Reason number 1,576 that I love my husband

Tags

candy, geek, husband, nintendo

Me, coming downstairs: “He’s asleep!”

Perfect Husband: “Look! I played Dr. Mario with the gummy worms!”

geek love is the best love

HELP. ME.

Tags

babies, cries, crying, identifying cries, sleep

Last night was Babby’s worst night in a long time. Near-constant fussing. So tired.

Does anyone know what it means when a baby fusses with a nasal, irritable whine followed by a series of dog-like pants, and then whines again, and then pants again?

I feel so frustrated that I can’t distinguish the meaning behind Babby’s cries. I read about mothers knowing their child wants a diaper change, or is hungry, simply by the sound of the cry. I can’t do that. I’m constantly just guessing at what he wants…

Attachment Theory 101, Part The First.

Tags

attachment parenting, attachment theory, myths, parenting, psychology

I am somewhat ashamed to admit that until @NotMaryP over at Daycare Daze made this post, I had no idea that attachment parenting was so despised by the very people who practised it.

I read Daycare Daze specifically because I admire her excellent authoritative parenting style and wish desperately that I lived close enough to send Babby to her daycare when he is a year old. But I recently found out that to her, Attachment Parenting is four-letter phrase. Since my foundation is in Psychology and Biology, I learned about Bowlby long before I ever heard of Dr. Sears and so I missed the whole attachment parents = permissive hippies connection.

My understanding of attachment theory comes psych courses, rather than from popular culture.  I’ve always been a bit of a shut-in, so this isn’t the first time I’ve realized that I missed something big (I found out when I was 14 that there had been this guy named Kurt Cobain, who was now dead, and that his band Nirvana had started a whole movement called “Grunge” and I was like “What happened to the Beatles?”).

Apparently, to most people, “Attachment Parenting” as considered to be the name for what Perfect Husband and I call “Please Parenting” – the kind of parents who beg their tiny children to behave and alternately scold or coddle during tantrums rather than calmly enforcing proper boundaries.

Ironically, this actually violates attachment theory.

This is how I feel when I encounter Fundamentalist Christians. As a child, I learned about Christian forgiveness, about the dangers of wealth, and about accepting the differences of others. The fact that Christianity is now largely associated with Republican mysogynist, homophobic, and capitalist agendas baffles me… because it seems completely in opposition to the whole point of Christianity.

Daddy loves me, this I know

Now here I am, being told that Attachment Parenting is associated with Please Parenting, and I can only shake my head in disbelief.

So now I am here now to explain Attachment Theory and debunk this bizarre misunderstanding once and for all.

…at least, among the 200 people or so who happen on my blog every day.

Yes! Bella Needs Help

Tags

books, New Moon, Twilight

Remember, folks, you heard it here first! I’m glad that Reasoning With Vampires agrees with me – see what was posted today!

Dear Bella - Psychiatrists prescribe anti-psychotics, not strait jackets. Some anti-depressants may be in order, too. THATS OK.

Pantley Pop Off In Place

Tags

babies, classical conditioning, no-cry sleep solution, sleep log, sleep routines, sleep training

Well, it’s time for another sleep log!

Snow suit + Seahorse = Success

I spent the first week just doing the same as I always do, nursing him to sleep, but playing the musical seahorse to help build a conditioned association.

Then, Saturday night, I started instituting the pry-him-off-the-breast-just-before-sleep trick known as the “Pantley Pop Off”. I did it as often as I could in the night, until my own drowsiness meant that I fell asleep before he did, usually around 3 or 4 in the morning. It meant that putting him down to bed took a lot longer – he’d wake up and root again and again, but each night I have eventually met with success. Like most things, it’s a battle of the wills, and I am determined not to be out-willed by someone with half my brain capacity.

Over the last few nights he has fallen asleep off of the breast at least for that first sleep of the night. Sometimes he would be popped off for the umpteenth time, crinkle his face to fuss, and then fall unconscious before a wail could escape (which looks really funny). A couple of times he simply lay there drowsily, full of milk, staring that the light on the seahorse or the pages of my book until his eyes closed for good.

I haven’t done it much at nap time. Pantley says naps are so important that I should save any sleep training for night time to start and only switch over to boobless naps once he has mastered the art of falling asleep boobless at night. In fact, she predicts that once he gets the hang of it he’ll start doing it on his own, and it’s true that a couple of times during his naps he has pulled off the breast and simply stared into space until his eyes closed. So I think it’s working. But it’s going to be a long haul, I know.

