Knocked Up

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• A Room of His Own

  My boys both slept through the night last night, and the night before.  Not a creature was stirring, except for the constantly hungry cat, from a little after ten to 5:30.  I should be happy, right?  Perhaps I've got a slumber hangover - you know, when you feel like crap because you've rested too much after your body has become accustomed to a frequently interrupted night of sleep - because I'm not.  See, three month old Jonas slept both of these nights in his own room.  It was the end to cosleeping.   Until two nights ago, Jonas snoozed in a bassinet at the foot of our bed, or in bed with us.  Sometimes he snoozed.  Other times he rolled around and squawked.  Sean and I got used to whispering.  I got used to tiptoeing about, trying to stay quiet, and then stumbling over a laundry basket/toy tractor/stray boot/cat because of Sleeping Baby Law No. 23 that goes something like, "The harder you try to minimize noise, the more the jackhammer will slam and the rooster will crow."  It follows Sleeping Baby Law No. 22: Whenever you tell someone the baby slept through the night, he will fail to sleep through the night on the following evening, and right before Sleeping Baby Law No. 24: When you most want the baby to sleep, the baby will sleep the least.  When you want to keep the baby awake, the baby will want to sleep.  Then there's my current personal nemesis, Sleeping Baby Law No. 37: The minute you pour a glass of wine and relax, thinking the baby is finally, really, truly asleep, the baby will start crying again.    After a few nights of regression (Sleeping Baby Law No. 1: As soon as you think you've got the schedule figured out, it will change), I decided it was time for Jonas to go out on his own, his own in this case meaning a room down the hall.  The night wakings were increasing, not decreasing, and I'd had enough.  He moved to what we're callling the boys' room, the bedroom across the way from Axel's.  Once Jonas is sleeping more regularly, we'll probably combine the boys in this room and return Axel's current bedroom to an office.  It will be nice not to have tomato sauce splattered on my laptop, now squashed in a makeshift kitchen counter pile of clutter/office/work type space.  But, I'm not going to risk having one boy wake up the other one during this precarious sleeping stage, if I can help it.  Thus, the separate rooms for now.   Read More... Posted Oct 14 2009, 08:51 AM by knockedup with | with 9 comment(s) Filed under: sleeping through the night, sleep, cosleeping

• The Bedtime Routine

  Finally, after thirteen weeks, we've landed in a sort of a bedtime routine.  There's a semi-predictable pattern.  I can think one or two steps ahead, rather than just sprinting from one task to the next, juggling whatever baby/toddler/dog/food-related mini-emergency arises.    Here are the parameters: one parent, two children, one dog, and one cat.  Yeah, basically, I'm on my own at bedtime.  Sean's on shift and, thus, sleeping, or not sleeping, at a fire station ten miles away, and, when he's not on shift, he's now in this little thing called paramedic school, which demands his presence at least three nights a week.   So, any bedtime strategies have to be doable by one parent, because we've only got two parents at home two, sometimes one, night a week.    (Note: while I have had my selfish woe-is-me moments, like when I've just been puked or pooped on by Jonas and Axel is yelling, "Dog dog dog dog dog," while waving his arms over his head in a booga-booga fashion and chasing the dog who is barking and who just finished eating the dinner that I foolishly put too close to the edge of the kitchen table, I recognize that we are very lucky.  Sean has not been deployed overseas.  Neither of us is struggling with a serious illness.  I am not actually a single parent, even if I am alone with both kids most of the time that I'm not at work.  It's just a bit of a rocky transition, from a 65/35 parenting split to something more like 80/20 or, as it will be in some weeks, 90/10.)   Anyway, here's what a typical evening is starting to look like at our house:   4:20 pm:  Get home.  Relieve nanny, who stays with the boys a couple days a week.  Put bottles of expressed milk in the fridge.  Wave goodbye to nanny.   4:30 pm: Strap Jonas into the Baby Bjorn.  Play outside.  See tractor.  Wave to tractor.  Chase Axel down the street after his long lost love, big yellow tractor.  See bus.  Wave to bus.  Prevent Axel from running into the street to declare his love for the bus and all its passengers.  See mail truck.  Wave to mail truck.  Follow mail truck down the street.  Wath Axel cheer, "Mail mail mail mail mail!"    Think how nice it must be for the mailman to have a fan club.      Read More... Posted Oct 01 2009, 12:16 PM by knockedup with | with 16 comment(s) Filed under: sleep, bedtime stories, bedtime routine

