Peanut Butter Spoonfuls

I’ve had this post sitting here as a draft for a while now and there seems no better time to hit publish than after a night where I was coughed on, puked on, woken up countless times, and finally unable to fall back asleep at 4:30 am. Any grammatical errors, misspellings, ramblingness, or general nonsensicalness, (<-and made up words) can be blamed on fatigue.

How little and poorly I sleep is my favorite thing to talk about. It’s not because I want sympathy (except for some times when I do) it’s just that it’s on my mind pretty much constantly and I have no filter so it all comes out. I haven’t discussed sleep in what feels like far too long for me, plus Jade asked if I was planning on night-weaning so I want to address that. Here is the full sleep update and my ramblings on considering night-weaning down the road. Warning: this is going to be long.

This post will also be littered with random sleeping pics.

All the sleep books love to talk about sleep-regressions. There are the 4 month, 8 month, 11 month, 12 month, 18 month, and 2 year sleep regressions most often cited, and then you can find a source describing one for every other month as well. I think the point here is that babies are really sh*tty sleepers. Case in point, B hit a sleep regression at 3 months and it lasted until 15 months. In my opinion, it’s all made up to sell books so I really hate using the term sleep regression, but I’m going to. I think we maybe had a real 18 month sleep regression and that is why he was boycotting his naps. It lasted for probably a month, and he still has his days where he won’t nap, but we seem to be through the worst of that particular phase. At least for now we are back to 2 hour afternoon naps in his big boy bed and mostly decent nights that are still spent hogging half of mine and G’s bed. (A decent night around here is waking up only 2 or 3 times, very briefly.)

Even if we aren’t snuggling, we must be in physical contact at all times.

On the rare occasion I stay up later than B, he slowly migrates across the bed looking for me.

I know to a lot of people waking up 2 or 3 times sounds horrible but it isn’t what you might picture. He doesn’t even open his eyes, then he says (not screams! not cries!) “Mama milk Mama milk,” until I wake up, he nurses, and he drifts off peacefully all in under 2 or 3 minutes. Neither of us really awakens fully and we are both typically well-rested. (Finally I am able to spout off that line about everyone being rested from the Dr. Sears books that I used to think was complete and utter horsesh*t.) That is not to say we don’t have horrible phases still. We definitely do have those, but today’s horrible is yesterday’s pretty good and today’s good is yesterday’s dream. I never thought I would be able to say that we are making any forward progress, and it still doesn’t feel like it in the short term, but when I look back to a year ago I realize just how far we’ve come.

He can even fall asleep in all sorts of contortionist positions now!

So yes, I am happy with where things are but of course they could be better. B is not sleeping through the night regularly, and in fact has not slept through the night even a single time in his almost 20 months of existence. Because he’s made progress completely on his own though, I can even more confidently say I know he will get there one day. However, because he has made progress at the pace of a sleeping snail, I cannot even begin to venture a guess at when that will be. So am I ever going to do anything about it? I don’t know.

Night-weaning or not, we will never take away those monkeys.

The only thing I would consider doing at some point would be night-weaning. (Given that he is out of his crib and can climb out of bed and open doors, I think we are a little past leaving him in his crib to cry himself to sleep, not that it was ever on the table anyways.) My reasons for not night-weaning haven’t really changed since I wrote this, and he is overall sleeping better than he was at that time which makes me even less interested in doing something that would involve short-term crying and no sleep. However, I do still like to keep the night-weaning option in my back pocket in case one day I can’t take it any more, or he takes way too long to make any further progress, or I find myself with two babies in my bed and there aren’t enough boobs to go around.

I still like to read about other people’s night weaning stories (obsessively) so I’ve amassed a rather good statistical sample in my head. Many people seem to have success with Jay Gordon’s method, and others tend to do well just slowly pushing back nursing sessions. On the whole, it seems like the people who have the most success are those whose children started out waking up the least. Duh. This is yet another reason why I’m hesitant to do it, since I do not consider myself to have one of those children.

Just because he appears peaceful here, it doesn’t mean he won’t wake up 4 seconds later.

As for how I would go about night-weaning, I like plans and schedules so Dr. G’s plan appeals to me there, but I actually think for us it would not be the best. I think trying to shorten nursing sessions rather than drop them would actually be more confusing and frustrating for B. It might be the sort of thing that would work well for a younger baby? I don’t know. If I were to do it now, I would probably talk to B about it a lot ahead of time and tell him the milk went night night and it will be back later. I might try to cut down to one night time feeding at first and then go from there, or I might just go cold turkey. I think it would depend on how much he was nursing at the time and whether I thought he was really hungry or just needed comfort. At this stage he is for sure hungry. (Babies can go all night without eating at a much younger age, he doesn’t need food then, blah blah blah. I agree with all of that but when you are used to eating a meal at 1 am you get hungry at 1 am and that doesn’t change in one night!)

