, holding the pacifier in his mouth while he settled and slept.
In short, the “passy” had become what for Rowan sleep experts referred to as a “negative sleep association”: he assumed he needed it to fall asleep. And, they all said, if we ever wanted our son to sleep through the night, we’d have to break that association. We opted for a “no-cry” method of weaning him off his addiction: getting rid of the ubiquitous soother during the day and then, at night, faithfully easing the pacifier from his mouth as he fell asleep so that he would learn to conk out without it. Although the book promised improvement within a few days to a week, Rowan did not improve. Finally, after much negotiation and heartbreak too tedious to detail here, we opted for the “cry” method of weaning him off his addiction. Which meant putting him down for the night without his pacifier and letting him cry himself to sleep until he learned how to sleep without it. This was much more effective, if gutwrenching.
And so we muddled along, moving from the insanity-inducing realm of no sleep at all to the merely exhausting and cranky-making realm of getting up once or twice a night to the bliss of sleeping through until morning. Somewhere along the way, though, we (okay, Rachel) gave the soother back. In spades. Rowan, who by now had the manual dexterity to pop the pacifier into his own mouth, ended up sleeping with five or six of the things scattered in the crib, one always at hand in case of emergency. In the mornings, we’d go in and pick up stray pacifiers from the floor and between the crib and the wall.
Oh, and he developed an equally passionate attachment to his security blanket.
Things continued pretty much along these lines for a couple of years. “Soose and blankie” — always together, like chocolate and peanut butter, Scotch and soda — became fixtures of Rowan’s sleep. They also provided us with leverage (“Come upstairs for soose and blankie!” “You can have soose and blankie after you eat lunch!”) and a good source of comfort for boo-boos and scary situations. Every few months, we’d shell out $8.95 for a new package of two to replace the lost and the worn-out pacifiers, all the while telling ourselves that one day (but not today) they would have to go.
Eventually, the inevitable happened: much to the grief of toddlers and preschoolers across North America, Playtex stopped making Rowan’s brand of choice. I picked up a package of the closest reasonable facsimile thereof, and offered one to my son. He spat it out like some kind of wine connoisseur: “That’s not a real soose,” he said disdainfully. “That’s a baby soose. Give me my soose.” And I did.
Eventually, we were down to just one “real” soose. And it was getting kind of grotty. That, coupled with the fact that his dentist reported that Rowan’s jaw was slowly moulding to the shape of the plastic nipple convinced us. And so, one night, a couple of weeks ago, I cut the tip off the nipple with scissors. There would be no going back. The idea was to cut back the soose a bit more each night until it was gone.
Rowan took one suck and spat it out.
“My soose is broken,” he keened, over and over, covering his eyes and rocking back and forth like a professional Greek mourner. “My soose is broken. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy is my soose broken?”
I explained that that was what happened: that as little boys got bigger and bigger, sooses got smaller and smaller, that they broke and went away.
He didn’t seem to find my explanation particularly comforting, but he didn’t flip out, either. Bedtime proceeded fairly normally, punctuated by the occasional moan of “My soose is broken.” And then he fell asleep.
He slept with the soose under his pillow for a few nights after that. And then Rachel threw it in the garbage. And that was that. It’s the end of an era.
Isaac — God bless him — has never been interested in pacifiers. Instead, he cuddles up with a blanket and sticks his thumb in his mouth and goes to sleep. And, twelve years from now, when we have to shell out for the orthodontic work to repair the damage that thumbsucking has wrought, I will do so happily. Remind me of that.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Nobody will love me like this ever again
I took Isaac to a baby shower over the weekend, and everyone wanted to be his friend. He was immediately whisked away by the host of the event, who handed him off to a baby-crazy teenage girl, leaving me to indulge in guacamole and tiramisu and open-faced Finnish sandwiches and bocconcini. Eventually, the teenage girl wandered into the kitchen, where I was enjoying the use of both my arms. “How is he?” I asked her. “Great,” she said, just as Isaac caught sight of me, his face crumpled, and he began to sob.
Month the ninth, and separation anxiety has set in.
