poor babies.
I'm reading a book I got from the library about learning to recognize signs of fussiness which accompany developmental leaps forward, with the idea that knowing about them helps make it easier to be patient with your baby and yourself, and avoid getting in the trap of thinking this will last forever. It's called the Wonder Weeks. One thing about the book though is that it quotes 12 (IIRC) parents whom they followed throughout their babies' first year of life, and gets their "real time" so to speak quotes when their babies were in a fussy period or past it. Sometimes the quotes seem to be serving the purpose of "If you don't realize this is just a phase, you might act like this, and that would be bad". Specifically the one mom, of "Juliette", is really grating on me. Every time I read a quote from her, you could sum it up as "my baby is such a bitch." With the sub-theme of "I'm so busy, I don't have time for this stupid baby!" And it seems like half her quotes end with her saying "When my baby annoys me, I put her in the crib and walk away." Starting when she's like three months old.
I just flicked through the book and I could not find a single quote from this mother where she's unequivocally positive about her child. All the other moms are quoted being both positive and negative, as far as I can tell--saying both "My son gave me his first real smile today--I melted!" and "He wouldn't stop crying in the middle of the store today. I wanted to cry too." Some of the quotes are frankly weird, like this one from the 54th week. "Sometimes, my daughter will sit, slouching and rocking back and forth, gazing into thin air. I always drop whatever I'm doing to shake her and wake her up again. I'm terrified there might be something wrong with her." It's like, crap, lady, if your daughter asks you to pick her up or play with her you get angry at her and put her in her crib because you're oh so busy, and when she just wants to sit and daydream you drop everything and shake her?
Poor Juliette. :(
The book was apparently published in 1992 in Dutch originally, so little Juliette is an adult now. Wonder what she's like.
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I am really liking the Dr. Sears Baby Sleep Book. It seems so sane! I know that sounds like it should be a given but in the world of parenting manuals it's really not. I especially like the mantra which appears every so often in helpful bold:
If you resent it, change it.
And their baby B's of attachment parenting include balance, meaning that everyone should be thriving, parents and baby too.
The Pipster has gone on strike totally from the swaddle, it seems. It was a very sudden thing. She seems to be keeping to the recently established pattern of initial 4-6 hour stretch, then waking every two to three hours, which means that I get woken up two to three times between midnight and ~7:30 (when she usually wakes up for the day).
Today she was ill, I think. She was very cranky, tired, and sniffly--no fever. She took five naps, which is a thing that never happens, two of which were 1 hr+ and the others a good twenty to thirty minutes, and yet she still got tired around 7pm and was asleep at 7:30. But when she was awake she was very clingy. Some of those naps happened while I wore her. Poor thing.
I got some good ideas from the book on how to reduce night wakings and night nursings (I'm hoping to have her wake and nurse only once a night--I'd be totally satisfied with that), but I'm going to wake to implement them until she's feeling better. The only tip I'm going to try starting now is to wake her up and nurse her when I go to bed--hopefully that will give me at least two hours, maybe three, of initial getting to sleep and sleeping.
We're also going to rearrange the crib and bed set-up on Friday so that it's easier for me to get her in and out of the crib without waking me up too much.
Having read most of the Baby Sleep Book it isn't that Pip is that bad of a sleeper, especially for her age, growth pattern, and teething; it's more that I've never been a great sleeper, so I am especially vulnerable to disruption. The only thing is that I wish the book had a section or tips for poor adult sleepers especially. It's weird that they don't, given how many people struggle with insomnia etc.
The book has further solidified me against cry-it-out (by which I mean any practice in which a baby is left to cry for extended periods alone). Especially when they gave the example of a mom who came to their practice at the end of her rope because her baby was waking so frequently and seemed to her to be in pain, and her pediatrician had said the baby was just fine, and everyone was telling her to let the baby cry it out, but her instinct said "My baby is in pain" and thus she drove the hour and a half to see Dr. Sears. Dr. Sears suspected GERD and had a gastroenscopy done and it turned out the baby had awful ulcers in his stomach and lesions on his intestines! The baby was truly in excruciating pain, and what's more he needed surgery ASAP. I hate to think what would have happened if that mom had listened to the chorus telling her to let him cry it out.
I don't think Pip has anything like that, thank God, but it just really hit me that babies are so helpless and vulnerable. They have no language except crying. They don't cry to manipulate. I can understand the parents who try cry it out and it works after a few days or even a week. But the ones for whom cry it out keeps going for weeks and months? I was reading an LJ of someone who is a nanny and this person blithely said that they've been doing cry it out for four months and the baby still cries an hour or more every night. It's hard for me to understand, it really is. Why keep doing something that is so distressing to the baby AND isn't working?
