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.

     

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  • Smiles and Sleep

    This weekend we went to an extended family reunion.  Generally, it was good, if chaotic in the way that a big mass of adults and five kids under eight is inclined to be.  All in all, it was a success: the grandparent generation spent time with their grandkids and golfed; the current parents enjoyed an elk and sherry-filled evening out; and the little people had new toys, ice cream, and an audience. 

     

    It inspired Axel to chase his older second cousins and be chased by them; to take a second turn on the bungee/trampoline contraption; to run around madly in the middle of formal family pictures; and to attempt many, many new words, like iced tea and breeze and his new favorite, peach. 

     

     

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  • Secrets of the Inner Ear

    I was under the impression that ear infections are an excruciating experience.  Children with ear infections don't sleep.  They yell for hours in the middle of the night.  Sometimes, I imagined, green goo spurts out like a horizontal geiser.  They are horrible, horrible things, the equivalent of a kidney stone for a toddler.  They cannot be ignored. 

     

    Well, I was wrong.  Axel had a red, pus-nurturing infection in his ear, and he acted like it was no big thing.  We found out because we took him to the doctor for a lingering cough.  The hacking, apparently, is nothing.  Though he was walking around sounding like the littlest coal miner suffering from black lung, it's just a post nasal drip cough with a touch of drama.  The real problem was the bad ear infection, which we wouldn't have found out about it were it not for the deceptive cough. 

     

    For a few weeks, Axel had been sleeping fitfully.  It was pattern-less fitfullness.  Every second, third, or fourth night, he would wake up between one and three times.  It wasn't every night.  It wasn't getting worse.  It wasn't getting better.  It was just enough to bother me (and Axel), but not enough to rise to the level of concern.  There were two afternoons of low fevers, but the fevers went away in a few hours and Axel was again cheerful - which for him means demanding milk and refusing to eat more than two bites of dinner, then tackling the dog's tail.  Both the sleep disruptions and high temperature blips seemed more like they had to do with teething, a hypothesis reinforced by the two molars grinding through his gums. 

     

    A side note on teething: at first, I wondered what all the fuss was about.  I remember getting permanent teeth.  It wasn't that bad.  Then I took a look at those big, flat molars, drilling through Axel's virgin gums, and realized that this kind of teething is not the same as permanent teeth.  I don't even like getting poked by the dental hygenist's instruments, so if someone suggested that I suck it up while a lumpy, irregular piece of bone drove through a part of my mouth, I'd be a little cranky, too.  It's amazing that Axel isn't more pissed off the constant budding of new teeth.  

     

    After we got the pink bottle of liquid amoxicillin - which Axel guzzles down like its chocolate milkshake - and started the doses, Axel improved.  He's slept through the night for a week straight.  He started kissing my nose.   But I'm left wondering how I'm supposed to know if he's really sick or not. 

     

     

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  • The Five Minute Sleep Solution

    The sleep solution - at least the current solution - is stomach sleeping.  Sleeping face down, with his arms splayed out and face smushed against the mattress, is apparently Axel's preferred sleep position.  Maybe for months he's been longing to be belly-down at night, and was thwarted by our committment to the anti-SIDS back to sleep approach.  I don't blame him - I like to sleep on my stomach, too, especially now that I'm not carrying six pounds of baby and twenty plus pounds of amniotic fluid and pudge in my belly.  Because I'm the sort to follow the doctor's recommendations precisely, especially when they have anything to do with death, we still put him to sleep on his back - it's just that he's figured out that he can immediately roll over, wiggle around for five minutes, and burrow down into his red crib sheet before passing out.  Though I've twisted his chin to the side when his nose is smashed down, I'm not so paranoid that I roll Axel back over to his back again and again.  If I started that, I'd be doing nothing but baby rolling all night long.  If he's able to do his rolly-poly nightly settling routine, he's also able to roll back, should he need to.   

     

    Let me back up and explain our other sleep-promoting steps over the past few weeks.  First, we moved Axel in to his own room.  I thought he would have moved from his spot in the Pack N Play next to our bed to his bedroom sooner, but his room wasn't quite finished.  See, we were insane enough to decide to renovate our kitchen, add on another bedroom and bathroom, and reconfigure the office (now nursery) starting when I was just over five months pregnant with Axel.  Things didn't go as planned, as they tend to when construction or children are involved, and, after the delays of our pokey, half-competent contractor, Sean's just now finishing up the trim on the doors, windows, and baseboards.   The move in to Axel's room went pretty smoothly and didn't, as I worried that it would, backfire and cause even more night wakings and restlessness.  He settled right in, happily grabbing at the yellow wall during diaper changes and spitting up on the red and gray carpet tiles. 