Suddenly, the outside world is a doubtful place for Isaac. Suddenly, the easy, open, automatic grins are reserved for me, Rachel, and Rowan. Strangers get solemn looks — what we refer to as “the baby stare of death” — and the occasional small smile, if they work really hard. Suddenly, jolly little Isaac is adept at “the lean,” that baby manouvre that indicates he’d much rather be in a mother’s arms than, say, yours.
If both his mothers are present, Isaac is starting to show his preference for me, the one with the milk. Personally, I don’t think it’s as marked a preference as Rachel does, but then again, I’m not the one on the receiving end of infant rejection, actual or imagined. (At least, not the moment. It’ll come, if big brother Rowan is any indication.) “I was thinking about this age,” Rachel said yesterday, after she and Isaac had spent the afternoon together. “I have so much more fun with them when ... you’re not there.”
Baby love. Inasmuch as it’s tiring, it’s addictive. I can see why so much of the rest of the world — at least, that segment of it not already occupied by or recently liberated from its own clingy children — wants a small piece of the action, wants to be wanted by the baby. I remember that fierce longing myself, for the adoration of my fickle childhood cousins, to be the object of their toddler desire. I watch how grown men stoop to make funny faces at Isaac, how arms involuntarily reach for him — and how his own arms, like Rowan’s used to, instinctively wrap around my neck, or Rachel’s. No thanks, he says, the classic pint-size kiss-off.
They love us so fiercely not because we’re fabulous people, or, for that matter, fabulous parents (although I like to think we are both), but simply because we show up. Again and again, day after day, well into the nights and early mornings, we show up. Often grouchy, often not entirely present, but we come back again and again, and this is our reward. For a brief, shiny window of time, we and no one else are perfect in the eyes of the children. Sometimes I think that Isaac would be happy forever perched on my left hip while my arm slowly goes numb, or standing on my lap, holding on to the skin of my neck and trying to eat my nose. But he won’t be. And that will be okay, too. I hope.
I’m not advocating having children in order to be loved so purely. But it is an unexpected perk in the midst of the madness. Even if it means less guacamole for me.
Month the ninth, and separation anxiety has set in.
Suddenly, the outside world is a doubtful place for Isaac. Suddenly, the easy, open, automatic grins are reserved for me, Rachel, and Rowan. Strangers get solemn looks — what we refer to as “the baby stare of death” — and the occasional small smile, if they work really hard. Suddenly, jolly little Isaac is adept at “the lean,” that baby manouvre that indicates he’d much rather be in a mother’s arms than, say, yours.
If both his mothers are present, Isaac is starting to show his preference for me, the one with the milk. Personally, I don’t think it’s as marked a preference as Rachel does, but then again, I’m not the one on the receiving end of infant rejection, actual or imagined. (At least, not the moment. It’ll come, if big brother Rowan is any indication.) “I was thinking about this age,” Rachel said yesterday, after she and Isaac had spent the afternoon together. “I have so much more fun with them when ... you’re not there.”
Baby love. Inasmuch as it’s tiring, it’s addictive. I can see why so much of the rest of the world — at least, that segment of it not already occupied by or recently liberated from its own clingy children — wants a small piece of the action, wants to be wanted by the baby. I remember that fierce longing myself, for the adoration of my fickle childhood cousins, to be the object of their toddler desire. I watch how grown men stoop to make funny faces at Isaac, how arms involuntarily reach for him — and how his own arms, like Rowan’s used to, instinctively wrap around my neck, or Rachel’s. No thanks, he says, the classic pint-size kiss-off.
They love us so fiercely not because we’re fabulous people, or, for that matter, fabulous parents (although I like to think we are both), but simply because we show up. Again and again, day after day, well into the nights and early mornings, we show up. Often grouchy, often not entirely present, but we come back again and again, and this is our reward. For a brief, shiny window of time, we and no one else are perfect in the eyes of the children. Sometimes I think that Isaac would be happy forever perched on my left hip while my arm slowly goes numb, or standing on my lap, holding on to the skin of my neck and trying to eat my nose. But he won’t be. And that will be okay, too. I hope.
I’m not advocating having children in order to be loved so purely. But it is an unexpected perk in the midst of the madness. Even if it means less guacamole for me.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Sleep update — emphasis on "up"
So, we Ferberized — actually, Weissbluthed — the hell out of Isaac and it’s way better than it was but he still wakes up twice a night.
