Let’s backtrack a few days.
It is the morning after my birthday. I have received 90 dollars in Chapters/Indigo/Coles gift cards between now and Christmas but I have not spent them yet because I know from experience that it is a mistake to buy myself ANYTHING between Christmas and my birthday. Whatever book I buy will invariably be the book that Perfect Husband bought for me as a surprise.
Perfect Husband wakes me up with “Happy Birthday! None of your gifts have arrived yet!”
I don’t mind that, but it means that I still can’t buy myself any books either. So Perfect Husband tells me which books he has ordered for me, so that I won’t go and buy them myself. It’s a good thing he did because otherwise I would have ordered those exact ones. So now I dance off to browse online for the other books I want.
Giddy as a kid in a candy store, I line up an impressive booklist online. Then, reflecting, I check the availability of some of my books in local book stores and then remove those from the online order. After all, the book store is an endangered species and I try to patronize them whenever possible. So I just order the books that you never see anywhere – a book on Baby Led Weaning, a book by the author of The Scientist In The Crib, a book about babies by Desmond Morris, and a book about secure attachments.
I try to order the books.
Chapters.ca tells me that I should log in so they can give me my irewards discount. Agreeing wholeheartedly, I attempt to do so, but my usual passwords aren’t working. Surprised that I have never created an online account at Chapters.ca before, I try to start a new account.
The email address you have given is already associated with an existing membership. If you have become a member using this email address, please call 1-800 blah blah blah to recieve your activation.
So… in other words I can’t create a new account OR log in to an existing account because I am an irewards member? I dial the number.
Thank you for calling Chapters Indigo online services. We are open Mon-Fri blah blah blah.
It’s Saturday.
So now I can’t buy the books because I can’t create an account or log into an existing one, because I paid them money to become an irewards member. I can’t get customer service for this issue, because it is the weekend.
So I wait.
In the meantime, I decide to go to the local store so I can buy The No-Cry Sleep Solution. They have two copies in store, according to Chapters.ca.
After half an hour of browsing the Parenting section, I come to the conclusion that there are no copies of The No-Cry Sleep Solution. Since the books appear to have been alphabetized by a blind chimpanzee, I wonder if I could somehow be missing the elusive books. The shopgirl that I hunt down assures me that they do have two copies in store. Her computer says so.
She can’t find The No-Cry Sleep Solution either.
“Sorry,” she says, “sometimes people, like, leave them on other shelves in the store?”
Perfect Husband leaves the aisle with an armful of Jenny McCarthy books, (of which there are plenty) because he has decided that they should be moved to other shelves in the store.
We leave Chapters without The No-Cry Sleep Solution.
Now it’s Monday!
I call Chapters and ask them if I can please be allowed to create an account so that I can patronize their website.
They send me my activation email. I go to check-out my books and I enter my gift card number and the corresponding PIN.
Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.
Hmm. I try again.
Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.
I try again.
Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.
I do it again, this time with the little spaces! They still won’t recognize my gift card.
I notice that my order total has inexplicably dropped, but not enough to be explained by the gift card actually going through.
I go back to my cart. One of the books has mysteriously disappeared.
“What the fuck?? Where did my book go??!” My frustration has reached the point of multiple punctuation marks, which is the classic edge of insanity.
I find the damn book on the site again and re-add it to my cart. I try to enter the gift card number and pin.
Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.
Perfect Husband reads each number aloud while I double check.
Incorrect Gift Card Information – Re-enter your Gift Card number.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHH! GIVE ME MY BOOKS, DAMN YOU! WHY CAN’T I BUY BOOKS FROM YOU??”
“Shhh. Leave it for now,” advises PH. “We’ll go to a different store tomorrow and ask them about the gift card.”
I’ll go to the other store tomorrow (the internet assures me that that location also has two copies of The No-Cry Sleep Solution, at least one of which I hope will be coporeal in nature) and ask if I can order the books directly into the store.
In the meantime I’m going to be pouting and moping around the house going
“…but I wa-ant my boo-ooks!”
Update: Chapters got in touch with me and helped me fix my problem.
If By Yes 
You may be glad you couldn’t get The No-Cry Sleep Solution. I bought that one. I hated it with the burning fire of a thousand suns. We had success with Good Night, Sleep Tight by Kim West a.k.a The Sleep Lady. You know, just in case the one you want is always on a different shelf. 😉
Oh no, what’s wrong with it? I have read such good reviews! Plus it has a foreward from Dr. Sears so I felt I could trust it not to be cry it out in new packaging (after the Baby Whisperer fiasco I am suspicious). Is the Sleep Tight book also anti CIO? Not that I don’t think CIO works for some families, just not something I am personally comfortable with while he is this young. Maybe when he is over 6 months.
No no, it’s not CIO at all, nor is Sleep Tight… for me personally, I found No-Cry Sleep Solution just not workable. Basically, it meant that the baby wasn’t crying, but I was, from lack of sleep. 🙂 Plus there was all sorts of stuff about how good sleep habits should be formed right from birth, and since I didn’t pick it up until Isaac was eight months old I found it really pretty useless. In my sleep-deprived state I also found the language and tone offputting, very hippie-ish granola-eating stuff; I’m sure the “family bed” works for some people with four kids (!!) and I’m glad it did for her, but I need my peaceful, uninterrupted sleep, thanks. It did actually get thrown out the back door one morning after a particularly bad night. Oops.
