Update on PAIL

Hi everyone, I just wanted to pop quickly back in and let you know that some fantastic ladies stepped up to take over PAIL.

They’ve been hard at work creating something really awesome for you all–including its very own dedicated site.

The new site is here and will launch on June 1. So be sure to check it out.

I hope you’re all doing well.

And, don’t forget to visit me at my new blog at The Prairie Plate!

Moving On

I’ve come to a decision.

If you’re a regular follower around here, you’ll probably notice I’ve been blogging less and less. Yes, I’m tired and busy and all the usual things, but that’s not what it is.

The cold, ugly truth of it is that this space was ruined for me a couple of months ago when all the drama around the PAIL blogroll ensued. Although I didn’t let myself get sucked in at the time, I’ve recently gone back and read the things people said during it all.

And I can’t believe how mean-spirited and nasty some of them were. And so many of them were very personal–outright attacks on my character from people who didn’t even know me.

I feel totally betrayed by the community I thought so highly of and loved so much.

What happened was tantamount to schoolyard bullying. The cool kids got together and made one person feel like shit.

I tried not to let it get to me, but I am only human. And I know a lot of other people got towed under as well, but I still can’t help but feel like I ended up as the ugly poster child.

I also simply cannot reconcile the fact those comments were allowed to stand.

That people weren’t ashamed to be saying such things and that no one stopped and said this was wrong. This is the part I really can’t get past.

Attack the ideas if you must, but the personal verbal lynching is what hurt the most. I’m still pissed off and this space is now a reminder of all that. I’m in such a happy place right now and I don’t want to be dragged down by any negativity.

To those who supported me, thank you. You have no idea how much it was appreciated.

I’ve written and rewritten follow-up posts on all the drama over and over again because I wanted to get it off my chest. But there is nothing else to say.

So I am moving on.

I’ve started a new blog where I will no longer be anonymous. This new blog will be about my life as a mother and and my daughter and parenting and my home and whatever else. It will be what I wanted for this space. What I wanted to create when I started the PAIL blogroll.

I suppose this actually came at the right time anyway. I no longer wanted to write anonymously, but I couldn’t fathom opening up this space to everyone I know. The painful journey I went through (and it was painful, no matter what anyone thinks) on the way to my daughter will always be with me and the words I wrote will always be a part of me, but I’ve never wanted everyone I know to read them. They are personal and private and were for my community’s eyes only.

Perhaps I’ll be back one day. Maybe when we try for a second child, I’ll find myself needing this place again. This space saved me when I needed it, but now it’s time to put it in my back pocket. I hope the posts that remain out there in the ether of the Internet will help someone else too one day.

So on that note, I’d like to open it up and see if someone out there would be willing to takeover and maintain the PAIL blogroll and continue the monthly theme post. I’d hate to see the project die–because then the bullies will have gotten their way–but my heart is no longer in it. I hope someone will take it and mold it to their own vision.

Of course, I’m not going away completely. I have forged some real friendships here in our online world and I will always continue to follow your stories and cheer you on from the sidelines. I love so very many of you and nothing will ever change that.

And finally, my new blog will be called The Prairie Plate, because I’m a girl who grew up on the Canadian Prairies and I’ve got a lot on my plate–both literally (I like to eat ya’ll) and figuratively.

If you’d like to come follow along and stay connected over there, I would absolutely love it. All of my readers have been so important to me here, and I’d cherish the opportunity to have you come along. I hope this isn’t goodbye.

I’ve turned off comments here, but if you want to chat, drop me an email. It’s in the sidebar. (Same goes for if you’d like to take over PAIL.)

Thank you everyone. For everything. It’s been a ride.

Love,
Elphaba

Sleep like a baby

In the past few weeks, I’ve come to realize what an asinine phrase “sleep like a baby is.” Who the hell came up with that? Babies don’t sleep. Or rather, they don’t sleep like babies. (Wow, are we going in circles here?)

Okay, I am happy to report, that after near meltdown last Friday, Alice is sleeping so much better at night than she was a week ago. After seeing all your comments and doing scientific research a la Google, we decided to go for a mini-session of crying it out. CIO-lite as Alexis referred to it. It has worked wonders.

We aren’t going the true Ferberizing route yet–just letting her cry a bit and going back in every five minutes and replacing her pacifier until she falls asleep. It’s never taken more than 15 minutes and for the last few nights, there has been no crying at all.

Since then, she’s woken up later and later for a first feed, starting at around midnight at the beginning of last week, and going all the way until almost 3am last night. That’s usually followed by another feed around 5 or 6am, after which I bring her into bed with us (or just me, depending if Mr. M has gotten up for work already), and we sleep until somewhere between 7 and 8 am. I am no longer a zombie.

