It's the day after my birthday, which means it's time for me to start getting sick. I don't know why I'm surprised; this happens almost every year. (Or enough years that it feels like some sort of not-entirely-coincidental curse.) I've been waiting for this anyway, because our whole family has been trapped in this relentless cycle of being a little bit sick for what seems like a very long time. Isaac is battling his second (or third, depending on how you want to look at it; I don't think he ever really got over his second) double ear infection, and Matt has a cold for about the billionth time this year (and he never gets sick, ever), and now it's my turn. Suzannah is getting over a cold as well, although she hasn't had much worse than the sniffles in a long time. Knock on wood.
I spent most of the last week home with Isaac. Again. I'm feeling really a little bit crazy here. You guys, I AM JUST SO TIRED OF RUNNY NOSES AND COUGHS AND POURING MEDICINE DOWN MY CHILDREN'S THROATS, and also, I can pretty much roll with having to arrange for a sub for my classes and be okay with it when I need to be, but still, that is also getting old. And it's not like I have a ton of available days to take off, since "maternity leave" sucks those right up. And now that my own sinuses are acting up, I'm ready to just pour myself a big old glass of self-pity.
On the plus side, once we survive this, Isaac will have an immune system of steel. I keep reminding myself that we went through a similar winter with Suzannah a few years ago, but she really hasn't had much more than the sniffles in a very long time -- since before Isaac was born. Also, having the immediate needs of my sick family to deal with has distracted me -- at least a little bit -- from greater and much more upsetting problems, like this nightmare, and also the horrible absurdity that is Scott Walker. These are things that actually do keep me awake at night sometimes, but right now, tonight, I don't have the energy to write a political rant. I hope that doesn't seem like a cop-out; give me some time to recover. (In the meantime, click the links. They're not brand-new, but I'm behind in my blogging efforts, so they'll have to suffice for now.)
Instead, because I'm grasping for some perspective, I thought this would be a good time to list some things for which I am particularly grateful. I had an absolutely lovely birthday yesterday, but I'm pretty easy to please; I can find a party in a glass of wine and a bubble bath, or an hour to read or write, or a really great dinner. On one of my favorite birthdays in recent memory, I took the day off school and spent it deep-cleaning my kitchen, watching a new DVD, writing for awhile, and reading -- uninterrupted -- for a good chunk of the afternoon. Matt brought me flowers and baked me cookies. It was an absolutely perfect day. This year, despite the lingering crud that has overtaken my house, my birthday was also pretty wonderful. It included sleeping in a bit, coffee and waffles, a phone call from my parents, my lovely and radiant friend Julia's baby shower, a dinner date with Matt while Aaron and Morgan babysat, lots of dessert, a gin-and-tonic, and curling up with The West Wing. Today I had an afternoon nap (all by myself, for nearly two hours), more dessert, and an hour at the gym, which definitely makes up for all the brownies I've eaten in the last couple of days.
So really, things are good. Sniffly, but good.
A little anecdote from today:
There's a wonderful man at our church who makes balloon animals for everyone on their birthdays. Today, he gave me a snowman wearing a birthday hat -- one of those pointy paper party hats. Suzannah, as you can imagine, loves it as much as I do, and she wore the birthday hat home from church and played with it for much of the afternoon. Tonight, when I was soaking in the tub after my workout, she burst into the bathroom (why do I ever imagine I'll have a moment of solitude before my kids are in bed?) and hung the birthday hat upside down over the toilet paper roll.
"There," she said. "It's Birthday toilet paper."
In other news, my plan is to give up meat for Lent. I suppose you could say it's a little experiment. Maybe I'll write more about that later...maybe.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
"A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them."
I've heard that there are children who go to bed at a reasonable time and sleep for eleven or twelve hours. I wouldn't believe they exist, except that my second child appears -- for the moment -- to be one of these mythical children. I definitely wasn't expecting this when I had Isaac, so it came as a bit of a surprise when my infant son had to teach me to just put him to bed already because he was done with the day at 7:30. When it happened more than a couple of times, proving that it wasn't merely a fluke (unlike the time Suzannah slept through the night three times when she was about three or four months old, and then never repeated it), I said to Matt, "I didn't know babies came like this. Let's have six more!"
And that is how I earned my own bedroom.
Just kidding.
(Sleep is a pretty hot topic in the parenting world, and it's one I tend to stay away from -- mostly because I take issue with the way our culture values and expects infants to sleep independently from such a young age. I am nearly thirty-two years old and, my word, I don't remember the last time I slept straight through the night -- and I have my own sleep "crutches." So, to me, it's nothing short of absurd to expect a baby to sleep alone, even an "older" baby, because babies are still babies. However, I also know that not everyone shares this perspective, and this entry really isn't about parenting philosophies. I'll start a fun debate some other night, maybe.)
