Parent Extremis

Just a few days ago when I wrote this entry about keeping your family and kids on a schedule I was trying to work out my own choices of late. But, just a few days later I’m doubting my own words. Today, for example I was was all whiney about how it was a bad day and I was tired and WAH! I had a bad day.

We had a busy weekend and took a trip to a baseball game in Baltimore yesterday for Father’s Day so naturally, I was tired today. Monday is usually a tough day for me; recovering from the weekend, alone again because Marc is back at work, no plans yet for the week but still a long TO-DO list that I am ignoring. And, Noah woke me up a few times last night. There, I established legitimate tiredness. Why do we feel we need to defend ourselves and explain our tired? That’s a whole other entry for sure!

Bad storms were in our afternoon forecast so naturally I used that as an excuse not to go outside for a walk-jog with the dog and the baby. After a long day in the house of not really getting dressed, not showering, and just operating on a three hour cycle of feed baby-change baby-sleep baby-check email-eat a snack-cuddle with baby-watch more television- I grew a little irritable and that led to some anxiety over my lack of ambition to get off my fat ass.

After I put Noah to bed I got to thinking that maybe, maybe trying to keep a tighter schedule might do me good. It might allow me to have the exercise time I know that I need. It might actually be better for me to eat at certain times of the day rather than when I get hungry and risk skipping meals and having a lunch that involves dipping the spoon into the peanut butter jar and then covering that heap of delicious nutty smoothness with healthy raisins (WHAT? They are high in iron).

NEW GOAL: Get on a damn schedule. Don’t stress it just try to find some natural rhythm to the day and possibly even get a shower and exercise, but not in that order.

Noah is taking a nap right now and I just ate lunch and am now sitting at the kitchen counter in utter and total silence watching him on the video monitor.

After feeding him downstairs in front of the television with the dog running around yapping I noticed that he looked tired so I just carried him upstairs and put him in his crib. I turned to close the curtains fully expecting him to wake up and scream about the whole putting-the-baby-down thing and demand a new diaper, another feeding, twenty-bucks for the night, ma! But he didn’t. He opened his eyes just long enough to establish where he was and then he closed them and went back to sleep and that was a whole thirty minutes ago. If past performance is an indicator of future behavior he will be waking up with a scream in about eleven minutes.

But for now, SUCCESS!

Noah’s upset sleep patterns a few weeks ago were due to a period of extreme growth and neurological development. I believe this and I read it in a book too. Since that period of awfulness he has returned to sleeping through the night and he has also mastered, MASTERED I tell ya’ the art of rolling over back-to-front and front-to-back. He’s a little genius!

The book, The Wonder Weeks describes major developmental milestones in a baby’s life and when they occur, approximately. This book doesn’t tell you what to do about them, which is cool because we all know I don’t like being told how to parent. But, by knowing when some major developments are going to occur it prepares you steel yourself for those tough weeks when your baby doesn’t sleep so well or needs more feeding or is just overall clingy and fussy.

EDITED TO ADD: It was more like seven minutes. URGH.

When I was pregnant I read books about pregnancy and giving birth. I didn’t read any baby books. Actually, I didn’t think I needed it. After all, I have practiced taking care of babies and children since I was ten years old. I figured I would love my baby, feed him and clean him, teach him good values and all and mostly … follow my intuition.

Awhile back I wrote about Noah not sleeping in a crib and how he slept with me on me. And I soon ate my words because he did a little sleeping in the co-sleeper for about two nights. My doctor reassured me and said that the first month is totally fair game and just to sleep wherever and however you can. So we did. And the next day I bought every baby-sleep book I could find in hopes of figuring out a plan of action for getting little Noah to sleep by himself, anywhere but on top of me.

I read this book and then I read this book and then I threw them both across the room and cried for awhile because, dude! they contradict each other, badly. And I think both books told me I was a very bad mother for not doing something sooner.

See, this is exactly why I didn’t read baby books. They are all a bunch of “theories” and “methods” and some of them work for some people, but they can also make you feel like a real bork of a parent. I kept looking through books and they all seem to be based on some sort of scare tactic, you know, if you don’t do this method you child will grow up to be a hopeless insomnia who might go all Menendez on you one day. Um, no thank you.

I am now back to my original plan, do what feels right. It won’t be a tragedy if Noah doesn’t sleep in his own room through the night for a few more months. I do believe that some babies need more close contact and some babies do sleep better than other.