So be it. Weissbluth, as far as I can tell, is the most draconian of the bunch of sleep experts, the one who advocates just walking out the door at bedtime and not returning ’til the morning. But he’s also the one — the only one I can tell, at least — who says that, up until about nine months, some babies need a feed or two at night. Isaac, who will be seven months tomorrow, seems to be one of those babies.
So, he’s off the hook for a couple months. Or until I change my mind yet again.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Things that go bump in the night
So, we’re tired. Have I mentioned that? That we’re tired? From not sleeping much and playing endless games of chase and coming up with answers to the questions, “Will I have to share it?” and “If I tell you ‘go away,’ what you going to do?” But I think mostly from the not sleeping much. Which makes you tired. And kind of incoherent.
Isaac has continued to be consistently inconsistent about sleep. I should mention here that the day after I wrote in here that Rachel and I resolved not to sleep train him, we decided to sleep train him. Enough with the rolling over onto his back and crying until somebody came to rescue him. He could bloody well learn how to sleep on his back (or cry trying, I punned, unfunnily, but that is what sleep deprivation does to you). Or so we decided one evening at about 9:30, after he woke up twice after being put down “for the night.”
So we marched upstairs. Rachel yanked out the pillows I had propped under Isaac’s mattress to — unsuccessfully — discourage him from rolling over, while I nursed him “one last time” in the rocking chair. Then we put our six-month old to bed and went to bed ourselves, bolstered by Dr. Richard Ferber’s assertion that, “most healthy full-term infants are sleeping through the night by three or four months of age. Certainly by six months all healthy babies can do so.”
It was surprisingly easy. When Isaac woke up, we went in to him at five minutes, then 10, then 15, of crying, a few times over the course of the night. The next night he slept seven and a half hours in a row. And things were pretty good for a while. Although he never went straight through from bedtime ’til wake-up time, he learned to sleep on his back and he woke up less often, often soothing himself back to sleep within a few minutes. For the first time in six months, I had to get out of bed only once during the night.
And then we took a trip to see family in Toronto, and Isaac caught Rhys’s bronchitis, and got his first tooth (!), and we had houseguests, and the sleep thing kind of deteriorated. As did we. I will spare you the details of the exhausted, sometimes heated, middle-of-of-the-night, negotiations that got Rachel and me to this spot (they involved words like “fuck” and “you”), but yesterday we agreed in great faith that it was time to let the baby cry again, in a somewhat more organized fashion than our current one.
In order to avoid further middle-of-of-the-night altercations, I mean, negotiations, we also decided that Rachel should sleep in the basement for the three or possibly four nights it would take to implement the sleep plan — which basically involves letting Isaac work it out on his own — and, hopefully, see results. Softie that she is, she gets a bit frantic when woken in the middle of the night to a crying baby, repeatedly. Me, I just get angry.
Which is the point. Why should I be angry at a baby who grins beatifically any time I walk into the room? Who takes my face so gently in his tiny hands so that he can try to eat my nose? Isaac and Rowan need parents who aren’t angry, who aren’t entirely exhausted, at least not all the time.
Further, Isaac and Rowan need their sleep. As do we. No one, including Isaac, wants to get up all through the night. We — more or less — have the skills to sleep through. He doesn’t, but he will. And if it involves a bit of crying, so be it.
So last night Rachel got out her sleeping bag and I got out my earplugs and we bid each other — and the boys — goodnight. And, honestly, I’m not exactly sure what happened after that. With the doors closed and my earplugs in, I didn’t hear much from Isaac. I know he cried a couple of times but I’m not sure when or for how long, and frankly — and kind of astonishingly — I didn’t really care. I went in, as planned, to nurse him at 4 a.m., and he woke up with Rhys around 6:30, happy as ever. Whereupon I phoned Rachel in the basement and told her to come on up and we all got on with our mornings.
And so it will go for the next two or three nights. Wish us luck.
Isaac has continued to be consistently inconsistent about sleep. I should mention here that the day after I wrote in here that Rachel and I resolved not to sleep train him, we decided to sleep train him. Enough with the rolling over onto his back and crying until somebody came to rescue him. He could bloody well learn how to sleep on his back (or cry trying, I punned, unfunnily, but that is what sleep deprivation does to you). Or so we decided one evening at about 9:30, after he woke up twice after being put down “for the night.”
