ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

such a great positive force, that kid.

haha.
sylvie turns 3 in august. yeah, i mean, i'm just trying to roll with it -- there are a lot of crazy emotions going through these kids as far as i can tell. just a phase!

a phase of mad neural connections and pathways being created in the limbic system that stick (or dont stick/do stick/are never made/should never have been made) for life. i guess the trick is to acknowledge toddlers emotions without playing up to them? fuck. we are walking a minefield here people-makers.

i've said to sylvie: "I understand that you are upset." did not help all that much tbh.

http://www.vintagechildrensbooksmykidloves.com/

we should have an ILP-M book thread!

I have always loved the names Beatrice and Ramona, I loved reading all the books when I was a kid. Those were also very common names in Mexico at the time.

That vintage children's book blog is going to make me cry.

infant aerosmith will never learn to sleep through night. let's just accept reality here

i have an all-time best selling classic for u to read

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_e4z5YXjJf0U/SlkZ70ASmxI/AAAAAAAABoM/D7__Z8dl_u0/s400/Ferber+Book.jpg

Ramona is my youngest daughter's middle name! And Mexico is the name of my oldest daughter's imaginary horse!

We used the Ferber method (or a variant) with our first kid and it worked. Sleep-training twins, with a three-year-old in the (very small) house, would be a nightmare if I ever got to close my eyes long enough to dream.
The twins actually settled into long sleeps around 3 months, but around five months they changed their minds and I've had no more than a handful of 3+ hours uninterrupted sleeps in two months. It's just, how do you let them cry it out when that wakes the other kids up and then you just have three kids screaming, which leads to two adults screaming (or at least glowering) at each other and everyone is always tired and on edge?
At least I get to come to work so I can rest a little.

That post makes my problems seem tiny.

It's not all that bad. I know from our experience with our first kid that all of this is temporary. All the kids are healthy, developing as expected, and mostly very sweet. The girl twin only cries at bed and nap times. She's the polar opposite of her big sister who cried so much that first year. The boy twin babbles jokes and then guffaws. He howls between spoonfuls of mush, he loves it so. They're both crawling and pulling themselves to standing and just beautiful kids. The only thing wrong with them is that they're babies. They'll grow out of it.

Mordy-I don't know how your post slipped by me. Huge fan of that blog, have it listed on my own blog roll, glad you posted it and yes, ILP-M book thread! It has me looking for certain titles when we go thrifting. My kid book list is now longer than my record list.

Got a book thread already! kids' books - SEARCH and DESTROY

this thread makes me want to adopt

a plant

We had kind of a powerful parenting breakthrough tonight, and apologies for the confessional post but maybe sharing it will help others who have these sorts of problems.

So to recap, K is a little over 3 months now. As I detailed in above posts, K has always put up a huge fight about going to sleep and made a several hour ordeal out of it. And K was becoming increasingly inconsolable. Eventually K was crying even at the breast (only at night -- other times of day, she was fine and happy), and would even scream while lying on top of her mom. I had been against sleep training this early, although our pediatrician had actually been kind of pushing us to do it early, and moms in the area had told my wife that they had done it and that it was easy and worked well. Finally one night I came home to my completely exhausted and demoralized wife with a screaming baby on top of her, and I said "Ok, we have to do this."

We did a ferber-type thing (letting her cry for intervals and then coming in to briefly console, gradually lengthening the intervals). For a few nights it was hard but we seemed to be making progress. K slept longer stretches, got to bed earlier and was more rested in the morning. But then we hit some kind of wall. Every night when we put her down she'd cry for a significant amount of time, fall asleep, then wake up again 20 minutes later and cry more. Some nights it was shorter, some longer. The total length of each crying bout would be maybe 15-25 minutes, which is a long time to listen to your baby cry, even though I know of people who did sleep training and put up with much longer bouts.

We started to have horrible doubts. We took a couple of nights off from it. Then the pediatrician told us that we shouldn't do the ferber thing because K is too young to understand it, and we should just close the door and do full-blown cry it out. I felt kind of furious and yet I felt trapped into the situation -- we tried a couple of nights off from the "sleep training" but things just seemed to get worse. So I fought my instinct and said "Ok, we'll do cry it out." We agreed to give it five nights and if no progress, we'd stop.

