The Cloud of Resentment

A friend sent me this article the other day. It's a little old, well, two months old. But that's an eternity when you are talking about controversies over magazines and breast feeding! The main idea is, as a mom, if you hate doing something don't do it. It sounds so simple but nothing is simple when it comes to parenting. You may hate baby wearing or breastfeeding (or any other parenting trend) but we feel compelled or almost forced to do it because, well, giant pointer fingers seem to always be jammed in our faces at any moment. The list is endless: breastfeeding, extended breastfeeding, cloth diapers, swaddling, co-sleeping, baby wearing, stay at home, go back to work, attachment parenting, making our own baby food, Ferberizing, look out! BPA is going to kill us! , sleep training, cry it out, oh no-- don't do cry it out it will damage your child forever. It's enough to make you crazy and add it with some good old fashioned stress and sleep deprivation and there you have it. Nuts. Totally nutso mama. So not doing something because you hate it is a little more complicated when you are a parent because you are responsible for another human.  Plus if they fail in any way,  the pointing begins even if it's not physical or real, we feel it. Maybe we are just pointing at ourselves but the pressure is real.

So it got me thinking what do I hate about parenting. My first thought is my two year old but that's not totally true. She has moments of real sweetness and hilarity mixed in with her particular brand of crazy. I hate bedtime. Can't really get rid of that though...I did get to a point where I just had to let some of it go so we put up a gate in her room. I hated doing cloth diapers with Callie once she turned two so I stopped. But I felt compelled to have someone else tell me it was ok. The cloth diaper thing is so hard for me because I feel strongly about the fact that we should try to help our planet as much as we can and diapers last forever in those landfills! So I feel sometimes that I have to do it because there are so many other people not doing it. But it got to the point with Callie that it was just making things so much harder. I texted a couple people as I struggled with it and  they gave me the permission I was craving. And then I thought to myself, I made it two years with only a disposable diaper at night. That's pretty darn good. You know what else I hated? Reusable baby wipes. What a mess. Loved the idea but damn Gina, I already have mountains of laundry! I will admit, I buy into most of the parenting trends but I don't feel that I go overboard. It works for us. But when I have let things go, like Callie's cloth diapers, the wave of relief was palpable. What a relief! And there is the value of letting things go. I love when the author says "A woman cannot live a life or raise a child in a cloud of resentment. Resentment is life-threatening. It's enfeebling. And it's everywhere." It is so true! Resentment is a destructive force especially when coupled when the enormous amounts of pressure, guilt and finger pointing that comes our way. So let's do ourselves and our kids a favor. Let's ease up a little bit and try to remember why we had kids. For the fun, for the love and to redisover some of what we have lost as we have become responsible adults. Because let's face it, every morning is more fun when you start it with your pants on your head or wearing a strainer for a hat,  like my girl here. 

Our Sleep Adventures Continue

Our trouble with sleep continues. Things were going well with Callie in her bed for a while and then...well...we screwed it up. We moved Lucia into her room at four months  because our pediatrician had recommended we put her in her crib rather than the co sleeper in the hope that having more room would allow her to sleep for longer periods. And since we have such a small house we tried putting her in her crib, which was in Callie's room. The first night went ok. Still 3 hour stretches. The next night was better 4-5 hour stretches. We were feeling good, like we had it under control. Which as any parent will tell you, is the kiss of death. Because that is when it will all go to crap.
The worst of it was a couple of days ago. I wrestled with Callie for 2 hours to take a nap during the day. I tried everything. Bribery, cajoling, pleading, demanding. I ended up screaming at her (again). She rolled over and went right to sleep. And I went right into my room and sobbed. Again. I hated myself again for not being the mom she needs me to be.
 That night we spent four hours getting her to go to sleep. So around 12:45 am she finally went to sleep. And then we got Lucia down as well. We thought: "Okay. That sucked. But it's done. They are both asleep."Again. Kiss of death. Callie was up 3 hours later. Bill got her back to sleep, slowly but surely. And promptly fell asleep himself in the chair in her room. 1 hour later I went in to get Lucia because she was awake and crying, so I woke Bill up, since I knew he would wake up eventually with a sore back at the very least. After that, Callie stayed asleep but Lucia was up every hour. In between each hour I was crying and finding that my rope had yet another end just when I thought I had reached it already. I started looking into sleep consultants because I couldn't handle this. AT ALL. I knew one of the madres had used one so I emailed her at 2am to find out who she had used. I found a couple of other names as well. I knew that we could handle it with two of us but with the amount of traveling Bill will be doing, the reality is that there is no way I could handle it on my own.
In the morning when I had a grand total of 3 hours of sleep under my belt I received a great gift from my mom. An offer to take Callie off my hands so I could get my rest. Sweet relief! I took the girls to our usual storytime gig on wednesdays and deposited Callie into Grandma Tere's minivan for the afternoon. Lucia and I came home, nursed and went to sleep for a glorious two whole hours! I knew that I probably could have gotten her to sleep more but I wanted some ammunition for this new battle. Off to google I went!
So now we are armed with some good information about toddler sleep patterns. The first thing we did was move Lucia out of Callie's room. At the moment, Lucia's crib is right smack in the middle of the dining room! We are planning on moving it to the back bedroom which means we have to get rid of some other furniture to make it work but that's ok. After doing a fair amount of research I discovered that  we were spending too much time on her routine. The experts recommend 1 hour tops from bath time to nigh nighs. I would wager that we were spending at least double that time, which would be one of the many reasons that I hated bedtime! So now we are working on maybe 20 minutes for bath rather than waiting for her to tell us when she was done. I am going to utilize a timer on the phone. So the timer can be the bad guy instead of me. Lord knows I've played that role enough. PJs and then storytime. This one was the hard piece for me to swallow. Being a teacher I was thrilled that Callie liked reading so much, but doing 8-10 books before bedtime was just taking too long but I tried not to let that one show because I thought it was so important. So now we are limiting it to three books at night but I am going to try to read with her throughout the day a little more. We also had been using a lamp in her room but I think it was too bright so it was opening up all kinds of adventures to her after we left the room and closed the baby gate. So now I am turning off the lamp and turning on her twilight turtle so she can see the stars. Some other ideas I read about was to just be as calm as possible when I tell her to go to bed a few times. After that we can move into consequences like taking away a blanket or a stuffed animal for a short period of time (2 minutes or so). Or because we have a gate in her room we can just let her do whatever in there til she passes out. Another idea was to give her a high carb snack before bed like cheese and crackers. I am torn on this one because the other big battle we have is over dinner. I'm afraid that if she just waits me out she gets rewarded with food that wasn't for dinner.
Anyway, so lots of changes. We implemented them for the first time last night and BAM! She went right to sleep! Could be beginners luck, but I know that being consistent is the key.

