abc family

Sleep Deprivation Makes Me Whiny

Our sleeping arrangement with Blaise is different from what we did with Camilla.  For her first six months she just slept on my arm, and whenever she'd stir to nurse I'd pop her on and go right back to sleep.  It was actually wonderful, and during those early months I felt like I was getting much more sleep than any mother of a young infant had a right to get.  (I paid for it by dealing with her neediness during the day, though.)

Blaise has reflux, so the arm-sleeping, nursing-lying-down thing doesn't work, much to my dismay.  We've got a crib side-car arrangement set up, with the head of the crib elevated slightly.  He sleeps in the crib, and when he wakes up to nurse I sit up, nurse him, then hold him up on my chest to burp him and let his food settle.  When he's deeply asleep enough, I put him back in his crib.

This was working great; in fact, earlier this week there were two nights in a row where he did only a 12am, a 3am and a 6am feeding.  It was bliss.  (We put him down around 10pm and Bryan usually takes him out of the bedroom around 7am so I can get a bit more uninterrupted sleep.  I sleep much more deeply when the baby isn't right next to me.)

Then came Wednesday night, and last night.  I want to cry just thinking about them.

I don't think I have high standards when it comes to baby sleep.  Camilla didn't sleep through the night until she was 20 months, but it was only after she was a year old that I started to feel frustrated with being up several times in the night.  (The month where she was waking every forty-five minutes all night every night was a bit much for me, but I think that would break anyone.)  When it became obvious that Blaise likes sleeping more than Camilla does, Bryan and I became hopeful that he *might* sleep through the night before he is a year old.  That, to us, would be some kind of miracle.

It's not that I wouldn't love to have a two-month-old who did eight hours at a stretch, it's just that I like to keep my babies close to me at night, and I know I pay a price for that, and I'm okay with it.

But even for me, the last two nights have been TOO MUCH.  Wednesday night I did not get to lie down between 12am and 4am.  I was sitting up the entire time, my grumpy, reflux-y, congested (he has a little cold) baby alternately nursing and sleeping fitfully on my chest.  Last night was even worse: I was sitting up from 1am to 7am.  Yes, that is SIX HOURS.

I have three pillows piled up at the head of the bed so I can lean back and sort of doze while I'm sitting up.  But still.  It is no fun at all.  I feel like a truck hit me. 

Tonight is going to be better.  We might try an arrangement where I pump and Bryan does a night feeding, or we might come up with something else.  But it is going to be better, somehow.  I'm determined.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to make today a good day despite my exhaustion.  I already got Camilla down for her nap easily by using my mom's old trick of a Book Rest.  (I put her in her bed with a pile of books and said, "You don't have to go to sleep, you just have to stay in bed and read."  Stuck my head back in half an hour later, and voila!  Sleeping child.)

I'm not putting pressure on myself to do anything extra today.  Not doing laundry, not cleaning, not anything.  I did stuff and stack the diapers, but I like doing that, and I am tidying, but only because I'm much happier and relaxed in a tidy house.  I am watching DVDS, I am snuggling the baby, I am playing Sudoku on my iPod.

And the universe is helping, because it's a beautiful day (currently 63º and gorgeously sunny) and look at this.  I can't be really unhappy when I have this:

Perspective

I've had a post about Blaise's time in the hospital sitting in my drafts folder for weeks.  I remember many, many of the details of his illness, and when I was still processing the whole experience, it helped to write some of it down.  But I never finished, so I never posted it.

Dealing with Blaise's being sick was one of the hardest things I've had to do as a mother so far.  I know part of that was due to the timing; it wouldn't have seemed so overwhelming to me if I hadn't been awash in postpartum hormones when it happened.  Regardless, it was a big deal to me, and even after we got home I still had to spend a fair amount of time working through it.

But after we got home I also starting following the story of a little baby who'd just had heart surgery - the son of a friend of a friend who, coincidentally, was born and underwent surgery at the same children's hospital while Blaise was an inpatient there.  He has a congenital heart defect; his condition was precarious; his parents spent two months in the hospital with him.  The preschool-aged daughter of another friend had surgery to correct another congenital condition during the same time period, surgery which also required a lengthy hospital stay.