NAPS ARE AMAZING. His napping has gotten a lot more regular. I put him down in the Sleepy Snow Suit for all of his naps, and he actually sleeps for two hours or sometimes even longer at a time!  It’s unheard of. I love it.  My days now have periods of  previously unimaginable freedom. I now have a startling amount of time in which to collect garbage, put on a load of laundry, or even eat on my own time, instead of hurriedly while Babby fusses on his play mat.  I’m still adjusting. Accustomed to only periodic dozes of 20 minutes or less, I am still slow to commit myself to things like showering or dish washing which are could drown out his crying for me. However, I have done both and he has slept through them all!

You have to realize that until a couple of weeks ago, my entire day was spent playing with, holding, singing to, or nursing Babby, trying to keep him cheerful and desperately hoping he would fall asleep, only to have him twist off the breast and start to fuss, or fall asleep on me and wake up the moment I tried to put him down or sneak away. Things like showers, quiet meals, and washing dishes were things to fantasize about.

I don’t know whether he is simply getting better at this sleeping thing or whether the consistent use of the snow suit at nap time is making the difference.

Here’s the latest sample sleep log: Keep in mind, this is after only five days of “pop off” practices.

Kick, Babby, Kick!

Tags

babies, swimming, swimming with baby

Well, we DID go swimming and Babby liked it! The water was warm enough, although the air was not. You’d think indoor heated pool = warm inside, but it turns out the pool is heated but the building not so much. Or at least, not well enough. So while swimming was fine, his upper arms began to turn blue (meanwhile his body and legs IN THE WATER were pink *eyeroll*) so we took him out and home, which involved a lot of frantic wrapping in towels and unhappy Babby.

But swimming was great. He kicked and splashed and had a great old time. I didn’t try dipping his head under the water, mostly because with the air so cold, I didn’t want his head to get wet! Maybe next time.

Pictures!

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Now I’m trying to figure out how to get my hands on an inexpensive way of taking underwater pictures/video. A casing for my video camera is prohibitively expensive, but I think a casing for the still camera might be cheaper…

Vancouver Sunshine

Tags

bad days, flowers, gloom, luck, spring, sun, Vancouver

It’s one of THOSE days.

You know.

I dreamed about a friend who was very close once but grew distant when I got pregnant. She has ignored birthday greetings from me and has not acknowledged the existence of my child. Thinking about her makes me sad, and these dreams pop up occasionally and make me sadder.

I tried to get a referral over the phone from my doctor, but was told that I had to come in and tell my doctor to her face that she is a moron. That did not encourage me.

PH went to the store to pick up the crib we ordered, only to discover that it is in a very large square box much bigger than the dimensions for the crib, and that it will not fit in our car. It is wider than our car. This presents a problem since I don’t want my baby to sleep in a warehouse. I will have to pester friends with trucks.

I was going to take Babby for his first swim today, but I”m afraid it will bum me out more if he hates it. But if I don’t  go at all I’ll feel even more like I didn’t get anything accomplished. Maybe I WILL take him in a fit of optimism.

I think this must be a combination of PMS and first-grey-day-in-many-days funk. I realize you people in the East won’t sympathize, but spring comes to Vancouver in February and lately Babby and I have been going to long walks each day to soak up the sunshine and flowers. But today is grey with a few flakes of snow. Short walkies today.

So, in view of banishing the Bad Day Gloom, I will dwell on the sunshine and the flowers of the past week.

BEHOLD!*

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*Some of these pictures are fuzzy because I bought a can of pop at the Esso on one of my walks, and I set it down to unhook the dog’s leash, and the can rolled away, and I chased it into the road and I did catch it but it was punctured places and spraying pop everywhere at high pressure BUT I DRANK IT ANYWAY and it made my hands and everything I touched sticky.

Dr. Useless Strikes Again (TMI alert)

Tags

breast feeding, contraception, diaphragm, doctors, IUD, medicine, pharmacy, prescriptions

My doctor sent me to the pharmacy with a prescription for a three month’s supply of “Diaphragm – whatever brand is available”.

…

…

PH insisted on coming to the pharmacy with me so he could have a good laugh at pharmacist’s dumbfounded expression.

Let me backtrack.

I went in to see my doctor, saying I wanted to “discuss my birth control options” because somehow “I want her to measure my vagina” wasn’t my first choice of words when speaking to the receptionist.