Anyway, I never considered Suzannah a "bad" sleeper, and really, I still don't, unless I'm ready to label myself as a "bad" sleeper as well. I'm sure I would have been considerably more sleep-deprived when she was an infant except that she slept with me, and her night wakings were far less disruptive than they might have been if she'd had to squawk at me from across the room to get my attention. Plus, I simply loved having her snuggled against me at night. I suppose one could wonder if this sort of thing is the reason Suzannah's bedtime routine -- that is, the endless litany of things that need to happen before she is sleeping in her own bed for the night -- is so ridiculous, but I don't think so. Isaac slept with me from the very day he was born, but he made it very clear around the age of nine months that he needed his own space. (I knew I was supposed to celebrate that, and of course there is something to be said for being able to cocoon myself in the covers or sprawl across the bed however I want, but I still miss the feeling of my baby boy's toes wiggling against my body and his sweet, milky little sighs in my ear before I fall asleep.) I know there's plenty of time for Isaac to develop his own ridiculous bedtime routines, by the way; I'm just saying that I've never tried to get him to sleep on his own, and, in fact, I relinquished him to "independent sleeping" with no small amount of sadness.
Now, Suzannah is four-and-a-half years old, so -- obviously not a baby. She does go to sleep in her very own room, in her very own bed. And, mostly, once she is actually asleep, she stays asleep. Not always, but mostly, and mostly is good enough for me. But there are times -- there are times.
For one thing, she seems completely incapable of falling asleep before ridiculous o'clock at night. I admit that when I hear about children of similar ages who go to bed and actually fall asleep at 7:30 or 8:00, a part of me is convinced that these are mythical unicorn children and do not actually exist in real life. (I suppose Isaac could be the kind of child who goes compliantly to bed at a reasonable hour, but I guess I must still sort of believe he'll outgrow this easy bedtime. In fact, he very well might be using it as a weapon to lull us into a false sense of security before his eighteen-month sleep regression, at which point he'll be all, HAH! FOOLED YOU, MOM AND DAD!) We can do the whole bedtime routine as early as we please, and Suzannah will be in her jammmies, with teeth brushed and stories read, by a perfectly respectable time -- but she will still come creeping out of her room at nine o'clock, or nine-thirty, or ten, or whatever, with her huge blue eyes and the merest hint of a smile on her sheepish little face.
"Young lady, what are you doing out of bed?" I might say (all the while wondering when I became a parent who says things like young lady).
"Well, I need to give Daddy a kiss," she'll answer.
"You already did that. You've had lots of hugs and kisses."
"But I need to kiss Daddy's elbow!" She really did say that one night, and it was so random that I just burst out laughing, at which point she knew she'd won. She's a clever little kid.
Our bedtime routine goes like this: Put on jammies, brush teeth, read stories (we learned long ago that we need to determine the number of books we read, and we need to decide which books we will read, before we actually start reading -- otherwise, obviously, we're sucked into a neverending cycle of please just one more, or, even better, Suzannah will stop us one page from the end of a book, decide she wants to switch to a different story, and announce that because we didn't finish the first book it doesn't count) and then hugs/kisses/lights out.
You would think that lights out would be the end, but that's not how it works.
After she is tucked into bed, Matt and I are expected to leave her room and go about her business, and a few moments later she calls for one of us. We go to her, and she says, "Please, can I rock with you?" (It would make a great deal of sense to rock with her after stories but before lights out, wouldn't it? But no! She has to get out of bed and creep into the living room and climb up in the big rocking recliner. It really is crucial that she work in the creeping down the hallway part.) We rock and cuddle for a moment, and then we say, "Okay! BED!" And she scampers back to her room and climbs back in bed. And then she looks up with those huge blue eyes, those beautiful, plaintive little weapons, and says, "Please, Mommy, can you sleep with me for a moment?"
If you could resist that, well, congratulations.
So I climb into her little bed with her, and we snuggle for awhile. And then she has to repeat that entire process with Daddy.
We have gotten smart enough, at least, to limit her rocking to one time per parent, and we don't even have to set the oven timer anymore; she's content just to have those few moments of snuggles. Of course, after she has exhausted her nightly bag of allowable tricks, she calls one of us in and says, "I need to go potty."
"Okay," I say. "You can go potty."
"I need to go ask Daddy if I can go potty."
"Suzannah, no you don't. You can just go."
"Well, I need to check."
"Daddy is going to say yes! You can go potty! For crying out loud!"
But she is already trotting down the hall.
And there is always one more hug, and one more kiss, and I'm sorry, I know, I should just make her stay in bed, and I'm sure I had all kinds of opinions on how parents should make that happen before I had my own maddeningly hilarious little bedtime staller, but I'm not as smart as I was back then.