     

     

    Axel's also been partaking of the sticky pasty deliciousness known as rice cereal mixed with breast milk.  Except when he's sick, he loves it - grabbing for the spoon with two hands and making his monkey face of excitement at it.  It reminds me making an elaborate paper mache earth for my 6th grade geography class.  Get out some newspaper strips and a balloon and we could make our own solar system with the leftovers.  I don't think this has had much of an affect on his sleep, but he seems to like it, and so we're going to keep on offering him bland mush.

     

     

     

    We're also fiercely protective of the bedtime routine.  We rushed home from a slow restaurant, changing our dine-in order to to-go, to get home in time to start the rice cereal, bath, baby massage, books, then bed routine.  With all of this, and allowing a bit of nighttime fussing - never more than ten minutes, because I am thin-skinned and weak - Axel's down to waking up just once per night.  

     

    Now, with his cold still in such force that he coughed so hard he made himself throw up, our sleeping through the night plan of attack is on hold.  We've withdrawn the sleep battling troops for some R & R, since we've all been hit by the same late season cold, cough, and aches.  Waking up once per night isn't really so bad, though, especially when compared to the four plus wakings we had before.  The most annoying sleep situation right now is that he's woken up at 5 am the past few mornings, and only been willing to fall asleep and stay asleep until 6 in my husband's arms.  The kid's sick, so I can see how sleeping cuddled up against a warm body would be comforting in the early morning.  I'm hoping the early morning waking when not yet ready to wake will pass when the cold does.   

     

    I'm obsessed with sleep - who's sleeping, how long, why, why not.  I'm a sleep-information addict, but all that information's just filling in for the real thing: my sleep craving will only be satisfied by the elusive, blissful full night's rest.

     

     

     


  • Mr. Sandman, Bring Me a Dream

    First question for a new mama, after the cursory "How are you?"  - "How's the baby sleeping?"  And, in response, I have to lie.  I don't want to be a traitor to my son, and make the asker think that my boy is (gasp!) not a good sleeper.  I feel like I have to protect him from judgement - the same way you'd protect a classmate in the third grade from the wrath of the subsitute teacher by pretending not to know who drew a big-nosed likeness of her on the side of the bathroom stall. 

     

    Why is everyone so interested in his sleep habits?  No one asks about his smiles - which come very frequently and often accompany full-body wriggles of delight.  One coworker asked if he laughed yet, which was a nice change in the line of baby-related questioning, even though I had to say "Ummm, not really."  No one wonders about Axel's eating habits, love of track lighting (or his best friend, who he often gazes at adoringly, table lamp), or interest in grabbing the cat's fur.  No one asks about how much he drools - enough to drench his shirt, sheets, the side of his face, and still have more to leave wet mouth marks on my shoulder.  Maybe that's not something I should brag about. 

     

    Really, though, how much do a three month old's sleep habits reflect on his strength of character?  Does waking up at 1 or 2 am every night mean that he's going to be holding up banks by the time he's thirteen?  I didn't think so.  So I've got to curtail this unnecessary urge to defend my boy's honor by stretching the truth a bit about his sleep habits. 

     

    Here's the truth:  he does not sleep through the night.  A few times, he's slept six hours in a row - and, on one blessed evening when the stars shone like diamonds and the moon was bright, for seven hours.  But then he goes back to waking up every three to five hours.  Even the time he slept seven hours (mostly) in a row, he woke up and made a few grunts and yells and needed some tummy rubbing to settle back down.  I repeat, he does not sleep through the night.  

     

    Sometimes, I like his night wakings.  He smiles when he sees me standing over him, and I scoop him up and try not to crush him in a hug.   He's warm and cuddles against me in the rocking chair as he eats.  There's a bonus to all this night nursing, too: I get to keep up on my magazine reading - when else would I be reading Vogue or the New Yorker?   There are times, of course, when I wish that my husband had functioning nipples and could take his share of these sleep interruptions.  He doesn't even move anymore in response to Axel's night noises or when I roll out of bed or even when I turn on the lights.   Though I've always been a deep sleeper, and can fall asleep within five minutes of getting into the passenger seat of a warm car, it's already clear that I'll be the one up in response to nightmares and late night fevers. 

     

    The length of time Axel sleeps does not seem to be affected by the amount of rocking he gets before bed, number of bedtime stories read, length of time nursing, wrap of the swaddle blanket, presence or absence of a pacifier, or white noise from the humidifier - though all of these things seem to help him get to sleep, at least some of the time.  Eventually, he will sleep through the night.  He's got to, right?  In the meantime, I'm going to stop lying and, when asked about his sleep habits, answer truthfully that he sleeps like a baby -  not the peaceful, sound sleep of the cliche but in sometimes fiftul bursts. 

     

     



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About the Blogger

Oz Spies

Oz Spies in Denver

Oz Spies lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband, a firefighter; their son, Axel; and a slightly obese dog and cat. She has a MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University.

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