Go The F*** To Sleep, The Reboot

Tags

breastfeeding, infant sleep, night weaning, nursing to sleep, parenting, sleep, sleep patterns

People love to ask you how your baby sleeps, and I have occasionally told people that Fritter sleeps “great!” only then to clarify to say that she still wakes several times a night.

You see, our bar is set LOW.

Until he was nearly two, Owl was waking multiple times in the night, usually every hour and a half.

 

Meanwhile, Fritter from day one would sleep in two to three hour stretches. There were some caveats – she couldn’t be put down, for example. I tried. Oh, how I tried. But if you put her down, she would wake up, until about 11 pm in the evening.

Those first couple of months I spent my evenings watching The Mindy Project with her nursing and fussing, and about an hour after she fell asleep I would transfer her to the Moses basket and she would sleep for another couple of hours.

Compared to Owl, that felt like a MIRACLE.

Once my anxiety about SIDS was relieved enough that I could leave her alone to sleep (around 5 months), I started nursing her down on my bed and then just sneaking away. By adding our trusty old Sleepy Suit to the mix, I was actually able to pick her up off of the bed and transfer her to the Pack N Play next to our bed (the successor to the Moses basket).

And so, I have been pretty okay with her sleep overall. She would go down to sleep at around 8 pm, sleep until midnight, until 3, until 5 or 6, and then until 7 or 8.

I could HANDLE that.

Plus, she has two solid naps a day, one in the morning at around 9:30 am that often runs until 11 or 12, and another around 4 pm that goes until 5 or 6.

Golden.

But lately, that has been falling apart.

The Time Draws Nigh (In Which I Agonize About Going Back To Work And Am Both Successful And In Deep Trouble Simultaneously)

Tags

anxiety, depression, dog training, maternity leave, parenthood, Perfect Husband, work, working mother

How has it been nearly a year since Fritter was born? Where did the time go?

  
I have spent the last month or two slowly gearing back up to work mode, because in a month I am going to have to go back into the world of unmet expectations and absolutely no down time which is the life of the working mother.

I don’t wanna.

I don’t want my cuddly baby to get bigger.

I don’t want to leave her at daycare because she has some stranger issues (which I will discuss at some point).

I don’t want the stress of having to meet people’s expectations, avoid judgement, etc.

I don’t want to lose the hour and a half of down time I get every day during Fritter’s morning nap while Owl is at school.

I don’t want any of it. I LIKE maternity leave.

 
But, since it isn’t a choice, what I really want is to get my dog training business going, and going HARD. Because training dogs pays between 40 and 70 dollars an hour and working at the vet clinic… doesn’t. Also because it’s one of my life dreams, along with being an author.

Thank You, 2015

Tags

depression, family, life, maternity leave, new years, parenthood, parents, pregnancy

I have mixed feelings about the passing of 2015.

Some parts of 2015 really sucked. My husband nearly killed himself, I ended up heavily pregnant, with a bacterial infection, working and caring for our four year old who also had a bacterial infection, while he was stuck in the hospital and unable to help.

My father broke his hip and overall has deteriorated markedly in his health.

My relationship with my son deteriorated, as my capacity to tolerate his extroverted highjinks hit a new low.

I spent a significant amount of this year coughing, exhausted, diabetic, extremely stressed, half-expecting to become a widow at any moment, researching the potential cost of burying my husband, and wearing Depends because I kept wetting myself.

On the other hand…

This year also brought me the generosity and love of the friends and relations who came streaming in to help during these difficult times. There were friends who picked Owl up at daycare when I was stuck at the hospital, and friends who brought Chinese food so that I wouldn’t have to cook, or took Owl for play dates so I could nap.

There was my mother in law, who is terrified of flying and financially limited, flying in TWICE to spend a grand total of three months sleeping on our couch, just to help.

On the first visit she made me diabetes-friendly meals and arranged snacks for me at a time when I was working and exhausted and could never have kept up the dietary management that was expected of me on my own. She put my son to bed at night and made him breakfast in the morning, she read to him and joked with him and brought some humor and pleasantry to a home that was seething in stress.