So we marched upstairs. Rachel yanked out the pillows I had propped under Isaac’s mattress to — unsuccessfully — discourage him from rolling over, while I nursed him “one last time” in the rocking chair. Then we put our six-month old to bed and went to bed ourselves, bolstered by Dr. Richard Ferber’s assertion that, “most healthy full-term infants are sleeping through the night by three or four months of age. Certainly by six months all healthy babies can do so.”
It was surprisingly easy. When Isaac woke up, we went in to him at five minutes, then 10, then 15, of crying, a few times over the course of the night. The next night he slept seven and a half hours in a row. And things were pretty good for a while. Although he never went straight through from bedtime ’til wake-up time, he learned to sleep on his back and he woke up less often, often soothing himself back to sleep within a few minutes. For the first time in six months, I had to get out of bed only once during the night.
And then we took a trip to see family in Toronto, and Isaac caught Rhys’s bronchitis, and got his first tooth (!), and we had houseguests, and the sleep thing kind of deteriorated. As did we. I will spare you the details of the exhausted, sometimes heated, middle-of-of-the-night, negotiations that got Rachel and me to this spot (they involved words like “fuck” and “you”), but yesterday we agreed in great faith that it was time to let the baby cry again, in a somewhat more organized fashion than our current one.
In order to avoid further middle-of-of-the-night altercations, I mean, negotiations, we also decided that Rachel should sleep in the basement for the three or possibly four nights it would take to implement the sleep plan — which basically involves letting Isaac work it out on his own — and, hopefully, see results. Softie that she is, she gets a bit frantic when woken in the middle of the night to a crying baby, repeatedly. Me, I just get angry.
Which is the point. Why should I be angry at a baby who grins beatifically any time I walk into the room? Who takes my face so gently in his tiny hands so that he can try to eat my nose? Isaac and Rowan need parents who aren’t angry, who aren’t entirely exhausted, at least not all the time.
Further, Isaac and Rowan need their sleep. As do we. No one, including Isaac, wants to get up all through the night. We — more or less — have the skills to sleep through. He doesn’t, but he will. And if it involves a bit of crying, so be it.
So last night Rachel got out her sleeping bag and I got out my earplugs and we bid each other — and the boys — goodnight. And, honestly, I’m not exactly sure what happened after that. With the doors closed and my earplugs in, I didn’t hear much from Isaac. I know he cried a couple of times but I’m not sure when or for how long, and frankly — and kind of astonishingly — I didn’t really care. I went in, as planned, to nurse him at 4 a.m., and he woke up with Rhys around 6:30, happy as ever. Whereupon I phoned Rachel in the basement and told her to come on up and we all got on with our mornings.
And so it will go for the next two or three nights. Wish us luck.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Snugly, huggly, mean and ugly
Rowan has bronchitis and I want drugs. Or a big huge mallet to put one or the both of us out of our misery.
The poor boy, really. After two weeks of minor coughing (I know, writing it down makes it sound like we’re entirely negligent parents, but, really, he coughed once after waking up. I thought it would resolve.), some nasty bacteria decided to set up camp in his lungs and fight the good fight. When I dropped him off at his babysitter’s in the morning, all seemed well. By the time I picked him up, his voice was froggy. The coughing woke him — and us — through the night. Our wonderful doctor agreed to squeeze him in the next day, and now he’s on amoxicillin and has a puffer, which he is not very good at using.
And he’s miserable. I guess I would be too (oh, wait — hey, I am!) if I coughed until I threw up on Friday night. (“There’s something all over the floor!” he told me when I went in to see what was wrong.)
Every interaction for the past 24 hours — a 24 hours, I should add, during which he helpfully decided to skip his daily nap — has been a battle. From getting dressed to eating to toileting to going to bed, all activities are epic and worthy of sustained resistance. Unless it’s watching Dora DVDs on the couch or throwing toys around, he’s not interested. Even when I think he might be cooperative, he manages not to be. It takes real skill. Witness the conversation I overheard between him and Rachel this morning:
“If I take olives in my lunch, I have to share them?”
“I’m not sure you’re taking olives in your lunch.”