My doctor told me that the mini-pill would be best since I’m breastfeeding. I found that odd because my OB-GYN said I should take no hormonal stuff at all. So I said I’d rather avoid hormonal routes altogether. She said that leaves me with the IUD.

Now, I’ve thought for years about getting an IUD after my first child. Sounds easy. However, so many people have gone “Nooooo, don’t doooo it” whenever I have brought it up that I’ve been put off the whole idea.

PH and my mother alike are terrified that it’ll scar my uterus and leave me infertile, and we want at least one other kid. A friend of mine told me horror stories about what happened to HER friends who got IUDs and ended up with horrible hospitalizations for vague reasons. Only one friend (who has used an IUD for 10 years and is done having kids) has endorsed the idea.

So that pretty much left me with the option of diaphragm, and now my doctor wasn’t even presenting it as an option.

“What about a diaphragm?” I asked the doctor.

“Oh… I have a couple patients who use those…” said my doctor. “You realize that it isn’t as effective as an IUD or homonal contraception? They’re only about 80% effective.”

“That’s ok. We want more kids, just not right now. If I do get pregnant, it isn’t the end of the world.”

“Do you need a prescription for one?”

“I have no idea.”

“How much do they cost, do you know?” my doctor asked.

“I… don’t know,” I said, feeling like the conversation was a little backwards.

“Well… why don’t I write you a prescription. I’ll just say whatever brand is available because I don’t know what brands are out there.,” said my doctor, scribbling on a pad. “Why don’t I get you a six month’s supply to start.”

I felt a little at sea in this conversation. “Um… I thought they were reusable.”

“Right. Yes. Well, why don’t I write a prescription for three months, and you can tell me if it is working for you. Call me if you have any problems, ok?”

I took the prescription because I was riddled with self-doubt. Part of me was saying “but I thought she had to fit me for one of these!” and the rest of me was saying “Shut up, if that isn’t right you’re going to look like an weirdo who wants doctors to prod her vagina unnecessarily, and if she is wrong, then clearly she doesn’t know what to do anyway, so what’s the point?”

And that is how I came to be standing at the pharmacy with a prescription that made no sense. The pharmacist gave me a really weird look when I handed it to her apologetically.

“My doctor is useless, I’m sorry,” I said. “Is there anything you can do with this?”

She wrinkled her brow, wrote down the available sizes of diaphragm, handed the prescription back to me and then commented on the fact that my son’s prescription was also wrong.

“I see your doctor has taken your son down from 15 mg twice a day to 10 mg twice day.”

“Oh Gawd.” I said, looking at the other piece of paper. “My doctor’s an idiot. She meant to leave it the same. She thinks Ranitidine comes in 10mg/ml concentrations, even though I keep telling her it’s 15 mg/ml. So I told her he was still getting 1 ml twice a day, and she thought that meant 10 mg instead of 15mg.”

The pharmacist looked dubious.

“It’s for GERD?”

“Yes.”

“How much does he weigh? 6.6 kg?” She pulled out her calculator and tapped away. “Well, 10 mg BID is well below the recommended dosage for GERD, and even 15mg is quite low. The old dosage should be fine and you could even go as high as 20 mg twice a day, so I’ll give it the old label.”

“Thank you,” I said meekly, and I slunk out with a chuckling PH trailing behind me.

Now my first period in over a year has arrived and I still don’t have a diaphragm because I don’t want to go back to my doctor and force her to measure my gooch against her will.

Mostly because I assume she doesn’t know how.

Maybe I should just get a damn IUD.

TwiBash Part II: “New Moon”, New Psychoses.

Tags

auditory hallucinations, Bella Swan, books, characters, Edward Cullen, Jacob Black, literary analysis, literature, New Moon, psychology, psychosis, schizophrenia, Twilight

Oh. My. God.

It took a couple of false starts, but I did eventually get through New Moon. I’ll say the positive stuff first.

It’s better than Twilight.

Never mind that the list of books that are better than Twilight can (and does) fill entire libraries. It’s a start.

It starts out awful, continues awful, then Edward leaves and things get a hell of a lot better for a while. I almost got caught up in the story, until things devolved again with Edward’s return.

To summarize, the parts without vampires in them are almost decent.

Except for Bella, who continues to be

a) Stupid

and

b) Schizophrenic

Let’s start with the first point, shall we?

(Beware! “Spoilers”)

Babby’s First Book Review

Tags

babies, book reviews, books, literature, reviews, Twilight, videos

A budding intellectual, you can tell.