On her return she cooked and cleaned, entertained Owl and then held the baby so I could shower, get dressed, eat meals, and spend some quality time with my son.

And in between those visits, my parents flew in for four months. They took money from their nest egg to rent a place nearby, and my mother drove back and forth making meals and snacks, cleaning, and reading Owl bedtime stories.

Not only did it bring me much needed aid, but I got to spend time with my father while he still knows who I am.

And this year brought me Fritter, who made a safe landing on the shores of time and gave us the gift of a colic-free fourth trimester. She brings me joy every day with her grins and chortles, and I wouldn’t change a thing about her.

And with all of those months of support from our family, PH was able to retreat and rest and begin healing. While he is still very ill, I have seen more of the old Perfect Husband in the last three months than I have in the past two years. There are mornings when I come downstairs to find breakfast laid out for me, afternoons when he greets me at the door to take my coat and offer me a drink, and evenings when he rubs my feet and offers to run me a bath.

Whenever he has a good day, I feel like I could suffer another two years just for a chance at more days like that.

I feel like I could kiss 2015 for bringing me even one day like that, let alone as many as I have been gifted with these last few months.

2015 also brought me maternity leave, which I love because I am a lazy slob. I love being home with my baby and watching The Walking Dead or writing during her naps. It’s way better than working. I’m sad that there are only a few more months left. I have a lot of writing to get down in that time.

Yes, over all I am very grateful to 2015. I feel like it got handed a terrible set of cards but it played them all right.

2015 for me was a year of defeat and renewal, of family and love.

We survived it, and maybe it has made us stronger.

If 2016 can keep up with this upward trend, I think I can look forward to the coming year.

And if it can’t… well… Bring it, 2016.

A Tribute To Fritter

Tags

baby, development, peekaboo, seven months, social referencing

Poor Fritter.

When Owl was a baby I posted constant updates on his many advances and progress, while Fritter has gotten almost no blog attention. But I promise that the neglect is only in writing. I enjoy her so much that it is ridiculous, and I want to really introduce her to you.

She is seven months old now.

She can roll around, eat solid food, and say “ba ba ba”. She creeps around on her belly but she still can’t sit up completely independently. Her growth is perfectly on the 50th percentile, making her much bigger than Owl was at the same age but nicely average. She actually wore 6 months clothes at 6 months, can you believe that? Some of the clothes are handmedowns from Owl, which he wore at 9 months.  She sleeps better than Owl did but still wakes up multiple times in the night.

But that’s all just data. It doesn’t tell you who Fritter is.

I love this ridiculous, derpy little baby.

Fritter is a people watcher. She especially loves to watch her brother’s antics, and she gets a big grin on her face when he comes into view. A game of peekaboo with him will have her laughing out loud.

She  doesn’t laugh out loud super often, though. Her laugh is a rare and delightful thing. Usually she just grins, or if you give her kisses or blow raspberries at her she chortles.

She loves dogs. My friend the Farm Fairy has a puppy who is only 2 weeks older than Fritter and they are great friends. I’ve taken her to a couple of dog training appointments, too, and she just grins at the dog and watches everything quietly.

Her smile blooms.

It starts out just gently tugging at the corners of her mouth, and then slowly grows over her whole face, until the emotion overwhelms her and she has to hide it, usually in my chest if she’s in the carrier, otherwise behind her own arms or behind a blankie.

She loves to cover her face and eyes. She rubs her “Sleepy Sheep” all over her face as soon as we hand it to her. She will cover her face with the sheep blanket, or a curtain, or anything she can get her hands on and wait for us to say “Where’s Fritter?” and then she whips it off of her face with a big grin.

She is definitely shyer of strangers than Owl is, and she’s a little overattached to me. And by “a little overattached” I mean that she bursts into tears when I leave the room, or if I hand her to anybody, including her own father.