“But if I take olives, I have to share them with Patrick?”
“I guess, if you take olives, you can share them with Patrick.”
“No. If I take olives, I have to share them. I don’t bring them I don’t want to share them.”
“That’s right, Rowan! That’s the rule. If you bring them you have to share them.”
A wail like an air raid siren: “But I don’t waaaaaaaaaaaant olives in my lunch!”
And so it goes. What got me through Sunday was knowing that on Monday we could ship him back to child care, assuming he was well enough to go. Admittedly, our standards for “well enough” are pretty low, though, given that if he stayed home with me another day I might just kill him.
I have to keep reminding myself that he’s not enjoying this either.
After forcing his clothes on his stiff, thrashing little limbs this morning, I finally got it together enough to pick him up and hold him close. “You’re having a rough time, aren’t you?” I asked him. “Do you want a cuddle on the couch for a little while?”
“Yes,” he said, proving that he still knew the word.
And so we cuddled on the couch and I sang him “It’s all right to cry” from the Free to Be You and Me album. Twice. He even giggled at the “down in the dumpy” part. And then he let me put on his coat and boots and mitts and hat and drive him over to someone else’s house for the day so that I could recover.
The poor boy, really. After two weeks of minor coughing (I know, writing it down makes it sound like we’re entirely negligent parents, but, really, he coughed once after waking up. I thought it would resolve.), some nasty bacteria decided to set up camp in his lungs and fight the good fight. When I dropped him off at his babysitter’s in the morning, all seemed well. By the time I picked him up, his voice was froggy. The coughing woke him — and us — through the night. Our wonderful doctor agreed to squeeze him in the next day, and now he’s on amoxicillin and has a puffer, which he is not very good at using.
And he’s miserable. I guess I would be too (oh, wait — hey, I am!) if I coughed until I threw up on Friday night. (“There’s something all over the floor!” he told me when I went in to see what was wrong.)
Every interaction for the past 24 hours — a 24 hours, I should add, during which he helpfully decided to skip his daily nap — has been a battle. From getting dressed to eating to toileting to going to bed, all activities are epic and worthy of sustained resistance. Unless it’s watching Dora DVDs on the couch or throwing toys around, he’s not interested. Even when I think he might be cooperative, he manages not to be. It takes real skill. Witness the conversation I overheard between him and Rachel this morning:
“If I take olives in my lunch, I have to share them?”
“I’m not sure you’re taking olives in your lunch.”
“But if I take olives, I have to share them with Patrick?”
“I guess, if you take olives, you can share them with Patrick.”
“No. If I take olives, I have to share them. I don’t bring them I don’t want to share them.”
“That’s right, Rowan! That’s the rule. If you bring them you have to share them.”
A wail like an air raid siren: “But I don’t waaaaaaaaaaaant olives in my lunch!”
And so it goes. What got me through Sunday was knowing that on Monday we could ship him back to child care, assuming he was well enough to go. Admittedly, our standards for “well enough” are pretty low, though, given that if he stayed home with me another day I might just kill him.
I have to keep reminding myself that he’s not enjoying this either.
After forcing his clothes on his stiff, thrashing little limbs this morning, I finally got it together enough to pick him up and hold him close. “You’re having a rough time, aren’t you?” I asked him. “Do you want a cuddle on the couch for a little while?”
“Yes,” he said, proving that he still knew the word.
And so we cuddled on the couch and I sang him “It’s all right to cry” from the Free to Be You and Me album. Twice. He even giggled at the “down in the dumpy” part. And then he let me put on his coat and boots and mitts and hat and drive him over to someone else’s house for the day so that I could recover.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Cradle cap, redux
So, have you noticed that I haven’t written about sleep yet? (I can see you all, my vast audience, nodding silently, “Yes, yes — we were wondering about that.”) It’s not because I haven’t tried. But sleep is a slippery subject these days. And each time I try to write about it, each time I think I have the story straight, each time I think I can sum it up in a tight little blog entry, the subject shifts and my mind blows out. Either I’m immediately blocked and must go check out Facebook, or I end up writing a five-page, single-spaced, typed essay. Seriously.
Maybe it’s because I’m tired.