Eventually, though, she does go to sleep. Instead of sleeping normally with her head on the pillow, she likes to create this little nest near the foot of her bed. She really buries herself in there, and sometimes not even a foot is visible; I've gone in on many occasions only to wonder, for a brief startling moment, if my daughter has somehow crept out again. ("Grandpa Chuck would hate this," Matt and I say to each other. It's true. My dad always hated it whenever I burrowed under my own covers, as he becomes wildly claustrophobic if a sheet is anywhere near the top half of his body.) But she's in there, and she's asleep, and if I'm lucky I have just enough time to read a few pages of a novel or something before I succumb to the temptations of my own bed. On weekends, I feel I should somehow take advantage of my "free" time and stay up late enough to enjoy it, but I have to be careful about that, because -- as all parents know -- children have the uncanny ability to sense the nights when their parents have stayed up just a bit late, and they will wake up a full hour early the next morning, no matter how late they stayed up themselves.
And of course, at nearly five years old, my daughter is "expected" to sleep through the night. But a couple of times a week, sometime in the wee morning hours, we wake up to a small blonde visitor. We used to just let her climb in bed with us, but then she is the only person who gets any sleep. My solution -- the one that has stuck -- is to accompany our daughter back to her bed, where I climb in with her and stay until she falls asleep. Her bed isn't large, and she hogs the covers; usually I wind up with my feet under the sheet and one of her blankets (the kind that are stacked at the foot of her bed, the kind I was given when she was a baby) over my shoulders. I lie on my side and she falls asleep against me, sometimes throwing one leg across mine. Sometimes she snores in my ear.
It is not exactly the most restful experience for me. But there is also something I love about it -- enough to know that someday, I will ache for these nights when my daughter finds comfort and safety in my presence. I'm reminded that even though she is "independent," and even though her nursing days are long past, my body is not yet my own -- she still lays claim to it, in a sense, in the way she presses herself against me, in the way that the boundaries between us blur.
And I'm not quite ready to let go of that, either.
And that is how I earned my own bedroom.
Just kidding.
(Sleep is a pretty hot topic in the parenting world, and it's one I tend to stay away from -- mostly because I take issue with the way our culture values and expects infants to sleep independently from such a young age. I am nearly thirty-two years old and, my word, I don't remember the last time I slept straight through the night -- and I have my own sleep "crutches." So, to me, it's nothing short of absurd to expect a baby to sleep alone, even an "older" baby, because babies are still babies. However, I also know that not everyone shares this perspective, and this entry really isn't about parenting philosophies. I'll start a fun debate some other night, maybe.)
Anyway, I never considered Suzannah a "bad" sleeper, and really, I still don't, unless I'm ready to label myself as a "bad" sleeper as well. I'm sure I would have been considerably more sleep-deprived when she was an infant except that she slept with me, and her night wakings were far less disruptive than they might have been if she'd had to squawk at me from across the room to get my attention. Plus, I simply loved having her snuggled against me at night. I suppose one could wonder if this sort of thing is the reason Suzannah's bedtime routine -- that is, the endless litany of things that need to happen before she is sleeping in her own bed for the night -- is so ridiculous, but I don't think so. Isaac slept with me from the very day he was born, but he made it very clear around the age of nine months that he needed his own space. (I knew I was supposed to celebrate that, and of course there is something to be said for being able to cocoon myself in the covers or sprawl across the bed however I want, but I still miss the feeling of my baby boy's toes wiggling against my body and his sweet, milky little sighs in my ear before I fall asleep.) I know there's plenty of time for Isaac to develop his own ridiculous bedtime routines, by the way; I'm just saying that I've never tried to get him to sleep on his own, and, in fact, I relinquished him to "independent sleeping" with no small amount of sadness.
Now, Suzannah is four-and-a-half years old, so -- obviously not a baby. She does go to sleep in her very own room, in her very own bed. And, mostly, once she is actually asleep, she stays asleep. Not always, but mostly, and mostly is good enough for me. But there are times -- there are times.
For one thing, she seems completely incapable of falling asleep before ridiculous o'clock at night. I admit that when I hear about children of similar ages who go to bed and actually fall asleep at 7:30 or 8:00, a part of me is convinced that these are mythical unicorn children and do not actually exist in real life. (I suppose Isaac could be the kind of child who goes compliantly to bed at a reasonable hour, but I guess I must still sort of believe he'll outgrow this easy bedtime. In fact, he very well might be using it as a weapon to lull us into a false sense of security before his eighteen-month sleep regression, at which point he'll be all, HAH! FOOLED YOU, MOM AND DAD!) We can do the whole bedtime routine as early as we please, and Suzannah will be in her jammmies, with teeth brushed and stories read, by a perfectly respectable time -- but she will still come creeping out of her room at nine o'clock, or nine-thirty, or ten, or whatever, with her huge blue eyes and the merest hint of a smile on her sheepish little face.