There are times now when B wants more milk than I have, which is hard to believe given I am essentially a dairy cow. Anyways, when that happens he gets upset that the “milk all gone” and he has to “wait later more”. He is, however, getting a lot better at just accepting that and falling asleep, or going back to playing, or doing whatever he was doing without a full on meltdown about his milk. Based on this trend I think it would only get easier to actually night wean him as he gets older because he could understand it. This could of course backfire as we get further and further into the tantrum years, and maybe that will be my reason for not night-weaning further down the road. Who knows!

Yet another sleeping pic to break up all of this text.

This was a very long winded way of saying we aren’t there yet with sleep, but it’s not so bad anymore. Or maybe we aren’t there yet and we never will be and I am now so far removed from sleeping well throughout the night that I have lost all perspective and this seems good to me now. What is the oldest a kid could possibly be and still not sleep through the night? I’ve heard of kids waking up until 4 or 5 but never past that. Any bets on when he will stop nursing at night on his own? His doctor said it will be “later than I will be willing to wait.” I don’t know what that means and she won’t give specifics but she also doesn’t know how crazy I am and what I’ve already put up with. Has anyone heard of a kid waking up to nurse in Kindergarten? I have not but I also know not to underestimate the torture my son can inflict in this department.

It was beyond incredible to get away to Vegas. I can’t say enough good things about the trip.

Since kids like to make sure you never get ahead and always feel like you are running on 30%, B decided to get sick immediately when I walked through the door. He was super happy to see me and decided to show it by throwing up all over me several times. He followed it up with spiking a fever, puking in the bed in the middle of the night, and waking up at 5:45 today. Good to be home!

Told him if he needed to puke he should do so in the bowl. He took it a bit too literally.

No really, it actually is good to be home. How twisted is that?

I have major heartburn about leaving B but G was able to convince me that we needed a short vacation just the two of us so here we in Vegas for two nights. It was a great idea I have to say and it’s led me to a starting revelation about my life.

Vacation smiles. Or mojito smile in my case.

So basically I have been some kind of tired since December 2010. It ranges from just not feeling fresh ever, to barely feeling as if I can keep blinking and standing upright for one more second. Obviously, there is one thing to blame for this and that is B, no big revelation there. This whole time though I thought it was an issue of sleep. I slept poorly during pregnancy and I think it’s fair to say I’ve documented my poor sleep ever since B was born. It just makes sense. If you don’t sleep at night you are tired during the day.

Luckily being tired here is fun.

As much as I’d hoped to get some sleep on vacation, my boobs had different plans. The first night I woke up around 2 or 3 and had to pump. Like could not possibly go back to sleep. Pumping is 1000000x worse than nursing because you really have to wake up. I just went with it and ordered the Twilight movie so I’d have something to watch while pumping and trying to will myself back to sleep. I was probably up for an hour in the middle of the night and then found myself awake at 5:30 for the day anyways. Unsurprisingly, I felt the same as every other day. I went for a run on the boiling hot strip, met G at the air conditioned gym for a more reasonable workout, spent hours in a bed at the pool drinking and eating ice cream, had a delicious dinner, saw David Copperfield, and walked and shopped along the strip. We got back to our room around 10 pm after all of that and I didn’t feel exhausted. It was 11 pm Utah time, 3 hours past the normal point in the day at which I can barely stand up straight, and I felt like I could keep going for hours. I didn’t, I just went to sleep, but still.

The Babe Ruthless: ice cream, booze, and candy. Someone surely won a Nobel Prize for this.

The camera saw us as we saw the world. A blur.

G was underwhelmed and “figured out” all the tricks. I told him he was in the wrong field then. Now he is starting his own show and we will be living in Vegas.

That’s when it dawned on me for the first time. I slept like crap, normal crap but still crap, the night before but I wasn’t drop dead tired at the end of the day so what was different? There were absolutely no demands made of me, I did not repeatedly have to lift a 25 lb weight, I was not constantly moving or packing snacks or stuffing limbs in car seat and stroller straps. When I went to the bathroom no one yelled at me, no one cried and grabbed at my leg, and no one tried to throw their monkeys in the toilet. Maybe in fact I am actually sleeping just fine now and it’s the actual physical and mental demands of caring for my kid that are wearing me out at the end of the day?

