I don't have any fresh pictures since we've just been hanging out at home. Uma's doing well. She sleeps heavily, doesn't cry much, and is starting to get the hang of nursing. I ran a couple errands to get some baby stuff. I strongly recommend getting this stuff well in advance, as babies are early sometimes. We're talking receiving blankets, changing pads, swaddlers, nursing wear, and other mundane but very, very useful things. Uma's a good, happy baby; last night was a little difficult, so we're both pretty tired, but things are steadily geting better (knock wood, cross fingers, toss salt over your shoulder, etc.). Jessica has no responsibilities for a few days besides Uma (if I'm doing things right), and we're hoping her mom can come next weekend, though we haven't really needed help (even with the refrigerator situation).
Ever since Uma came back from the hospital, I get a little bit anxious when she's still. Countless times per day, when she's lying motionless in her bassinet, I'll go over and watch carefully to make sure I can see her breathing. Sometimes, I'll stroke her or poke her to stimulate a reaction, just to be sure. It's not that I'm living in fear; it's just that I want to make sure. Intellectually, I know she's just fine, but it's hard for me to accept that something so small and fragile could reliably breathe on her own. What if she forgets how? It's not just me, either; last night, Jessica confessed to doing the exact same thing. Poor kid.
HEB (grocery) store brand diapers. They fit Uma better than the Huggies the hospital started us on.
Kiddopotamus SwaddleMe infant wrap. It's a lot easier and more secure than with a receiving blanket.
The Happiest Baby on the Block (book and/or DVD). We watched the video. It's not magic, but it still works really well to calm Uma when she's unhappy for no apparent reason. It's still helpful, though less so, when she's hungry or gassy or uncomfortable, but then, in those cases, we should be feeding, burping, or moving her as appropriate.
The Baby Book by Sears and Sears. Comprehensive, well-researched, and sensible information and advice.
Not a product, but a person: Lanell Coultas, our doula, who was invaluable for helping Jessica deliver and keeping me sane.
Not a product, but a class/service: Bridget Brown's Bradley Method® class. The Bradley Method tends to look at modern birth and delivery practices negatively. That is understandable, but it's also off-putting to be brow-beaten. Bridget is a lot mellower and tolerant than (what I gather to be) the Bradley Method norm, so there was no issue with that. There was a lot of useful information and preparation in a relaxed, friendly environment. It helped also to be around other expecting, first-time parents, especially ones as likable as the ones in our class.
Even if you don't take this class, or any Bradley class, I highly recommend you take some sort of comprehensive class (or combination of classes) that teaches you about pregnancy, labor, delivery, and baby basics. I have no opinion on the quality of Lamaze, but it does not seem to be as comprehensive. Books and videos and talking to people you know will only go so far. This is not something for which you want to be un(der)-prepared. I hope this helps.
I got a kick out of this article. Apparently, there are multiple regional and national theft rings that specialize in medicines, personal care products, and baby formula, as those items have a high cost/size ratio, and are thus it is highly profitable to steal them. The government has found links between some of these groups and Middle East nations, though not all the way to terrorist organizations
1
. Breast feed! For America!
1
Although they make highly suggestive associations like how the FBI has traced money from these rings to "nations where terrorist groups, such as Hamas and Hizbullah, are active." They really want to assert the connection.
I have to wonder what geniuses think slats are a good design choice for cribs. It seems like not a day goes by that Uma doesn't get an arm or leg stuck and holler for help. It's not that Uma is an especially trap-happy baby, either; we know other people who have the same problem (like an adorable almost-2-year-old who yells "Andrew stuck!" when it happens to him). They even sell bumpers that (among other things) prevent this from happening. Sell the disease, then sell the cure. It's pretty clear to me that some kind of mesh would be superior, or perhaps the Lucite of a high-tech movie prison. Anything but those stupid slats. Let that be a lesson to you if you find yourself crib shopping.
If you anticipate that you may have a baby in your next house, I suggest you look for a few things:
The master bedroom and the baby's bedroom should be close together. Ours are on opposite sides of the house, which has some advantages, but is overall a minus. If one or both parents are light sleepers, you might not want them too close.
There should be a full bathroom pretty close to the baby's room. Ideally, it would be immediately adjacent, perhaps separating the master bedroom from the baby bedroom. This is handy for baths and cleaning up after diapers.
There should be a second full bathroom elsewhere in the house in case your baby is a light sleeper.
The baby's room should be away from the living room, kitchen, and other noisy parts of the house.
The master bedroom should be large enough that you can fit a bassinet comfortably. It's likely that you will want the baby in there at least to start.
Following the above, make sure your master bathroom has a door between it and the master bedroom. Ours does not, which made things kind of stressful for the first few months when Uma was in with us.
Make sure that the baby's room is big enough for a crib, a dresser, a rocking chair, a changing table, and a twin bed.