"Young lady, what are you doing out of bed?" I might say (all the while wondering when I became a parent who says things like young lady).
"Well, I need to give Daddy a kiss," she'll answer.
"You already did that. You've had lots of hugs and kisses."
"But I need to kiss Daddy's elbow!" She really did say that one night, and it was so random that I just burst out laughing, at which point she knew she'd won. She's a clever little kid.
Our bedtime routine goes like this: Put on jammies, brush teeth, read stories (we learned long ago that we need to determine the number of books we read, and we need to decide which books we will read, before we actually start reading -- otherwise, obviously, we're sucked into a neverending cycle of please just one more, or, even better, Suzannah will stop us one page from the end of a book, decide she wants to switch to a different story, and announce that because we didn't finish the first book it doesn't count) and then hugs/kisses/lights out.
You would think that lights out would be the end, but that's not how it works.
After she is tucked into bed, Matt and I are expected to leave her room and go about her business, and a few moments later she calls for one of us. We go to her, and she says, "Please, can I rock with you?" (It would make a great deal of sense to rock with her after stories but before lights out, wouldn't it? But no! She has to get out of bed and creep into the living room and climb up in the big rocking recliner. It really is crucial that she work in the creeping down the hallway part.) We rock and cuddle for a moment, and then we say, "Okay! BED!" And she scampers back to her room and climbs back in bed. And then she looks up with those huge blue eyes, those beautiful, plaintive little weapons, and says, "Please, Mommy, can you sleep with me for a moment?"
If you could resist that, well, congratulations.
So I climb into her little bed with her, and we snuggle for awhile. And then she has to repeat that entire process with Daddy.
We have gotten smart enough, at least, to limit her rocking to one time per parent, and we don't even have to set the oven timer anymore; she's content just to have those few moments of snuggles. Of course, after she has exhausted her nightly bag of allowable tricks, she calls one of us in and says, "I need to go potty."
"Okay," I say. "You can go potty."
"I need to go ask Daddy if I can go potty."
"Suzannah, no you don't. You can just go."
"Well, I need to check."
"Daddy is going to say yes! You can go potty! For crying out loud!"
But she is already trotting down the hall.
And there is always one more hug, and one more kiss, and I'm sorry, I know, I should just make her stay in bed, and I'm sure I had all kinds of opinions on how parents should make that happen before I had my own maddeningly hilarious little bedtime staller, but I'm not as smart as I was back then.
Eventually, though, she does go to sleep. Instead of sleeping normally with her head on the pillow, she likes to create this little nest near the foot of her bed. She really buries herself in there, and sometimes not even a foot is visible; I've gone in on many occasions only to wonder, for a brief startling moment, if my daughter has somehow crept out again. ("Grandpa Chuck would hate this," Matt and I say to each other. It's true. My dad always hated it whenever I burrowed under my own covers, as he becomes wildly claustrophobic if a sheet is anywhere near the top half of his body.) But she's in there, and she's asleep, and if I'm lucky I have just enough time to read a few pages of a novel or something before I succumb to the temptations of my own bed. On weekends, I feel I should somehow take advantage of my "free" time and stay up late enough to enjoy it, but I have to be careful about that, because -- as all parents know -- children have the uncanny ability to sense the nights when their parents have stayed up just a bit late, and they will wake up a full hour early the next morning, no matter how late they stayed up themselves.
And of course, at nearly five years old, my daughter is "expected" to sleep through the night. But a couple of times a week, sometime in the wee morning hours, we wake up to a small blonde visitor. We used to just let her climb in bed with us, but then she is the only person who gets any sleep. My solution -- the one that has stuck -- is to accompany our daughter back to her bed, where I climb in with her and stay until she falls asleep. Her bed isn't large, and she hogs the covers; usually I wind up with my feet under the sheet and one of her blankets (the kind that are stacked at the foot of her bed, the kind I was given when she was a baby) over my shoulders. I lie on my side and she falls asleep against me, sometimes throwing one leg across mine. Sometimes she snores in my ear.
It is not exactly the most restful experience for me. But there is also something I love about it -- enough to know that someday, I will ache for these nights when my daughter finds comfort and safety in my presence. I'm reminded that even though she is "independent," and even though her nursing days are long past, my body is not yet my own -- she still lays claim to it, in a sense, in the way she presses herself against me, in the way that the boundaries between us blur.
And I'm not quite ready to let go of that, either.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)