I have no idea why this is working. It almost feels like she’s just getting the lead out so she can relax for the night. And she’s totally aware of what’s going on. My baby stops crying the moment we walk in the room, in fact, she even smiled up at me a few times. Clearly, she wasn’t suffering.

We also made the move to turn off the baby monitor. Now, I’m not hearing every little sound she makes and only get woken up when she really needs me. Sometimes technology is the enemy.

The result has actually been an even happier baby, because she’s actually getting a good night’s rest. I’d like to wean her off the pacifier eventually and for that we might have to do the real Ferberizing, but we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing some more reading on CIO and today Alexis sent me a link to a great blog on baby sleep and there is an article there offering an alternate (and what seems like a wholly reasonable) view on the research on CIO.

The basic premise is this: that all those studies that show crying-it-out is damaging to babies are based on babies that are severely neglected for months and that letting your child cry for 45 minutes for one night isn’t going to turn them into a serial killer.

If you’re at all on the fence on CIO, read the article. And then read everything else this woman has written. She’s awesome.

So, that’s where we’re at. Depending on how the next couple of weeks go, I’m going to explore the idea of Ferberizing for real. We’re going away in two weeks, so maybe we’ll try then.

And the best part is that I don’t actually feel like a terrible mother for letting her cry for a few minutes. She’s more rested and happier. Something must be right. (Isn’t it ironic it was just two weeks ago, I said I’d never CIO? Funny how quickly things can change when you’re up against the wall.)

Note: For my Canadian friends and readers, I’ve recently started a new group on Facebook called Canadian Mom Bloggers, which is exactly what it sounds like. So if you’re interested in connecting with other mom bloggers, tweeters etc. or just want to follow some who are, please join up! Oh, and I’m not there with this blog (this one is still anonymous), but a new blog that you’ll see if you come and join the party.

 

 

 

More (or less) sleep

First off, thank you all so much for your comments yesterday–they were a huge help and made me feel a lot better.

Last night, Mr. M took over baby night duties with a bottle and I got some rest. She also had a much better night for whatever reason, only waking up a few times, so who knows what’s going on there.

So, five whole hours of sleep in a row and I feel about a zillion times better.

I thought I’d address some of the suggestions given so that I can paint a clearer picture of our sleep life around here and hopefully people have some more great advice.

Alice’s Mood: I will say that despite the fact she hardly ever sleeps, she’s actually in a pretty good mood most of the time. So, other than I can see she’s tired with her yawns and tiny little bags under her eyes, it’s not that she’s super cranky at least. She definitely does get fussy sometimes, but other times when she’s tired, she’ll just get really quiet and still. I swear she just doesn’t want to miss a moment of anything that’s going on and knows if she fusses, she’ll be sent to bed immediately.

4 month sleep regression: It was only when I complaining to a friend about Alice’s sleep last week that I even heard of this. The problem is, our sleep regressing started more than a month ago and has only been getting progressively worse. I’m having a hard time seeing a light at the end of the tunnel right now.

Pacifier: Yes, we use the pacifier and for the most part, she goes out like a light with that thing. However, part of me wonders if this is part of our whole problem. If she needs the pacifier to sleep, and it falls out in the middle of the night, she needs us to replace it for her so she can fall back asleep. I wonder if I either need to try and wean her off that thing, or grin and bear it until she’s old enough to find and put that thing back in herself–a definitely viable option as long as we can get her back to sleeping in 3-4 hour stretches like she has before. Like I said, I have no problem with her waking up a few times a night–I just can’t handle waking up every hour.

Swaddling: When Alice was very small, we didn’t swaddle her because she didn’t seem to need it. It was actually a few weeks ago that I did start swaddling her not because she couldn’t sleep without it, but because she is so much more interactive with her hands and she kept knocking the pacifier out of her mouth. (See point above.) We use one of those velcro dealies, and my Baby Houdini does manage to regularly wrestle her way out of it, but it doesn’t seem to matter as long as she’s still bundled when she actually falls asleep.

Bedtime Routine: We do this every night as well. Alice’s bed time is 7 pm and we aim for that within 20 minutes every night. And 99% of the time we do it. Her bedtime routine consists of getting changed into diaper and jammies with a song. A couple of stories with Mom and Dad, then I feed her and put her to bed with the white noise machine cranked up, her bundled like a burrito and plugged with a paci.

Co-Sleeping: This is the big one. I’ve mentioned before that I never thought I’d co-sleep before I had Alice, but that things changed pretty much immediately when she came along. For the first month or so of her life, we co-slept in the spare bedroom because she wouldn’t sleep any other way. After that, we moved her into the bassinet in our room and she’d sleep for most of the night in it and sometimes end up in our bed. We got to a point where she would easily spend the whole night in her bassinet. Then we moved her to her crib in her room and I don’t know, maybe we’re just starting the same process over again and eventually this will work itself out.