Tonight was night three. At first she just kind of fussed and cried mildly and then stopped. But then it kept starting up again. Gradually it built, and then eventually she's crying hysterically and screaming, and I looked at the timer we used and she had cried a total of twenty minutes over the course of a thirty minute stretch. I completely broke down. I cried. I told my wife (who I had a few times stopped from caving in herself) that I couldn't do it anymore and I went in. K was practically thrashing in her crib. I'll never forget her red face and the way her legs were kicking up frantically in her sleep sack. I started to pat her and she got slightly less agitated and then my wife came in and pretty much worked magic, and K stopped crying and a couple of minutes later was actually smiling.

We had had all kinds of arguments and discussions about consistency and about what plan we were or weren't going to follow, and we had read books and spoken to experts and gotten all kinds of advice about how important it was to be consistent. But we hit a point where something just felt deeply wrong to us, and we followed our instincts, and I'm really glad that we finally did. I don't think there's any way to know whether the "cry it out" thing is actually damaging to a baby in the long run, but I realized that it was damaging to me. I was actually getting depressed about it. I felt like it was damaging my soul.

After that we did eventually leave the room and she cried some more, but we went in regularly to check on her and pat her, and she didn't get as hysterical and finally fell asleep around 8pm. My wife and I talked about it and decided that we just have to accept that K may have trouble falling asleep for a while, and that it's not worth the potential harm to her or to us to go for an easy, quick solution. She's probably going to continue to cry every night for a while no matter what we do, and maybe that's the way it is, and we are going to keep trying to get her to sleep in her crib, but we're not going to force ourselves to just sit there and listen to her go into hysterical fits by herself, because it feels too awful.

It gets better.

It does get better, and lots of parents struggle with setting sleep habits. Fwiw, your pediatrician is wrong about the ferberization (at least according to Dr. Ferber). You don't go in and visit every 5/10/15 etc for the baby. Acc to Dr. Ferber you could just do cry it out cold, but parents have a tough time just letting their child cry. He sends you in at an interval really for your own peace of mind, not for the baby. Of course, I always found visiting the baby while she's crying exhausting and almost as bad as not visiting at all.

Hurt, have you completely ruled out something odd like inner ear pressure that's increased by lying down? Does she lie down happily enough at other times of day? Can you think of other anomalies, things to do with bedtime/sleeping/lying in crib?

Otherwise I think you are otm with the doing what you need to do for your child and yourselves. There's no quick solution, and you know your baby better than a book does.

Yeah, she basically goes down easily for naps, a little fussing at most. Morning nap is easiest and they get slightly harder throughout the day but only night is really hard. She really seems to notice when it's getting toward night. She even looks at the window and seems to notice the light change. The bedtime routine maybe even makes it worse because she anticipates it, although we tried dropping the routine to "trick" her and it wasn't very effective. For a while we thought it was gas but that's subsided and the crying hasn't.

My mom says that my brother was the same -- just seemed to need to cry at night because nothing calmed him down.

So my two cents is basically don't worry so much about your response to the bedtime (or nighttime) crying being consistent. Gauge that response based on what your baby is doing. If they're crying unconsolably you are going to mess anything up by going in there and attempting to calm them down frankly. Consistency matters in things like when a child goes down for nap/bed and wakes up for the day a fair amount for a lot of kids (and frankly I find the predictably easier to work around).

not going to mess anything up

Childless lady at work today decided to lecture me on what we're doing wrong.

Nodded. Could not really muster smile.

This is why I don't talk to people at work about how I parent generally.

i find a haughty, "ha, ha, ha your genes will die with you" sufficient to turn childless ppl off from giving me parenting advice

i don't have anything equally useful for advice-bearing parents tho.

"yes, but your child is not as lovely and clever as my child, so of course your stupid, ugly methods work with her"

i don't actually say that

Spoke to my grandmother yesterday and she told me how my dad never had a crib, he just slept with her and my grandfather until he was two years old and got his own bed. It was the first time I had ever heard of how she and my grandfather parented. I had never asked before, she never spoke about it until yesterday. Just thought it was interesting how she just volunteered all this info now that I am a mother.