But I think the real problem is that there is no tidy sleep story, no master narrative of sleep, at least not in this household. For the longest time, Isaac’s sleep story was wrapped up with Rowan’s, and went something like this: Rowan was a terrible sleeper. Rachel and I made many mistakes and did many things to encourage his terrible sleep. We would not make the same mistakes with Isaac, who would as a result sleep beautifully. Once upon a time and happily ever after and all that.
Isaac has not read this story.
Case in point: even as I write this, he is waking up from a too-short, mistimed nap, the result of an earlier, mistimed nap, the result of waking up at 5 a.m. and resettling around 6:30 this morning. After waking up at 3:48 a.m., 2:30 a.m., and 10:40 p.m. during the night. Which is on the slightly worse end of fairly typical for him moment.
“Fairly typical,” of course, changes constantly. Over the course of his five months, Isaac has slept in our bed, on top of a pillow, in a bassinet, in a single bed next to ours, and, mostly, in his own crib. He has napped beautifully and not at all. He has woken once in the night and six times. Just when I think I might lose it, he sleeps a solid five-hour chunk in the middle of the night and I wake hopeful. (Unless, of course, Rowan wakes up too, which he has taken to doing, given all the commotion around here, and Rachel or I go to sleep with him for a while.)
The fly in the ointment is that Theo learned to roll over. Normally, I applaud such developmental milestones, but he rolls over in the middle of the night, gets stuck like a turtle upended on its shell, and can’t get back. And so he yells. I spend lots of time these days coaching him on rolling the other way, but so far no dice. None of the baby books has a solution for this particular problem (and in my lower moments, I’ve debated Velcro or bungee cords). Until he learns how to roll back to his stomach, Rachel and I are pretty much in agreement that most forms of “sleep training” (also known as “crying it out”) would probably be, if not entirely useless, much more difficult to implement. In any case, he’s probably too young.
Which sucks. I mean, haven’t we done everything right? Haven’t we avoided all our previous “mistakes”? But no. The colossal mistake we are making, have made, is assuming that we have or ever did have control over the process. Sure, we can help facilitate our sons’ sleep to some extent. But even doing everything “right” doesn’t guarantee a baby that will sleep the night. Maybe Rowan would have been a terrible sleeper no matter what we did. We’ll never know. But wee Isaac, poor maligned second child (Rachel, a firstborn, thinks I overidentify with the baby of the family), could probably benefit from a clean slate in terms of sleep story. He’ll do it when he’s ready, maybe with some help from us. And until then we trudge back and forth at night, playing musical beds and soothing our children, and each other, to the best of our abilities.
Maybe it’s because I’m tired.
But I think the real problem is that there is no tidy sleep story, no master narrative of sleep, at least not in this household. For the longest time, Isaac’s sleep story was wrapped up with Rowan’s, and went something like this: Rowan was a terrible sleeper. Rachel and I made many mistakes and did many things to encourage his terrible sleep. We would not make the same mistakes with Isaac, who would as a result sleep beautifully. Once upon a time and happily ever after and all that.
Isaac has not read this story.
Case in point: even as I write this, he is waking up from a too-short, mistimed nap, the result of an earlier, mistimed nap, the result of waking up at 5 a.m. and resettling around 6:30 this morning. After waking up at 3:48 a.m., 2:30 a.m., and 10:40 p.m. during the night. Which is on the slightly worse end of fairly typical for him moment.
“Fairly typical,” of course, changes constantly. Over the course of his five months, Isaac has slept in our bed, on top of a pillow, in a bassinet, in a single bed next to ours, and, mostly, in his own crib. He has napped beautifully and not at all. He has woken once in the night and six times. Just when I think I might lose it, he sleeps a solid five-hour chunk in the middle of the night and I wake hopeful. (Unless, of course, Rowan wakes up too, which he has taken to doing, given all the commotion around here, and Rachel or I go to sleep with him for a while.)
The fly in the ointment is that Theo learned to roll over. Normally, I applaud such developmental milestones, but he rolls over in the middle of the night, gets stuck like a turtle upended on its shell, and can’t get back. And so he yells. I spend lots of time these days coaching him on rolling the other way, but so far no dice. None of the baby books has a solution for this particular problem (and in my lower moments, I’ve debated Velcro or bungee cords). Until he learns how to roll back to his stomach, Rachel and I are pretty much in agreement that most forms of “sleep training” (also known as “crying it out”) would probably be, if not entirely useless, much more difficult to implement. In any case, he’s probably too young.