• Sleep, The Second Time Around

  When Axel was a baby, I was obsessed with sleep: who was sleeping (not my baby), who wasn't (me), how to get him to sleep (nursing, rocking, singing), and how to get him to stay that way (prayer and voodoo).  When you don't sleep, it's all you can think about.  Babies, I realized, are crazy.  I even viewed all mothers who claimed their babies slept with some suspicion, especially those who slept through the night by four months - were they lying to me?  Had they just forgotten, five or twenty-five years later?  Had sleepy little aliens snatched away their human babies, replacing them with identical pod babies who snoozed for twelve hours straight?    Well, now I know the truth.  They weren't lying.  It's not aliens.  There are real, live human babies who sleep more than two hours in a row.  One of them lives with me.   I've been afraid to tell you this, for fear it might jinx it.  I'm rubbing my luck rabbit's foot and knocking on wood and providing offerings of pink marabou-trimed slippers and expensive organic cotton mattresses to the sleep gods as I type this.  But here it is: my youngest son actually sleeps.    Read More... Posted Sep 23 2009, 09:50 AM by knockedup with | with 16 comment(s) Filed under: sleep

• Kicking the Habit

  The bottle habit, that is.  At Axel's 12 month check-up, his doctor told us now's a good time to get the boy off the bottle and on to the cup.  Apparently, 12 - 15 months is a more flexible time in a child's life.  There's no doubt Axel is physically a Gumby; he can touch his nose with his toes.  His will and preferences, though, are less like a rubberband and more like Play-Do that's been left in an uncovered container for a few days.  I guess this is only going to get worse, and soon he'll refuse to eat anything that isn't orange and insist on wearing a snorkeling mask as a hat.    During the day, it's all sippy cup, all the time.  But he still has a bottle just before going to bed.  Axel falls asleep on his own, after the bottle and speed-reading a few books by turning the pages faster than a speeding bullet.  The extra calories of the post-bed milk do his body good, I think.  He has another bottle when he wakes up at about 5 in the morning.  After the 5 am bottle, he slips back off to dream of romping with a pack of friendly dogs in a room filled with empty cardboard boxes.  He stays asleep until 6:30 or, from time to time, 7:00.  This extra hour and a half is very, very precious to me.  I do not want to disrupt the 90 minutes that let me sleep a little more or shower in peace.  Read More... Posted Dec 19 2008, 08:21 AM by knockedup with | with 22 comment(s) Filed under: bottlefeeding, weaning, sleep, bottles, sippy cups

• Baby Rage

  Axel still gets mad when he's tired, and even more mad when someone tries to help him address the problem of exhaustion by encouraging him to sleep.  He screams and cries and then, a few minutes later, a switch gets flipped and he's suddenly silent and asleep.  There's no winding down - it's yell yell yell yell yell yell yell zzzzzzzz.    The other night, Sean was reading the great classic The Grouchy Ladybug to Axel.  Axel likes to speed-read, so there's just enough time to repeat, "Wanna fight?" or identify the sparrow on the page before moving on to the next page.  Once the ladybugs were happily eating aphids together, Sean offered Axel a bottle.  Axel drank a little and sweetly, angellically, nuzzled into his father's chest.  Then he decided he wanted a little more milk and did his adorable open bird-mouth request for a nipple.  Sean offered him the bottle.    Axel (perhaps in homage to the grouchy ladybug) screamed at the bottle and pushed it away as violently as you can push something when you weigh less than a case of beer.  This is the normal reaction to something that you've asked for - screaming and pushing. Read More... Posted Nov 09 2008, 03:05 PM by knockedup with | with 14 comment(s) Filed under: sleep battles, sleep, farting, gas, pajamas, tantrums

• Sleepless in Denver

  I know I should be thanking the magically delicious shooting stars and purple horseshoes that Axel's sleeping a solid ten hours each night.  And I'm grateful.  It's just that I'd consider animal sacrifice (just a little one, like a goldfish) if it would guarantee that he'd sleep in a little longer, until the sun is higher in the sky than the moon, even until 6:00 or 6:30 am.    Most mornings, I'm on solo baby duty.  My man works 24 hour shifts which, with driving time and the fact that he gets in early and leaves late, mean that he's gone 26+ hours.  So, if he's working, he leaves the house by 5:45.  If he's coming home from work, he gets back at 7:45.  Thus I'm trying to walk the dog and dress myself and dress the baby and feed the baby and possibly run a couple miles before work and make sure my sweater doesn't have boogers on it and get the bottles and diapers and my work crap in the car and a squirming baby in his car seat and, well, you get the picture.  It's just a little bit chaotic.  There's a lot of tripping over the cat and wearing of socks that don't match.   Almost every morning between 5 and 5:15, Axel makes his first peep, and I beg him (silently, from the other room) to just sleep in a little longer, so that I can sleep a little more and/or shower in peace.  And every morning, Axel decides that 5:30 is the perfect time to get up and at 'em, and get the proverbial worm and all that.  He's got important things to do.  He can't just lounge around in bed all day.  Hey, lazybones mama, he calls, get moving!   There are enough worms to go around, I want to tell him, and you can still dig up a whole mess of them if you just give me fifteen more minutes.  Read More... Posted Sep 17 2008, 09:54 PM by knockedup with | with 25 comment(s) Filed under: sleep battles, sleep, sleeping in, early riser, waking up early