I think part of this is nature, and part of this is nurture. I think she is naturally a little more easily frightened. She went through a period when she was 2-3 months old where the slightest unexpected sound, even if it was just her father coughing or someone speaking when the room had gone silent, was enough to throw her into an angry pout followed by a protesting cry.

This is an unfortunate situation when you have an active five year old and a dog in the house. Every bark, every shout would send her into a fit of fear-rage.

Thankfully she has adjusted a bit, and now only does her angry pout if a genuinely startling noise happens.

On the other hand, she hasn’t been as well socialized as Owl in some ways.

Sure, she sees people more often  than Owl did at that age, since she comes along to drop off and pick up at school, and on many play dates. I didn’t have a car when I was on mat leave with Owl so I was housebound, but now that PH is home on disability I can take her out shopping and she is out of the house almost every day.

But she is always on ME. I am her primary and virtually sole caretaker.

She is almost never held by anyone else except her father, and that’s only for short periods. We haven’t had a date night out since she was born, partially because we were unable to get her on a bottle and partially because PH has been unwell and has very little energy for evening shenanigans, so she has never been left with a sitter.

Owl, on the other hand, was FORCED onto a bottle and left with a sitter on a bi-weekly basis from a month old onwards. He was cared for by a rota of friends and I think he learned early that lots of people have the ability to care for him.

Fritter, on the other hand, probably thinks she will die if I leave the room because she doesn’t know otherwise.

Now that she is on solids we are working on this problem. Our first step is to get her to trust her father to look after her. Now that she’s past the screamy newborn stage he can play with her and put her in her high chair and feed her and she will learn that I am not the only person in the world who can feed and clothe her. Then we’ll start leaving her with other people.

Mockingjay Part 2  is in theatres now, so we consider this an emergency. We missed Mad Max and The Martian but we aren’t missing MOCKINGJAY.

Sorry, kid.

Now, let’s talk about her looks.

Everyone says she looks just like Owl, and it’s funny because she does, and she doesn’t.

Owl has my eyes and his father’s eyebrows. She has her father’s eyes and my eyebrows. Overall she looks more like me than Owl, and people have noticed that.

That being said, there really is a resemblance, especially when I compare photos of them at similar ages and clothing.

No matter whose various body parts she has, her face ultimately looks like herself. I do love her little face. She gets such derpy expressions sometimes that it seems easy to underestimate her, but I think she’s actually pretty bright.

She was reaching for things early, and she studies how things work. She studies my reactions, turning to search my face for clues about what is happening around her. As I have already mentioned, she will initiate peekaboo and listens for a specific verbal cue before whipping the blanket off of her face.

It’s hard to explain but I just have this creeping feeling that there is a keen intelligence behind that cabbage patch face. Maybe I’m just being a doting parent. We’ll see.

In the mean time, I am just enjoying her babyhood. I can’t stop cuddling her like she’s a stuffed toy and kissing those chubby cheeks. And even though I know that I need to get out to see Mockingjay, and that she needs to feel comfortable with other people, I have no real desire to pass her off to other people.

She’s my last baby, and it goes so fast.

Incredibly Belated Halloween Awesomeness

Tags

baby, costumes, Hallowe'en, skeleton

Sorry I have been so absent. Life is actually going fine, it’s just… full… and the blog has fallen lower down on the priority list. But I miss it so I’m catching up.

Look! Cute Halloween pictures!

Owl wanted to be a skeleton. Well, actually, at first he insisted on a cute Dia de Los Muertos dress costume with a pink frilly skirt (you know how he loves those).

I eventually caved to the demands with reluctance, not because it was a girl’s costume but because it was still three weeks until Hallowe’en and he has all of the focus and determination of a light autumn breeze.

I kept the receipt.

Sure enough, two weeks later he spotted a green skeleton costume and immediately changed his mind.