Which sucks. I mean, haven’t we done everything right? Haven’t we avoided all our previous “mistakes”? But no. The colossal mistake we are making, have made, is assuming that we have or ever did have control over the process. Sure, we can help facilitate our sons’ sleep to some extent. But even doing everything “right” doesn’t guarantee a baby that will sleep the night. Maybe Rowan would have been a terrible sleeper no matter what we did. We’ll never know. But wee Isaac, poor maligned second child (Rachel, a firstborn, thinks I overidentify with the baby of the family), could probably benefit from a clean slate in terms of sleep story. He’ll do it when he’s ready, maybe with some help from us. And until then we trudge back and forth at night, playing musical beds and soothing our children, and each other, to the best of our abilities.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Picky (or, The Real Reason We Had Children)
Continuing along with our theme of bodily functions...
Cold season is upon us, a season that brings great joy to Rachel, because it allows her to indulge in one of her favourite pastimes: picking the crap out of Rowan’s nose. She’s relentless to the point of obsession (and denial), ignoring the wailing and the flailing and shrieking and running away and screaming of “No!” as she pursues her crusty quarry. With the arrival of Isaac, her joy has doubled.
Although I occasionally remind her to give the children a break, mostly I look on bemusedly — partly because no child ever died from having his nose picked, or picked at, and partly because if I called her on it, then she would call me on my own obsessions. If Rachel’s on snot detail (and ear wax, can’t forget the ear wax — and, yes, it’s true, you could probably grow potatoes in Rowan’s ears), then I am all over the fingernails and haircuts.
Like any other self-respecting mother, I carry nail clippers in my pocket at all times. You would too, if a tiny baby scratched your nipples — and his own head — with his little razor-sharp claws. You would, if your three-year-old had jaggedy toenails and half-moons of black at the end of each finger. And nobody likes a mullet. Least of all me, apparently.
And then there was Isaac’s spectacular case of cradle cap, wherein his entire scalp was covered in a stinky layer of dead skin that looked like the Gobi Desert. I spent much of his early months oiling up his tiny head in order to soften the crust. Then, I picked off the flakes as he nursed serenely.
This urge to groom, to pick, it seems hardwired. Is it some parental instinct, as natural as chimps picking fleas off each other? Or maybe it’s the enforced intimacy of having and caring for children, biological or adopted, that hardwires us, makes us into parents instead of just innocent bystanders. Whatever the case, little satisfies me more than tucking short-nailed, clean-nosed, downy-scalped children into bed each night. Until a life is conferred upon me, I guess this is as good as it gets.
Cold season is upon us, a season that brings great joy to Rachel, because it allows her to indulge in one of her favourite pastimes: picking the crap out of Rowan’s nose. She’s relentless to the point of obsession (and denial), ignoring the wailing and the flailing and shrieking and running away and screaming of “No!” as she pursues her crusty quarry. With the arrival of Isaac, her joy has doubled.
Although I occasionally remind her to give the children a break, mostly I look on bemusedly — partly because no child ever died from having his nose picked, or picked at, and partly because if I called her on it, then she would call me on my own obsessions. If Rachel’s on snot detail (and ear wax, can’t forget the ear wax — and, yes, it’s true, you could probably grow potatoes in Rowan’s ears), then I am all over the fingernails and haircuts.
Like any other self-respecting mother, I carry nail clippers in my pocket at all times. You would too, if a tiny baby scratched your nipples — and his own head — with his little razor-sharp claws. You would, if your three-year-old had jaggedy toenails and half-moons of black at the end of each finger. And nobody likes a mullet. Least of all me, apparently.
And then there was Isaac’s spectacular case of cradle cap, wherein his entire scalp was covered in a stinky layer of dead skin that looked like the Gobi Desert. I spent much of his early months oiling up his tiny head in order to soften the crust. Then, I picked off the flakes as he nursed serenely.