If you have rambunctious pets, you'll want to be able to close off part of the house so they can't disturb the baby. Dogs scratching themselves at night can be surprisingly loud, especially with metal tags (which I suggest taping together anyway).
See how comfortable the baby's room is with the door closed and the AC and heat on. Uma's room is small, and we have forced air heat, which makes it alternately hot and stuffy or cold and dry with the door closed, especially since there's no thermostat. As a result, we leave her door open at night. That works well, but it means she's not isolated from noise, and we have to keep the dogs out of that part of the house. Radiators and radiant floor heating are apparently much better for this.
If you're doing cloth diapers and washing them yourself, you'll want the washing machine to be close to the baby's room so you don't have to lug so much stuff back and forth. Even if you're not washing your own cloth diapers, you're still going to be doing a lot of laundry. It may be worth it to pay extra for energy efficient appliances, including a front-loading washer, assuming you have to buy new ones. It's not worth it if you already have inefficient ones. And, of course, having a laundry room inside the house is better than having to go out to the garage. That's true without a baby, but you're going to be doing a lot of laundry.
Wood flooring is your friend. Tile is hard and not appropriate for many rooms, while carpet gets dirty easily and is a pain to clean. Your baby will be spending a lot of time on the floor. Laminate flooring should be fine, also.
It may sound like we're a little excessive with keeping things quiet. We're slowly getting more cavalier with making noise, as she is getting better about sleeping through noise and falling back asleep if she wakes up. However, if you have problems with your child's sleep, you will be desperate to avoid anything that might disturb her.
In 1961, the psychologist Stanley Milgram performed a simple experiment. Take an ordinary man (they were all men), and see what happens when he is induced to inflict pain on another. The setup was simple. The subject was told that he was participating in an experiment testing learning methods. He was to be the "teacher," while another man was the "learner." If the learner, believed by the teacher to be a subject but secretly an actor, failed to give the correct answers, the teacher was told to administer an electric shock of increasing severity. The learner would give all the external indications of being in severe pain, to the point of pounding on the window separating him from the teacher. If the teacher hesitated, the person running the experiment would goad him on. Fully two thirds of the teachers proceeded to increase the voltage until the maximum level (supposedly fatal) was reached. Of course, they were the real subjects of the experiment, whose purpose was to test obedience to authority. Besides being a disturbing and valuable bit of insight into human nature, it has a bit more immediate relevance.
I can't help but see parallels between the Milgram experiment and the "cry it out" schools of thought on training babies to sleep. Both require ignoring a person who, by all indications, is in great distress. More than ignoring the distress, you are in fact an active participant in causing that distress because you have the power to relieve it. There is also the element of authority in asserting that you are doing the right thing. In the Milgram experiment, the authority was the psychologist running the experiment. In the world of baby care, it comes in the form of pundits and "experts" such as (but not only) Richard Ferber. I use the word authority intentionally, because the appearance of authority is really all it rests on. Ferber may be a pediatrician, and he is the director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders, but there have been no scientific studies on the comparative effectiveness of any of the various methods for teaching infants and toddlers to sleep (with the exception of co-sleeping, which isn't quite the same kind of thing). As a result, there is a huge jumble of assumptions, myths, and actually effective techniques that can very difficult to untangle. You end up with lots of people loudly proclaiming the superiority of their chosen path, with little beyond anecdotal evidence to support it. "Cry it out" methods can be very appealing to desperate parents (and you do get desperate) because they remove responsibility and can (partially) eliminate the problem by defining it out of existence. It also appeals to parents of certain philosophies by attempting to avoid pampering and coddling children, as though those concepts make any sense whatsoever with a baby.
I don't say any of this out of sanctimonious judgment (for once), but instead out of guilt. You see, we have taken a small step down the path to the dark side. We have made a conscious effort to be less responsive when Uma is upset at bed time (nap or night). The sleep situation in our house has degraded over the last few months, to the point where we had to expend considerable effort to get her to fall asleep at least twice and sometimes all three times in a day. This involved rocking, patting, and singing until she was calm or asleep, then trying to put her down gently, running out of the room, and hoping. Usually, she woke up as she was getting put down, and it was a roll of the dice as to whether she would accept it or start crying. Getting out of the room quickly helped, as it seemed like seeing us leave caused more unhappiness than us being absent. For a while, I was spending 20 or more minutes on her morning nap and up to an hour at night trying to soothe her to sleep. Sleep times became something that we approached with fear and foreboding, because we knew it would be hard. That was not a situation we wished to see last indefinitely. Certainly, she would sometimes go down without a fuss, but that was a distinct minority of cases. However, on numerous occasions, we haven't been able to respond to Uma's cries as quickly as we wanted. To our surprise, in many of those cases, she quieted down and fell back asleep without intervention.