I was annoyed but also relieved, because the girl’s costume had me concerned – he was supposed to wear his costume to school for the Hallowe’en parade and I didn’t want to expose him to misogynistic kids teasing him for wearing a girl costume.

I found a skeleton costume for the baby and I turned a kid’s skeleton t-shirt into a cover for the ergo and cuteness ensued.

Thankful Enough. I Think.

Tags

depression, gratitude, laughter, parenthood, Thanksgiving

It’s Canadian thanksgiving, so we cooked a turkey and were all thankful and stuff.

I’m thankful for a lot.

In fact, I think thankfulness has replaced other positive emotions, like joy or pleasure, in my life.

I’m thankful that my husband is still alive. I’m thankful for the fact that most days, lately, he has been able to help significantly around the house, cooking dinner and or doing laundry and such. Once or twice lately he has even extended signs of affection to me and I get extra thankful about things like that.

I’m thankful that my baby is alive and healthy and that I have bonded strongly with her. I’m thankful for her chubby little cheeks and her goofy chortle when I snorgle her. I’m thankful that my son is so bright and curious and so loving to his sister.

I’m thankful for my immense support network, for all the friends who helped me when things were in crisis, and that so many of my friends have kids Owl’s age.

I’m thankful that Owl loves school.

I’m thankful for the mountains and the incredible views that I get to enjoy every day taking Owl to school and back.

I’m so thankful for everything that I’m just bleeding out with it.

That’s right. I’m ungrateful about gratitude.

It’s odd. I’m not depressed. But I’m somehow… jaded. I feel like my sense of humor has deteriorated. I always used to be looking for the funny side of things.

Somehow I have lost that. You notice that I’m posting less? It’s because I have fewer funny stories. It can’t be that less funny stuff is happening. I’m just not seeing the humor.

When Owl tries to dick around with his general five year old silliness, I’m more likely to shut him down than join in. When I try to make jokes it feels forced and stupid. I’m like a cranky old lady.

I don’t like it.

But I don’t know where my sense of humor has gone. I want to see the funny side of things again.

I think PH has noticed. He keeps telling me bad jokes. “What does a pirate octogenarian say?” “I’m eighty.”

But in the meantime, there is turkey. I love turkey dinner, it’s my favourite thing, and when I smell the good turkey dinner smells and listen to the sounds of music from our ipod playing in the kitchen, football whistles from the living room, and cuddle my snuggly six month old, and enjoy the peace that comes from Owl being invited out by a friend on a playdate, I feel content and very grateful.

So why do I still feel like there’s something wrong?

On Our Own

So, our inlaws flew home at the end of July, and we’ve been hacking it on our own for the first time since January.

That’s right. We haven’t had to be proper, full fledged adults in EIGHT MONTHS.

I’ve forgotten how I did it all – how did I get dishes washed and Owl’s face wiped and keep him entertained ALL ON MY OWN?

Luckily, PH’s mood is more stable these days. He’s still struggling, but he’s further from the edge. He has a bit of energy – enough to get Owl his breakfast in the morning and help him into bed at night, and sometimes help out during the day either with laundry/tidying/dishes or simply taking our extrovert out of the house. Of course, he still thinks that he isn’t doing enough but compared to what he was able to do eight months ago, I consider this level of help freaking miraculous.

Besides, we’ve organized a bit of help for ourselves.

Last week we put Owl in a preparing for kindergarten camp which took him from 9 am until 3 pm every day, which was fantastic.

This week we could only find a gymnastics camp from 1-3 pm, so that’s where he is.

It’s wearing us out, but we’re managing.

PH deals with Owl in the morning and lets me sleep until Fritter wakes up between 8 and 9 am. Then I get up, shower, dress, have a diet pepsi, put Fritter in a carrier and her and Owl out on a looooong dog walk with Beloved Dog. Sometimes Fritter falls asleep on the long walk and so when we get home I can do some dishes and clean a bit while she snoozes.