This urge to groom, to pick, it seems hardwired. Is it some parental instinct, as natural as chimps picking fleas off each other? Or maybe it’s the enforced intimacy of having and caring for children, biological or adopted, that hardwires us, makes us into parents instead of just innocent bystanders. Whatever the case, little satisfies me more than tucking short-nailed, clean-nosed, downy-scalped children into bed each night. Until a life is conferred upon me, I guess this is as good as it gets.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Accidental parents
Rowan’s swimming lesson last night was — much to his delight — in the sports complex’s baby pool. He prefers it because it’s shallow and warm, as opposed to the colder “big pool,” where he clings to me like a limpet.
The reason for the switch? You guessed it: an “accident” — of the solid variety — was spotted at the bottom of the big pool. From the fuss they made, it might as well have been a body. The pool was evacuated, floaty toys sprayed down, and all kinds of chemicals dumped into the water to “clean” it.
As the mother of a recently toilet trained (yeah! toilet training!) boy, all I could think was, “Thank God it wasn’t my kid.”
And then we practiced blowing bubbles and kicking and pencil floats and putting our faces in the water and jumping in. I finally made the executive decision to dunk Rowan , just get it over with. He shuddered, smiled, and then realized what I done and complained as the water ran down his eyes and snot streamed from his nose, to be washed away in the chlorinated water.
And it occurred to me — as it occurs to me every time we get in a pool — that we are all there under the tacit agreement that nobody will take too seriously the fact that we are floating in a cesspool of pee and snot and sweat and dirt. The collective denial makes it possible to get through — enjoy, in fact — swimming lessons. It’s only when something undeniably solid surfaces that we have to acknowledge it, deal with it. Otherwise, daily maintenance with filters and chlorine seems to do the trick.
Kind of like having kids (come on, you weren’t waiting for the heavy-handed metaphor?). We’re all floating in a poopy, drooly, snotty, sweat- and -pee soaked world out here, blowing bubbles, and doing our pencil floats, and swimming so that we don’t think —I mean, sink.
The reason for the switch? You guessed it: an “accident” — of the solid variety — was spotted at the bottom of the big pool. From the fuss they made, it might as well have been a body. The pool was evacuated, floaty toys sprayed down, and all kinds of chemicals dumped into the water to “clean” it.
As the mother of a recently toilet trained (yeah! toilet training!) boy, all I could think was, “Thank God it wasn’t my kid.”
And then we practiced blowing bubbles and kicking and pencil floats and putting our faces in the water and jumping in. I finally made the executive decision to dunk Rowan , just get it over with. He shuddered, smiled, and then realized what I done and complained as the water ran down his eyes and snot streamed from his nose, to be washed away in the chlorinated water.
And it occurred to me — as it occurs to me every time we get in a pool — that we are all there under the tacit agreement that nobody will take too seriously the fact that we are floating in a cesspool of pee and snot and sweat and dirt. The collective denial makes it possible to get through — enjoy, in fact — swimming lessons. It’s only when something undeniably solid surfaces that we have to acknowledge it, deal with it. Otherwise, daily maintenance with filters and chlorine seems to do the trick.
Kind of like having kids (come on, you weren’t waiting for the heavy-handed metaphor?). We’re all floating in a poopy, drooly, snotty, sweat- and -pee soaked world out here, blowing bubbles, and doing our pencil floats, and swimming so that we don’t think —I mean, sink.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
How Rowan's mind works
I told Rowan we were having a party tonight — Rosh Hashanah dinner.
“Who’s coming to our house?” he asked. And then: “Will there be cake and ice cream?”
“Well,” I said, “there will be pie and ice cream.”
Pause.
“And cake?”
“No, sweetheart, no cake. Just pie.”
“Just pie and ice cream.”
“That’s right.”
Pause.
“Is the pie mixed in?”
“Mixed into the ice cream?”
“Yes.”
“Sure, you can mix the pie into the ice cream.”
“Okay.”
“Who’s coming to our house?” he asked. And then: “Will there be cake and ice cream?”
“Well,” I said, “there will be pie and ice cream.”
Pause.
“And cake?”
“No, sweetheart, no cake. Just pie.”
“Just pie and ice cream.”
“That’s right.”
Pause.
“Is the pie mixed in?”
“Mixed into the ice cream?”
“Yes.”
“Sure, you can mix the pie into the ice cream.”
“Okay.”
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