Amazing. What’s even more amazing is that even with that realization I am beyond excited to be home with the little monster in just a few hours. Of course we owe a special thanks to my mom for allowing us to escape sans baby, thanks Mom!!

It’s been a long time since B would just fall asleep after 5 minutes of nursing. Now he nurses, rolls around, giggles, sings, crawls over top of G or me, snuggles, and generally stalls and winds down once we get him into bed. Sometimes we even “talk” about his day now as he settles, which is pretty awesome. This time of day is both my favorite and my least favorite. A lot of the time I’m just thinking, “Go the F to sleep,” because I’m so tired myself, but if I stop to enjoy the snuggles and the chatting then it’s actually pretty awesome and special.

Here is a clip from last night, when B was wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day just before he fell asleep. I know I already wrote about the great purge of 4 trash bags worth of clothes while our internet was out, so I might as well explain. Yes, I am wearing a t-shirt from my high school running camp which means it made the cut. You should see the things that didn’t.

Happy Mother’s day to all the mommas out there! And a special happy Mother’s Day to my momma! All of those annoying cliche things that people say are usually true, and the ones about motherhood are no exception. You really don’t start to 100% appreciate everything your mom did (and still does!) for you until you have a kid yourself.

It is easy to remember all of the ways in which my mom has been there for me in more recent times. From my teenage years to my 30′s my mom has always been the person I’ve turned to for advice, support, and friendship. And now that I have my own kid, I am realizing all of the things she did that I don’t even remember to make me feel loved, safe, happy, and secure. Those feelings have forever stuck with me despite the fact that all the memories have faded. Knowing how much I appreciate those things helps me get through some of the tougher parenting moments with B. When I feel my patience growing thin or my fatigue growing thick, I remind myself how important it is to show him that I am listening, and I am there for him, and that his really big feelings about something as seemingly silly as his trains falling off the track are as important to me as they are to him.

My mom has given me so many things but it is this gift of showing me how to be a mother, that I am now most grateful for. She was, and is, everything that I want to be to my own kids and I am thankful every day to have that blue print* to follow.

(*No one is perfect so I still intend to make just a few edits to this script along the way, like more ice cream and sugary cereals allowed.)

Despite the fact that I have been technically off of her books for years now, my mom still won’t quit. I still sometimes can’t believe she agreed to move out here to be with us and that I get to see her almost every day.  It gives me such great joy to watch my mom and B together and to know that my own son is able to get all the same precious gifts from my mom that I was lucky enough to receive. Not to mention the fact that whenever I have questions about parenting, I don’t have to sit here and wonder what my mom would do. I just ask her!

It is not even fair to be so lucky. Sniff. I love you, mom! I know I can never repay you for all you’ve done but I hope I can make you proud by trying to do my best for B*.

(*At least until he grows up and leaves me and never calls home, and then I call you to cry about it.)

Thanks for all the snuggles.

Thanks for letting me destroy your house and play with all of J’s old toys.

Thanks for agreeing to look at the camera! It is a rare thing to find a picture of my mom not hiding from the photographer.

See? Always hiding. Thanks for letting my pretend baby and me sleep in your bed and setting up a generational cycle.

Thanks for playing Barbies even though you were so embarrassed about it that you had to hang your head in shame!

Thanks for the Disney World trip and tolerating the outfit and hat!

Thanks for bringing me presents from all of your travels and for letting me exclusively wear New Kids on the Block attire for 2 years straight.

Thanks for always letting me be myself, and dress myself, even when I looked like a complete idiot.

Thanks for being there for me, and with me, for all of the big things in my life.

And thanks for doing it all over again with my lucky little boy.

It is clear that B’s obsession with going out to a place he calls “siiiiiide” is going to last all summer. He is perfectly happy playing with weeds, sharp rock shards, mulch, bugs, and the gutters, but I was beginning to get bored of those things and feel a little bad. After much manual labor and back aches for my mom and me both, we now have a pimped out our yard and are ready to live outside for the next few months.

Ok it’s not totally constructed. We haven’t attached the climbing wall yet but B seems ok with it.

The slide is a big hit. He has worked out that “mama too big” but it doesn’t stop him from making me go down over and over again.

Oh and B now has his “oooown sandbox!”

Even when our internet is working it sucks. When we first moved into our house I was devastated to learn that we only had one option for “high speed” internet and it was the slow kind. Add to that the fact that we experience fairly frequent outages that last for a day to even days at a time. It’s not really the future here. At first it would make me so angry that I’d not only continually be on the phone with our service provider, but would also call others to beg them to expand service to our area. My please finally worked and now I am way too lazy and entrenched to actually switch providers. My DSL and I have fallen into a comfortable and dysfunctional friendship. I accept our crappy service for what it is, it accepts me, and we are somehow able to coexist.