The biggest problem is not the baby, although she complicates things and fills my arms for the majority of the day. It’s TALKING TO OWL. He wants to talk all the time. He wants to move all the time. If I take him out of the house it’s not so bad, but in the house he wants to be bouncing or swinging or climbing within my personal space while saying “Mom? Volcanoes esplode lava, right mom? Lava is hot rocks. Mom? The rocks are hot. Right Mom? Hot rocks make lava. The lava is so hot. Mom? What if lava esploded IN YOUR HEAD?”
It’s exhausting to introverts like PH and me.

So we take him out places. 

  
On really good days, I can arrange to meet a friend for a playdate, and then I can stand around and cuddle my baby and watch Owl playing with his friend and it’s adorable and I feel happy.

  
On days like that, I have time to reflect on how lucky I am. I’m lucky that so many of my friends have boys about Owl’s age. I’m lucky that I live in such a beautiful place. I’m lucky that Vancouver hardly ever has rain in the summer and so I can take Owl outside because otherwise I don’t know what I would do.

  
I was lucky to have so much help for so long.

And I’m lucky to still have a husband who can take Owl for a couple of hours in the morning, and help him brush his teeth at night, and sometimes even clean the house while I’m out on a playdate.

We have each other.

So really, we’re not on our own at all.

Electing A Lovey… AGAIN

Tags

comfort object, lovey, sleep

Some of you remember Owl’s sleep.

Or lack thereof.

You may also remember my frenzied research into classically conditioning sleep using sleep aids and my selection of a toy to help with this project.

That didn’t go so well.

At the time, I was really thinking of Pavlov’s dog and researching toys that made noise to help Owl sleep. I thought that if he could mash a button and turn on a conditioned sleep response, that would be wonderful.

Unfortunately, the toy I chose was large, firm, and not very cuddly.

Then, one night, he developed an irrational fear of it, and that was that.

It might amuse you to know that he found it recently and had no memory of it. I showed him how you could press the button to make music. He listened to the music for a few seconds and then quickly demanded to know how to turn it off.

“I’ll save that for the baby,” he said firmly.

He never did develop a true attachment to the seahorse or any other object. My sister in law made and sent a cute blankie for him when he was a baby and while he still likes to lie on it occasionally, he never developed the kind of fixation on it that I had for my own “blankie”.

Anyway, lately I’ve been wanting to try again with Fritter.

Fritter is actually a pretty good sleeper. At night she’ll sleep three to six hour stretches and naps frequently during the day, although they’re generally cat naps.

That being said, sleep experts all recommend a “lovey”, and as someone who had one herself, I know the comfort it can bring. I want her to experience that.

This time, instead of thinking Pavlov, I just started researching popular lovies. What do kids fixate on?

Well, it seems like every site I find on the topic votes for a blanket with a head.

I’ve seen these around. My neighbour’s oldest son had a blanket with a dog head called Puppy that he lugged around everywhere. I think they’re weird looking, personally. What do they represent? Is the dog’s head severed and tied onto the blanket? Is it a skinned dead dog?

But you can’t argue with results, and according to the internet, kids love it. A blanket with a head combines the physical comfort of a blankie with the friendship of a teddy bear.

The most commonly recommended lovey is a product called Angel Dear. They have dozens of animal-headed blankets all under $20 in price. Price is important because parents warn you to buy multiples for when the original inevitably gets lost  or destroyed (I never lost my blankie, but I do remember my mother doing major repairs on it at regular intervals). Parents also claim that they wash really well and hold up to heavy loving.

Except I don’t like their lamb version, and I have it in my head that Fritter needs a lamb, because she’s an Aries who was born in the Year of the Sheep/Goat/Ram.

Besides, the Angel Dear blanket really is a head on the corner of a blanket. You can’t even pretend that it’s a whole animal.

Then I found the Gund Huggybuddies. The lamb version is darn cute, and it looks like an actual lamb, albeit either a skinned one or perhaps just an anorexic. Out of 49 reviews on Amazon, not one is below 3 stars. Parents claim that they wash well, too, and kids love them. The only complaint is that the head is pretty big – much bigger than the Angel Dear version.