As a result of our accumulated exhaustion and this faint light of hope, last week we decided to make the conscious choice of holding back. Our rationale is simple. Uma is aware of us and the world around her to a much greater degree than she was a few months ago. She is very good at letting us know when she doesn't want something, be it more peas, a diaper change, or to have her face cleaned. There's a difference between that and the confused, scared desperation that sometimes afflicts her. The former is just complaining, while the latter is real agony. She's also much more clued-in to what's happening around her and can often predict what is going to happen. Sometimes, she starts complaining as soon as she's picked up from play time or finished nursing because she doesn't want to go to bed. Our new choice is to ignore the complaining and respond to the real anguish. We're not exactly happy about this. Most obviously that is because there will always be some crying, but it's also because there's a lot of error in the process. We often think she'll quiet down and then endure awful, painful minutes as she doesn't. Or we'll intervene when we don't need to, which is certainly not painful, but has a wearing effect. We're slowly getting better at distinguishing between the two, but there are still those terrible moments. Ideally, she wouldn't cry at all, but we are far away from that. One thing is for certain, though; we will not let her cry indefinitely. We listen very closely to the quality of her cry. Some cries are clearly fishing to see if she can get Mommy or Daddy back, while others are red alert and get us in there faster than a blink.
I feel like we're doing the right thing for us and for her, but it's very easy to convince yourself of that no matter how bad a thing you are doing. In spite of the problems we've had with her sleeping, I'm also glad we didn't try this before. For this to work in a way we're comfortable with, it's essential that Uma be aware and self-reliant enough that she can quiet down, play for a while, and then fall asleep. It's certainly not something to do with a newborn
1
, who is so bewildered and confused that any disturbance is terrible and frightening. We certainly don't want to teach her that crying gets no response, because sometimes, something truly is wrong. Nor do we want her to believe that we won't respond to her distress; even if she isn't capable of thinking those thoughts today, she will be someday, and sooner than we think. We just want her to learn that sleep isn't as distressing as she thinks. So far, it's been helping. When she's genuinely upset, we fall back on our standard playbook of soothing tactics. We still try to leave with her awake, but sometimes we just have to go in for the long haul. That's fine. We didn't expect that things would be immediately perfect; we just wanted to reduce what had become a frequent ordeal. It doesn't seem to have affected her in any great way. She complains a little more when we bundle her off to bed, but it also seems like she complains less once she's actually in her crib and we're gone.
Teaching an infant to sleep is a hard, hard thing. It could be the hardest thing to deal with as the parent of an infant. Uma isn't the angel baby you occasionally hear about; my personal opinion is that she's slightly (but only slightly) more difficult than the average. Of course, it's not really fair of me to blame her, since it could very well be that we do things that sabotage our efforts (as we have in the past). Still, it could be worse. We have friends with a son a couple months younger than Uma who almost never sleeps more than two hours at a time, even at night. Uma does fall asleep without any crying at least some of the time, and she rarely wakes up more than once per night. She's generally a happy baby, and when she isn't, most of the time it's our fault (hunger, thirst, taking away a toy for no good reason). She's been healthy (knock wood), developmentally normal, and just a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time thinking about what to do. We have to strike a balance between her needs and ours, between what's good now and what's good for the future. Decisions like this aren't easy, nor should they be.
1
Back in May, a long, long time ago, we were having terrible problems. Uma wouldn't fall asleep until she was completely exhausted at 1am or 3am. Twice, we tried letting her cry, holding her but not actively doing anything else to calm her. That was terrible. The first time took a half hour. The next night, we gave up partway through because we'd rather be up at 2am than let her cry like that. It turned out that the problem was of our own making, anyway; we weren't giving her the daytime sleep she needed, so she would be so over-tired, wired, and unhappy by the time evening came that it would be impossible for her to fall asleep until she was completely exhausted.
I type this in a bewilderingly tranquil house. Jessica put Uma down about 10 minutes ago. She is quietly playing by herself, occasionally babbling something. She made no unhappy noises as we prepared her for bed or after she was put down. Nothing. Zip. Zero.
This is the fourth day in a row where this has happened. It isn't just at night; her morning and afternoon naps have been just as smooth and pain-free. What changed? Exactly what I described on Monday. It worked far better and less painfully than I could have hoped. Uma cried without us intervening less than ten times. At no time did she cry more than a few minutes without us coming in when she genuinely needed it; as I said before, we won't do the "cry it out" unto exhaustion thing, because that's terrible. We just decided to ignore her complaining about going to bed. The rest of the time, she stopped grumbling after a few minutes. I'm sure that at least once we went in when we didn't need to, but I'd rather that than the opposite.
The point is, our plan to be mildly unresponsive has been wildly successful. It's been so successful that it feels eerie. I have had 11 months training me that sleep was usually a fight, that it was something to be dreaded. Having had 12 consecutive unqualified successes is incomprehensible. I hope it never becomes fully comprehensible because this is something to be cherished, and I don't want to take it for granted.