Callie's Sleeping Adventures

It has been quite some time since I have been able to blog. Sorry fair reader! But I have been in single mama mode for a while. More on that in another post (hopefully!). The last couple of months we have been dealing with Callie's sleep adventures. A couple of months ago Callie started climbing out of her crib. The girl is pretty spry and coordinated but I was worried that at some point she would fall and hurt herself, so we took the side of the crib off and bought a crib rail. Then the "fun" began. She was in and out of her bed, and this is no exaggeration, at least 20 times a night before she would fall asleep in strange places.
 Like...

Here

Or here. Hey. At least she is sleeping on something soft. Sorry Milo. SOL.

She even did it at a friend's house

It actually got to be super freaky. I am easily freaked out I will admit. Callie would scare the bejesus out of me at night. She would sneak out of her bed and I would look up and she would just be standing there in front of me staring straight at me. I admit it. I screamed once. It was like she was just appearing out of nowhere. She was making almost no noise, which is a feat for my little monster who usually sounds like a herd of elephants.
The worst part was nap time during the day. I would need a break after dealing with a crazy two year old and infant all day.  So I look forward to the time of day when I am down to one and I could focus on feeding Lucia or trying to get her on a semblence of a schedule. I would inevitably end up screaming at Callie to "GO TO BED!" It was quickly becoming a war. And I felt horrible. I felt like I was becoming a Joan Crawford version of myself. I would hear myself screaming at the top of my lungs at her, my little girl who made me a mother, who made me someone new. And I would see fear in her face as she started to cry. And then I was crying too. And let me be totally clear. This was not a raised voice. This was not yelling. This was screaming. No holds barred, top of my lungs screaming. I can honestly say I have NEVER in my entire life screamed at someone like this. I was doing it daily. Sometimes more than once a day. And how could I do this to her? How could I do this to our family? I needed to get my shit together and I knew I needed help to do it. I was time to put my pride on the shelf and admit that I needed help and I needed it fast.
I reached out to the moms that I trust the most for advice on what to do because what I was doing sure as hell wasn't working. I got some really good ideas and we are/have been implementing some of them. We are basically throwing a bunch of darts out there and hoping some of them stick to the board.
We have changed how we do storytime. Instead of reading in the back room and then trying to get her to go to her room to settle down and go to sleep we are doing everything in her room. That seems to help to get her in the right mind frame. And it is also making our reading time more enjoyable because she is more focused on the books not on all the random crap in the back room. I cleared off a shelf in her room to put her puzzles and books so her room can be a fun place for her not just the evil place where she has to go to sleep.
We also installed a baby gate on her door. And oh boy did she know the jig was up. She screamed bloody bloody murder when I put it up! But I knew part of the problem was that she was going into other rooms and staying too alert. I thought if I could at least keep her in her room that would be half of the battle. It definitely has helped. The only problem is that her door opens into the room not into the living room so there was one night when she fell asleep in front of the door and I had to push her gently away to be able to get into the room and pick her up and deposit her into the bed.
We  bought a lamp for her room. We tried to do a night light but all of her outlets are covered by furniture. We opted for an extra light because one night when I was trying to calm her down she kept pointing to a corner of the room and saying "Yook (her way of saying Look) Mama. Yook!" I turned slowly, because as I said I am easily freaked out. Obviously there was nothing there, as I told her and tried to comfort her. Eventually she said "I scared Mama." Which anytime my tough chick says that she is scared breaks me just a little. So to target we went for a lamp. We found a nice one with stars that she liked.

So that is part of our new routine. Bath, PJs, she chooses books, we read, turn on the lamp and I turn out the light in the room and say goodnight. She was still sleeping on the floor so I bought a rug so she would at least have somewhere soft to land. In theory as you can see:

Hey Callie! Try the rug next time!

I was pretty excited when she finally fell asleep on the rug!

Now it is at the point where when I turn out the light and say goodnight she will climb up on the changing table, turn the light back on and climb into bed and go to sleep.

In bed! But she wouldn't stay in bed unless she could wear her happy hollow hat. Inside out. Duh mama. 

Not a total victory, but good enough for me! Nap time is still the tough one but sometimes I just try to tire her out during the day at a park or happy hollow or something and then transfer her from the car to her bed.

Thank you Happy Hollow. I am pretty sure they could double the price of membership and I would still consider it a  bargain.

Which is funny because I NEVER use to be able to do that when she was a baby! But whatever. The target is always changing! I also want to give a big shout out to Susan Stone Belton. I got to see her speak this past week and it just solidified that yelling doesn't work. So I will keep trying to not yell and to talk to Callie instead even when she is making me bat shit crazy. I am hoping to do another post on her talk because it was so incredibly eye opening. So hopefully more posts coming soon!