Don’t go by me. Lots of people, as you say, swear by it. I just had a tendency to swear AT it, and I have this Pavlovian response whenever I see it anywhere. It’s entirely possible that since your baby is that much younger, that you’ll find it more useful than we did.
Sleep Tight was very simple – basically advocated gently helping baby teach himself to sleep. Not CIO; there was never any leaving baby alone in a dark room. We had terrible troubles with Isaac – he didn’t sleep more than 90 minutes at a stretch for the first eight months, and refused to sleep in his own bed (problematic for me, because while I love a cuddle, I was getting no sleep at all with his baby feet kicking me all night). After following her method, within a week – for real – he was being put down in his crib awake, going to sleep peacefully without crying within five or ten minutes, and staying that way for four or five hours. Within a couple of months, he was sleeping all night through most nights, for ten hours, with another couple of hours sometimes possible in bed with us cuddling in the early mornings. It was BLISS.
But the thing is, as I’ve learned, every single baby is different – after all, Sleep Lady methods didn’t work for James. He was a great sleeper until he was about a year old… then he got really bad, waking all night, it was murder, and in the end we had to do CIO for a night. So just discount my hysterical ranting and try No-Cry; you may love it, and since you’re starting earlier than I did with Isaac you will probably find it more relevant.
It sounds like Sleep Tight may be a better book for when Babby’s older. From what I’ve been able to gather from the psychological research I’ve done, formal sleep-training can have a negative effect when the baby is under 6 months, but isn’t so bad as the baby gets older (by the time the baby is a toddler, it’s fine, and it make start working before that depending on the individual baby). Since Babby is still so young, I want to just work on the gentle habits now, and worry about sleep training in a few more months.
I’m not too sleep deprived except after the really bad nights, but PH is starting to wear thin.
I’m pretty grenola anyway, what with the cloth diapers and the semi-co-sleeping (i.e. keeping him in a bassinet except when I fall asleep with him on the boob and sleep with him in the bed for the rest of the night, which happens every night around two or three). So I’ll start with No-Cry and work my way up.
Oh, darn! I could have sent that book in your package! (I barely touched it. I’m really great at researching books and buying books, but never seem to get around to READING the books.) I could still send it if you’d like? It would take another week-and-a-bit, but it’d be free. 🙂
Oh, and, boo to Chapters. I really do like to patronize Canadian companies, but I gotta say, Amazon has never let me down.
I know – last time I ordered a book online at Chapters, I waited a month for it, then cancelled my order and re-ordered from Amazon and it arrived the same week.
But now I have gift cards and the books I want are too left-wing to find on shelves.
I’ll let you know if they have it at the store tomorrow – if they don’t, I may ask for your copy!
I liked The No-Cry Sleep Solution, but I’m also a big advocate of “Do whatever works for you & yours.” So… who knows if it’ll be helpful for you. ;>)
I haven’t bought anything at Chapters since I discovered Amazon a couple of years ago – And now the mail is fun again!
Love Amazon. When I self-publish, I’ll sell there.
There’s a book called Bedtiming: the Parent’s Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep at Just the Right Age by Lewis and Granic that seems to offer common sense advice about getting babies to sleep. I looked into it back when my 4 month old was having nap issues, but once we resolved that, I ended up not ordering it. Now we are in the throes of a sleep regression (a couple of nights with multiple wake-ups followed by a night of refusing to go to sleep), I may actually push the order button this time.
I think part of my reluctance to make the purchase is I didn’t use any kind of parenting book with my older kids (I did read the Baby Whisperer when my son was a newborn, but she made me feel so awful, I kicked the book out of my house) and just tried to follow my instincts. But this little one has me all in a tizzy because she is so hard to put to bed at night (sharing a room with her sister doesn’t help as we have to do all bedtime prep in the living room). If only she would suck her thumb like the other two did. The paci just doesn’t seem to do as good a job of soothing her as it should.
Yes, the Baby Whisperer made me angry because she recommended things that were directly contradictory to proven science and used fallacious logic.
Example: “how can a baby learn to be independent if we don’t put them down and leave them alone occasionally?”
When actually, how can leaving someone helpless and alone teach them to feel independent? Especially since research shows that the more a baby is held and coddled, the more independent the end up being when they get older.
Another Baby Whisperer hater here.
In desperation, I actually tried to follow that woman’s “schedule” when Liam was three months old. By 2pm or so, we were both exhausted, confused, and traumatized. He looked at me like “Why are you doing this to me? We had a good thing goin’ on.” and I felt the same way. People said we “had to get on a schedule”. Well, I tried. It wasn’t all they made it out to be. 😛
Did you know that the Babywise guy, another one who is big on schedules, has actually been condemned by the AAP because his methods are associated with infant dehydration and failure to thrive??
http://www.drmomma.org/2009/12/babywise-linked-to-babies-dehydration.html
my head just exploded.
“My frustration has reached the point of multiple punctuation marks, which is the classic edge of insanity.”
I love this line.
(!!!) 🙂
I really liked the book Bed Timing. While it doesn’t advocate any one sleep training method, it does link the baby’s developmental growth stage to when trying to sleep train would be most effective, and when you are better off just waiting it out until a better stage comes along.
I read No Cry Sleep Solution, and while I think it’s a good read, I found it ultimately disappointing because I already had in place most of the ideas put forward in the book.
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