Ultimately, I don’t want to co-sleep (and obviously, I’m not passing judgement on those who do, this is just what I want).

I love having her in our bed for a couple of hours in the morning because it’s cozy and nice, but I don’t want her in our bed for the whole night. I don’t want to sleep without pillows and blankets like I’ve heard people recommend. That just doesn’t appeal to me at all–and there’s no way I’d be sleeping well like that either.

I want her to sleep in her bed. I don’t want to have to go to bed at 7pm with her every night.* I don’t want to spend every nap sleeping with her. I need and want that time to have a breather to myself, throw in a load of laundry, sit down for a second, and while I know some would argue these things aren’t important and it’s only temporary, it’s important to me.

So that’s it in a nutshell. I am going to read Ferber’s book as someone suggested (and yes, I have read the stuff from Dr. Sears as well) and do a bit more research before I make my decision. (And maybe in the meantime, Alice will just work her issues out on her own? Maybe?)

*Do I have this aspect of co-sleeping right? Do you go to bed when baby goes to bed if you’re co-sleeping? Again, those couple of hours when she goes to sleep before I do are very important to me. I don’t want to give that up.

Crying it out

I’m starting to lose it. I have no idea what is going on, but week after week, Alice’s sleep just seems to keep getting worse and worse. She used to go down for naps relatively easily, even if they were short, there was no drama. For the past few days every nap has been a struggle. It takes me 45 minutes to get her to sleep, only to have her sleep for 30 minutes. Today, I napped in a chair with her on top of me, just so we could both get some sleep. It’s exhausting.

For the past two weeks and especially the last few nights, she has woken up every 60 to 90 minutes. I haven’t gotten more than an hour of sleep in a row in days. Last night around 1 am, she just wouldn’t go back to sleep no matter what I did. I got angry and I yelled at her, and then I felt so guilty for getting mad at her. I spent all of this morning crying about it I felt so bad.

I love her so much, but I am at my wits end here.

The only thing that partially seems to work is to eventually just bring her into bed with me. She still wakes up (a little less often), but at least I don’t have to get out of bed to soothe her.

And I’m sure it’s not because she’s hungry. Last night I tried feeding her every time she woke up, thinking that might help and most times, she either refused, or sucked for a moment and then was done. She fed properly around 4am, which has been our normal routine in the past. So it’s not that.

I know I said I didn’t want to cry-it-out, but I have tried everything else. I have read every stupid book on the subject of sleep out there and I’ve tried every soothing, sweet, no-cry technique and nothing works. Her sleep just keeps getting worse and worse. I’m getting desperate.

I don’t need her to sleep through the night yet. I have no problem getting up to feed her a couple of times a night. But I need her to sleep longer than an hour. I can hardly function anymore.

Right now she’s crying and it’s breaking my heart. I just don’t know what else to do.

PAIL: April Theme Post

PAIL: April Theme Post–What kind of parent are you?

Welcome to the April Theme Post on the topic of what kind of parent are you? Below is my response followed by the rest who participated: 

I’m going to start out this post by pleading ignorance. Before I had my daughter, it really didn’t occur to me that there would be different kinds of ways to raise a baby. Sure, with older children I could see there would be different styles–the disciplinarian, the go-with-the-flow, the whatever falls in between. But babies? To me, babies cry, you fulfill their need to the best of your ability and you move on.

Little did I know there is a whole plethora of theories on the correct way to raise a baby. That some people believe you can spoil a baby by holding it too much and there are others who believe you really cannot hold your baby too long or too often. There are those who believe babywearing is fundamental to a child’s development and there are those who aren’t interested. There are those who believe babies should be on a schedule for sleeping and feeding and those who think baby should decide. There are those who believe baby runs the show and those who believe the parents dictate everything.

It’s enough to question every move you make.

Once I’d discovered all these opposing views, I took the time to do some reading. I read up on Attachment Parenting and Babywise (and of course, I read the stuff from both camps who thought the ‘other side’ was comprised of morons who sleep with their cousins), and I began to see how my own style began to emerge.

If we were to put this on a spectrum, then I definitely lean on the side of an Attachment parent. I hold Alice all the time, especially at the beginning, I don’t think I ever put her down.

I do co-sleep (but often more out of necessity rather than ideology–I’d prefer if she’d stay in her own bed all night because then I get a better sleep, but if she just won’t settle, then I admit, I also do love having her little warm body in bed with us). I babywear on a fairly regular basis, although I’m not one to wear Alice around the house and do chores or anything.