For now, I’m trying to put Noah in his crib in the evening, when he is tired. I let him cry for a few minutes but not for hours. Not even close. It just doesn’t feel right to me.

If I had absolute 100% confidence in the cry-it-out method, I’d do it. But I am not willing to go through that trauma (me) and racket (Noah) if there is even a remote chance it won’t work.

And all those self-soothing ideas? Yeah, they don’t work for us.

If you had a baby who was a bad sleeper I would love to hear what worked for you and what didn’t.

Greetings!

I’m the new writer for Parent Extremis. I’m no more qualified to write for this site than I am to care for my own seven week old baby. So it should be a fun ride! No, really, I plan to use this site to evaluate and discuss a variety of parenting issues. I hope you will stay tuned for some potentially riveting, or at least mildly interesting discussions of all the issues I can dream up including breast versus bottle feeding, sleep issues (co-sleeping vs. crying it out), the effect of pregnancy on the family, dealing with pediatrician visits and vaccination controversy, dealing with toddlers, heading back to work, discipline methods and much more.

I recently became a stay at home mom, or a work at home mom who does some freelance writing, to Noah, born December 21, 2007. He is almost eight weeks old and I love him more than life itself. We live with my hardworking and devoted husband, Marc, four cats and a yappy little dog.

Someone told me that a woman is a mother by the time her child is born, but a man has to become a father. True, what my wife experienced for 9 months (let alone 19 hours) changed her forever.

How does a man become a father? A real father, I mean. Not just a biological father, little more than what a co-worker of mine called her “beloved sperm donor.”

Dr. Michelle Borba at Parenting Secrets writes about what makes older men better fathers. But her observations could apply to any father. Perhaps, to mothers too.

1. Older dads are more involved in child rearing. Some fathers are so involved in their own careers they don’t take time for their children. Or maybe they want to sow their wild oats, so to speak. Guys, they have already been sown.

2. Older dads are more nurturing. Some fathers have a reputation or a self-image to maintain. We’re all wounded, and many of us didn’t have nurturing fathers ourselves. But that’s a child you have there. He won’t be a child for long. He won’t need love later as he needs now.

3. Older dads are more willing to share child responsibilities. Again, some fathers have their own agendas, and can’t admit that the time has come for those agendas to change.

To be a good father means changing the way you naturally do things. You will need to reduce the importance of your career. You will need to spend more time at home. You will need to look at your child with the eyes of a child.

Parents often wistfully wish they could raise their children differently, spend more time with them, teach them themselves, protect them from pervasive influences. Their wistfulness implies it’s good, but it isn’t possible for them.

Well, is it good for their children to continue the way they’re going? Or just convenient for them? If what we’re doing is not good for our children, why don’t we make the necessary sacrifices to change what we’re doing?

Sure, society is against us, everybody does it this way, and hardly anybody does it the way we wish we could do it. No, I can’t change society, at least not right now, but I can change my family life. I can’t change what’s on television, but I can change the channel. I can unplug the television.

Maybe you’d like to give birth in a non-institutional setting, but your company insurance doesn’t cover midwives. Believe me, from personal experience, the difference is worth it. Under most circumstances, it’s safer and maybe it’s even better for your baby’s development to stay out of the hospital nursery. Why choose an unnatural, second-class experience for your child just because it’s not approved by your authorities?

People say that it’s too hard. It’s too different. Well, getting rid of a malignant tumor is hard too, harder than learning to live with it. But if to live, or to live more abundantly, I might have to do hard things.

Finances come into play in all of this, of course. Parents have to raise their children like other people do because they can’t afford to do it differently. They can’t afford to leave their job and work from home, with their children. They can’t afford to move out of their neighborhood or out of the city. But consider our children, maybe we can’t afford not to.

To make radical parenting work requires radical changes in society. Maybe not all of society but it might require something radical in your society, in your family. Maybe not in the national or international economy but certainly in your family economy.

Some parents find they may have to abandon the concept, popularized during the Industrial Revolution and rare before it, that work needs to be performed away from home, that career means pulling at your roots every day, hoping that the plants don’t suffer too much.

Some parents may have to give up the idea that watching how electronic people live, instead of living yourself, is a good use of your time. The average American child spends hours a day in front of a screen of some sort. Think how much he or should could accomplish in that same amount of time if he didn’t. How much could you accomplish?