Sometimes August sleeps in her co-sleeper and when she does she will wake up once or twice for a feeding. Other times she sleeps out of the co-sleeper, between us and sleeps through the entire night. The night being 12-1am until 7 or 8am. Seems on days when we run a lot of errands she tends to be fussier at night. I start to think maybe it is too much stimulation. She naps through all of it though. I think she was always this way. When I was pregnant with her and we would be out and about all day or most of the day, I knew that at night she'd be tossing and turning. So far she has followed the same schedule she had when she was inside me, something I find interesting.

I have heard that babies in utero sleep a lot during the day because the mother's movements lull them to sleep like rocking but when the motion stops (the mom at night) that's why they get wiggly.

last night while Tera was cleaning up and taking care of things, I had alone time with August and she was wide awake. I always sing to her and for some reason I decided to sing Neil Young songs to her, she looked like she was on the verge of getting getting fussy. When I started singing she stopped and just looked at me, and she gave me those half smiles she's starting to give. She was laying on her side and I was on my side. She suddenly grabbed my beard with both hands and tried to pull her face closer to mine so I helped her with a nudge and she snuggled underneath my face. I couldn't help but start crying. She was making these baby noises which are new and slowing becoming more varied. I remembered my Dad playing me Neil Young records as a kid, and now I'm a dad singing Neil Young to my daughter. She drifted off the sleep for a short nap. it was a moment that touched me.

aw that is so great. neil young is nice to sing, though my daughter requests powderfinger a lot which seems like a weird song to sing to a kid. i think she imagines some dude with powdered sugar for fingers.
awful day as parent for me today. wife is sick, sylvie having fits every five seconds. totally snapped at her while making dinner. feeling like a jerk!

omg she loves powderfinger <3

Well the other day K was on her playmat and I pulled up a chair and my guitar and did the opening bars of "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison, and she went from zero to screaming in 5 seconds.

Note to dad: stick to pete seeger animal songs

Awww bad day over soon, new day approaching.

I was like "wait, how have you already seen Blue Velvet?"

HA!

Aww Jacob when we found out our second child was going to be a boy I started looking into the differences in girl and boy babies. Boys are interested in movement and groups as a whole whereas the big thing for girls is making a individual connection usually through eye contact. So you hit on something there for sure

Also the fastest way we found to get Henry to stop crying and start laughing was for PP to grab his guitar and start singing. Later on it was hulahooping!

Okay, sunny. Let's use our public voice.

i used to sing "ignition (remix)" to L to get him to sleep, it can actually be a very effective lullaby

i sang the clean version obviously

I'm kinda worried at what my kids are gonna think when they realize all the songs I've been singing around the house for years, in my own cleaned-up versions, often nursery-rhymed out, are in their original forms totally explicit.

But loads of Nursery rhymes are about either prostitution or plagues, etc.

It's probably ridiculous to buy a seventy dollar dress for a infant right?
http://www.katequinnorganics.com/brands/plum-bunny/quilted-sacque-sweater-natural/

Unless you are independently wealthy, yes.

Yes, and I will tell you why in one word: leakage.

Even that aside (you can always put some kind of diaper-covering underwear underneath), I find that even high-end-looking baby outfits can often be had for $30 (Remember it's a tiny amount of fabric and sewing compared to an adult garment), and also that they grow out of things much faster than the sizes suggest (our admittedly large three month old is wearing 9 month size). We have beautiful gift items that she either never had the chance to wear or wore once.

I didn't think about leakage, which using cloth, happens more than not. There are lots of other cool cloths on that same site for less, in the 25 to 50 range, which seems reasonable to me.

The stuff on that site is really nice. Will keep it in mind for gifts. Strictly rags for my daughter though.

not a sack, a "sacque"!

(french for sack is "sac", non??)

you could conceivably justify by saying child #2 will also use it. also with a sleep-sack like that it may even last a whole year, or longer

still