As for a schedule, well, I just have no idea how people even manage to establish one. God knows I’ve tried to come up with some kind of routine around naps, but so far I’ve failed hopelessly on that front. I suppose if I delved into Babywise I’d get some more tips on it, but to be honest, I’m just not that bothered by it anymore. Things will work themselves out eventually.

However, Alice does have a bedtime of 7pm and we do manage to stick with that give or take 20 minutes either way on most nights. She still wakes up anywhere from 3-6 times a night, but we don’t get up for the day until at least 7am the next morning. For now, I’m fine with that, but I do look forward to the day she does start sleeping through the night.

I’ve demand fed from day one and I’ll continue to do so for at least the first year of Alice’s life. I give Alice a soother, I clamour to her every whim, I swaddle, I soothe, I hold, I rock.  I don’t believe I am, or can, spoil her. Part of me wouldn’t really care if I were. I hold her because I want to.

And, for now, I don’t believe I will cry-it-out. (I thought some of the comments people left the last time I mentioned CIO were really insightful and therefore, I haven’t ruled it out completely, but I’m still pretty sure I won’t.)

When it’s all told, I guess I’m a believer in Attachment Parenting, although I’m not sure I need to put such a definitive label on it. Ultimately, I do what feels right. After four months of this, I’ve come to realize that I do have an instinct for what feels right for my child. I’ve gone through trial and error and made mistakes along the way, but I think what I’m doing is the best for my little girl.

You can call it whatever you want, but in the end, I’m the kind of parent that is just doing the best I can.

Below you’ll find the entries from everyone who participated in this month’s post. I’m thrilled that so many of you were inspired by this topic. (I apologize for not including the descriptors this time–I just didn’t have the time to get it done. Next time I’m going to get everyone to write their own.) 

I encourage you to visit and comment with each other–there are some great posts here. The full list will be housed permanently on this page, so you can go back and revisit them any time you like. The next theme post will run May 7-14. 

• Fruit Snacks and Freezer Jam
• From TTC to Mommy, thanks to IVF
• The Delicate Balance
• Mira’s Mama
• The Making of Me
• Double Income, Wants Kids
• According to C
• All the Sun for You
• Little Chicken Nugget
• ANDMom
• Snips, Snails, and Puppydog Tails
• Lessons from an Infertile Social Worker
• Wildology
• not undecided
• The Kasun Family
• My Cheap Version of Therapy
• Fertility Frustration
• Three is a Magic Number
• Three Geminis and a Sagittarius 
• Me and You, Just Us & a Miracle Baby too!
• No Baby Ruth: Playing Baseball Without a Bat
• Pearls and Curls
• Life by the Day
• Baby and the Geeks
• Mission: Motherhood
• Many Adventure of Alex
• Uncommon Nonsense
• The Cass Family

Month 4

Dear Alice,

Today you are four months old and what a month it’s been. We’ve been through a lot of firsts this month–your first plane ride (more on that in another post), your first nights sleeping alone in your room (more on that too), and your first movie (yah, Hunger Games).

You’re growing so fast and quickly turning into a little girl already.

This month we introduced you to your Jolly Jumper, and while you just kind of hung there for a day or two, once you got the hang of it, you started to go wild. Last week during Easter brunch, you were the star of the party bouncing around in that thing, showing off and grinning at everyone around you. I feel like you are going to be a very happy-go-lucky person when you get older.

 

You’ve started to sleep a little better at night, although a nap beyond 45 minutes still eludes you. Despite what the books say about short naps, you are happy most of the time and, therefore, I must be doing something right. I’ve let it go now, Alice. I’m not reading anymore stupid books either.

Sorry about all that.

You’ve also started playing strange with people. Both your grandpas were on the hit list for a while and when we went to see your grandparents, you didn’t give me much of a break for the first few days. There was also that ill-fated trip where your dad and I went out for a couple of hours and you screamed the entire time. In a way, it’s nice to know you need me more than you need anyone.

Now that you’re getting older, I’m starting to anticipate our future together more and more. I can’t wait to start you on real food (and you are totally your mother’s daughter, as you’re already showing a keen interest in everything I put in my mouth these days). I can’t wait until you’re old enough to understand holidays and the Easter Bunny and those kinds of things.

I love watching as you explore more and more of the world. You play with your toys for real now and have a preference for certain ones. I’ve also been working on getting you to sit up and you’re getting there. You can’t do it for very long, and you aren’t very stable, but I bet it won’t be long before you’re a pro at it.

Now that the weather is getting warmer, we’re spending more and more time outside and it’s a privilege to introduce you to the world. I can’t even count the number of times a day, I look at you and think about how lucky I am to have you. To me, you are the most amazing little girl in the world.

Love,
Mom