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I'm going to start my liturgical planning post for October tonight since I have an unexpected surfeit of time. I expected to have to write a review for JIG but there are some game issues that mean that has to be postponed. I've folded all my laundry, and I was trying to do some tidying and I woke up Pippa. She's possibly sick, like I said, so I'm going to hold off on doing anything else noisy tonight.
I just flicked through the book and I could not find a single quote from this mother where she's unequivocally positive about her child. All the other moms are quoted being both positive and negative, as far as I can tell--saying both "My son gave me his first real smile today--I melted!" and "He wouldn't stop crying in the middle of the store today. I wanted to cry too." Some of the quotes are frankly weird, like this one from the 54th week. "Sometimes, my daughter will sit, slouching and rocking back and forth, gazing into thin air. I always drop whatever I'm doing to shake her and wake her up again. I'm terrified there might be something wrong with her." It's like, crap, lady, if your daughter asks you to pick her up or play with her you get angry at her and put her in her crib because you're oh so busy, and when she just wants to sit and daydream you drop everything and shake her?
Poor Juliette. :(
The book was apparently published in 1992 in Dutch originally, so little Juliette is an adult now. Wonder what she's like.
---
I am really liking the Dr. Sears Baby Sleep Book. It seems so sane! I know that sounds like it should be a given but in the world of parenting manuals it's really not. I especially like the mantra which appears every so often in helpful bold:
If you resent it, change it.
And their baby B's of attachment parenting include balance, meaning that everyone should be thriving, parents and baby too.
The Pipster has gone on strike totally from the swaddle, it seems. It was a very sudden thing. She seems to be keeping to the recently established pattern of initial 4-6 hour stretch, then waking every two to three hours, which means that I get woken up two to three times between midnight and ~7:30 (when she usually wakes up for the day).
Today she was ill, I think. She was very cranky, tired, and sniffly--no fever. She took five naps, which is a thing that never happens, two of which were 1 hr+ and the others a good twenty to thirty minutes, and yet she still got tired around 7pm and was asleep at 7:30. But when she was awake she was very clingy. Some of those naps happened while I wore her. Poor thing.
I got some good ideas from the book on how to reduce night wakings and night nursings (I'm hoping to have her wake and nurse only once a night--I'd be totally satisfied with that), but I'm going to wake to implement them until she's feeling better. The only tip I'm going to try starting now is to wake her up and nurse her when I go to bed--hopefully that will give me at least two hours, maybe three, of initial getting to sleep and sleeping.
We're also going to rearrange the crib and bed set-up on Friday so that it's easier for me to get her in and out of the crib without waking me up too much.
Having read most of the Baby Sleep Book it isn't that Pip is that bad of a sleeper, especially for her age, growth pattern, and teething; it's more that I've never been a great sleeper, so I am especially vulnerable to disruption. The only thing is that I wish the book had a section or tips for poor adult sleepers especially. It's weird that they don't, given how many people struggle with insomnia etc.
The book has further solidified me against cry-it-out (by which I mean any practice in which a baby is left to cry for extended periods alone). Especially when they gave the example of a mom who came to their practice at the end of her rope because her baby was waking so frequently and seemed to her to be in pain, and her pediatrician had said the baby was just fine, and everyone was telling her to let the baby cry it out, but her instinct said "My baby is in pain" and thus she drove the hour and a half to see Dr. Sears. Dr. Sears suspected GERD and had a gastroenscopy done and it turned out the baby had awful ulcers in his stomach and lesions on his intestines! The baby was truly in excruciating pain, and what's more he needed surgery ASAP. I hate to think what would have happened if that mom had listened to the chorus telling her to let him cry it out.
I don't think Pip has anything like that, thank God, but it just really hit me that babies are so helpless and vulnerable. They have no language except crying. They don't cry to manipulate. I can understand the parents who try cry it out and it works after a few days or even a week. But the ones for whom cry it out keeps going for weeks and months? I was reading an LJ of someone who is a nanny and this person blithely said that they've been doing cry it out for four months and the baby still cries an hour or more every night. It's hard for me to understand, it really is. Why keep doing something that is so distressing to the baby AND isn't working?
---
I'm going to start my liturgical planning post for October tonight since I have an unexpected surfeit of time. I expected to have to write a review for JIG but there are some game issues that mean that has to be postponed. I've folded all my laundry, and I was trying to do some tidying and I woke up Pippa. She's possibly sick, like I said, so I'm going to hold off on doing anything else noisy tonight.