Thankfully my mom’s iPad still works so B can snuggle his favorite letters.

I am not sure of the exact duration of this last outage but it was somewhere around 36 hours. That is even too long for me to be away from my precious computer. I almost broke down and scheduled an installation but instead decided to channel my rage into other projects.

I now have a completely rearranged closet and dresser and am donating 5 trash bags of clothes to Goodwill. I have organized and cleaned out the kitchen junk drawer, and I’ve started a pile of papers to be filed and fully intend on purchasing whatever is required for one to actually file. I also emptied out my car and went to Toys R Us to pick up all the pieces for an outdoor play thingy with a slide. Then I realized we were lacking the proper tools, and a few bolts, required to assemble it so I am now the proud owner of the fanciest drill bit set you’ve ever seen and have begun assembly.

The guy at Toys R Us loved me when I made him take every single part out of the box that was too big for my car.

My assistant modeled clothes and helped me determine what to keep.

Sadly the glittery butt mini-skirt didn’t make the cut.

Someone enjoyed Home Depot.

There is no way a full-grown man could fit in the spaces required to assemble this monstrosity.

My back hurts and I’m exhausted but now that I’ve started all these projects, I can’t quit. If I lived in a pre-Internet era, I can only imagine how clean my house would be.

I recently did a post on B-isms, or all the things B says that I find adorable. Of course right after I did that he came up with his best one yet. Now whenever someone is singing, either to him or to themselves, and he doesn’t like it, he just says, “turn it off.” I die laughing every time, even when I am the target of his insult.

As if he does not blab enough all day, B is also constantly chattering throughout the night. The most common utterance I hear when I’m half asleep is actually probably better described as a scream. B desperately calls out, “reeeeeeead book!!!” at least once, often more, during the night. I think his worst nightmare is that no one will read books to him. Tough life.

His other worst nightmare would be having only a Queen size bed all to himself.

On that note, since I imagine it will be a while before he can read to himself, I would love for him to sit down and watch TV now and then. This makes me a great mother, I realize, but we have a few long flights coming up this summer and it would be great if he would just zone out quietly and stare at a screen for 30 minutes or so like it seems normal kids do. Is this an age thing or a temperament thing? When can I expect him to become a good TV watcher or is there no hope?

He watched the RSL game for about 4 seconds, just long enough to get this picture.

Yesterday we went to our mommy and me music class. B was lucky (or unlucky) enough to select a seat right next to the instructor and therefore got to be (or had to be) the example. As a perennial teacher’s pet and suck-up, it never occurred to me that a child might not welcome this special treat. Every time we started a new song, the teacher would tap the rhythm on B’s toes, or dance her fingers on his head, or do whatever all the parents were supposed to be doing with their children. B mostly just sat there and stared straight ahead, stone faced, but I assumed he was just freezing up from all the glory and pressure that comes with this position.

Running away from the pressure.

Then as soon as class was over he started saying, “Jane* go away, no no no no!” (*Jane is not really his teacher’s name but I am protecting the innocent.) I asked him if he didn’t like that Jane kept touching him and he looked really upset about it, gulp. He just kept repeating, “Jane, go away go away,” with this big frowny face.

I really didn’t expect to be having this conversation so soon, but I told him that if he doesn’t want someone touching him then it is ok to say so. No one is allowed to touch him without his permission, it’s his body, yadda yadda. I said next time it happens he can just tell her to please stop, or he can move away from her. Now all he says is, “Next time! Jane no no no no. Go away!” I am excited and scared to find out what he actually does next class.

We also talked about how it’s not ok for big kids to snatch toys out of his hands so he’s working on possessing as many toys as possible.

Also, I am excited and scared for when he puts together that me changing is diaper is actually a form of someone touching him against his will.

Finally science tells us that mama’s boys rule the world. At least that is how I interpret the following finding from a study conducted at Harvard. (See? Not just science but Harvard science!!)

And, in a conclusion that surely would have pleased Freud, the findings suggest that the warmth of your relationship with Mommy matters long into adulthood. Specifically:

• Men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87,000 more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.
• Men who had poor childhood relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when old.
• Late in their professional lives, the men’s boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.
• On the other hand, warm childhood relations with fathers correlated with lower rates of adult anxiety, greater enjoyment of vacations, and increased “life satisfaction” at age 75—whereas the warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no significant bearing on life satisfaction at 75.

The only predictable thing is that he will be completely unaffected by his poor sleeping.

There was no letting go of the trash truck.