So I ordered it in.

We’ll see how this goes.

Dear Fritter – if you have a horror of sheep as an adult, it’s probably my fault.

In Which My Anxiety Fixates On Something That Is Completely Impossible To Prevent

Tags

anxiety, baby blues, mental health, post partum, SIDS

In the days following Fritter’s birth, I got a lot of questions about my mood from the public health office.  They called to check on me when we got home from the hospital, a week later, and again when Fritter was six weeks old.

Through some sort of file sharing with the hospital, they know that I have a history of depression and so they kept reminding me to expect baby blues. In fact, you could tell they expected it to turn into full on post-partum depression given the whole depressed-husband-and-a-four-year-old life situation.

I expected baby blues too. I mean, that’s pretty normal. Weepiness, sobbing over Skittles commercials… that sort of thing.

But it never came.

In fact, when they took me through a depression questionnaire at the six week mark, I passed with flying colours.

Look at me, all not-depressed

I don’t know why I have been spared any sort of bizarre hormonal fluctuations, or post partum depression, but I am grateful.

Maybe it was having the support of my parents and mother in law (who flew out here again once my parents returned back to Nova Scotia). I haven’t had to behave like a fully fledged adult since the nightmare that was early January.

Support. It helps.

In any case, I’m feeling pretty happy, but I DO still have my generalized anxiety gnawing at me.

When Owl was a baby, I used to fret over his head. I kept having images of accidentally crushing it like an egg or melon.

With Fritter, I am terrified of SIDS.

Things I Had Forgotten About Babies

I loved Owl’s babyhood, despite the colic, but in recent years I haven’t been able to remember WHY.

I liked this??

I would look at him pulling on his own pants and putting dishes in the sink for me, I’d wonder why on Earth I had ever thought that babyhood was so great.

Some parents may sometimes wish that their children were babies again but I didn’t get that feeling. I loved watching him grow.

Wishing Owl back into a baby would mean undoing the person that he is now, not to mention bringing me back into the world of diapers and 2 am breastfeeding.

And yet, when Owl was a baby I used to cuddle him and I had felt that I definitely wanted to do this again.

So I did it again, even though I couldn’t remember why.

I did it even though I was dreading going back four years and starting all over again.

I did for the same reason my husband agreed to it, even though he did NOT love Owl’s babyhood and was dreading a baby much more than I was: because while we didn’t really want to go through another babyhood, we did want a second CHILD.

And there were parts I was looking forward to again – I did look forward to the tiny outfits and a child too young to talk back to me, or to run headlong into me from behind, nearly knocking me down the stairs.

There was so much I had forgotten:

The tiny little panting noises that babies make. God, those are cute. It’s like holding a very tiny, floppy puppy.

The way babies stare off into space with one side of their lower lip drooping more than the other. It’s so adorably derpy that I can’t even.

How hilarious it is when they get mad and do a really angry pout over absolutely nothing of consequence.

The cute little “ah” noises they make in that tiny little voice.

The way the skin on the back of the head moves around all loose and soft like that of a rotten peach (I love it, I don’t know why, I just do).

How it feels to cuddle your child close and have them snuggle into you, instead of having them say “waaaaaaa-BASH!” and pretend to smash their car into your skull.

Those first smiles which are full of such pure and instant joy.

The other crazy derpy faces that they make. 

Basically, I had forgotten the cuteness of a child who CAN’T pull up their own pants or put dishes in the sink – the sheer adorableness of a tiny person who has no idea what is going on and whose thoughts are so simple that they are probably best articulated with non-sentences like “wut do?” or “how be?”

Fritter will get older, and she’ll start to understand what on earth is going on, and she will make me proud by learning words and achieving milestones and become more and more self sufficient, and maybe I won’t miss this stage.

But right now I’m glad she’s a tiny, soft, confused, derpy baby.

Who, by the way, sometimes sleeps through the night.