Both little ones are thankfully doing well now, but I was following both their stories and praying for them and their families constantly over the weeks following Blaise's illness.  Meanwhile, my little boy was in great shape, growing and thriving.  Slowly I began to see his ten-day hospital stay less as a huge ordeal and more as a tiny price to pay for his fighting off RSV as quickly and effectively as he did.

When we were at the hospital we took some pictures of Blaise: nasal cannula, pulse oximeter, and all.  I could hardly imagine that I'd want to remember my little guy being so sick, but in the life of someone only a couple weeks old, ten days is too long to go without taking pictures.  So we took them.

In the past couple of weeks we've gotten some reminders out here in blogland that life is fleeting, even for little ones.  It's surreal and it's heartbreaking.

And it has changed the way I see things.  I thought I'd never want to look at those pictures we took in the hospital, but now when I see them my eyes fill with grateful tears.

This isn't a picture of a sick baby.  It's a picture of a healthy baby who just happened to have a rough week.

We are so incredibly blessed.

Babies Are Not Robots

So, it appears that Things You Can't Control That People Act Like You Can Control is a big thing, with babies.

Diane's experience that she mentioned in her comment on my last post really made me want to slam my head into the keyboard.  A nurse told her they want all babies to be near the 50th percentile for weight!  How ridiculous is that?

As my husband said, "Don't you have to take statistics to become a nurse?"

My own personal Achilles' heel in the TYCCTPALYCC category is sleep (for obvious reasons, since Camilla never slept through the night before 20 months old).  I don't understand why random people feel the need to ask if your baby is sleeping through the night in the same tone in which they'd ask if an older child was doing well in school. 

My preferred tack was to tell them that she was sleeping just fine (which she was, for her age and temperament) although sometimes just to mix it up I'd launch into lengthy screed about how difficult the situation was for me and how I, personally, was coping with it, as if that was what the person was really interested in.  I think the people who got that response probably wished they'd never asked.

There are so many areas in which TYCCTPALYCC applies besides sleep and growth.  Developmental milestones is a big one, and I'm sure every parent who's had a child who was anything-other-than-average in some way can name an instance in when they were given grief for that fact.

I think it's tied in with the box-checking approach to parenthood: the idea that if you do A, B, and C (and D through Z), and you do them flawlessly, then your child will necessarily respond in the predicted ways.  Like babies are robots and all you have to do is flick the switches in the proper order.

Camilla does not fall asleep easily, and it used to frustrate me very much.  I was doing everything "right" - bedtime routine, etc. - and I felt like she "should" therefore be going to sleep in five minutes, and why did it always take half an hour or more?  I had a mental breakthrough when I realized I was being unfair by holding her, a mere baby, to a much stricter standard than I would ever hold an older person.  I myself always take at least twenty minutes to fall asleep in the evening; why should I expect my tiny daughter to do something I can't do myself?

The babies-are-robots approach makes parenting much more stressful than it needs to be.  When Camilla was slow starting on solids, I used to fret about it daily.  Why was she still nursing so much?  I had to actually throw away those little charts from the pediatrician's office that say how many servings of which foods your toddler should be eating in a day, because Camilla was eating nowhere near that much and it was stressing me out.  She wasn't anemic and she was growing just fine, so I made the conscious decision to let it go.  And then one day she just started showing much more interest in food, and she went from getting three-quarters of her calories from breastmilk at 18 months to being completely weaned on her own initiative at 22 months.  She's not a robot; she's a person and it was her own will and readiness that made the difference.

I think that the saddest thing about expecting parents to control things that are outside their control is that sometimes the expectations can inhibit the parents' ability to enjoy their children.

For example, when Camilla was sleeping not-so-well, I was sometimes so sleep-deprived that I was genuinely unable to enjoy her - or anything - very much.  (I'm sure all parents have been there!)  But at other times when I was actually coping pretty well, I would still sometimes get discouraged because she was so far away from meeting the popular standards for how babies should be sleeping.  If I let myself mentally label my daughter as a Bad Sleeper, I'd start feeling like I had an obligation to fix her.  I got so much less joy out of being her mother when I was looking at Camilla as a problem to solve rather than as a person to interact with and love.

Standards can be useful because they sometimes act as indicators that children need help.  But when they serve - even unintentionally - to make parents feel guilty or worried about things that aren't even problems and over which they have no control... well, that's when something needs to change.