Week Eight: The Stress of Small Person Maintence
What is the deal with sleeping through the night? Seriously what is with all the pressure? I open my email today to find my weekly Babycenter newsletter with the headline, Sleeping through the night: Is your baby ready? It is also one of the first questions people ask, following up such vital statistics such as gender and age.
The short answer is that Will is definitely not "sleeping through the night", and I don't even have that expectation at this point. Will wakes up a few times during the night, makes some grunting noises, and then as I feed him in our nice warm bed, he drifts right back off to sleep (and so do I). Ian asked me one morning this week, "Did Will wake up last night?", and I thought about it and said "I guess he did, but I don't really remember". What I don't understand is the pressure about sleeping through the night. I think that maybe if all the parenting resources never mentioned the whole thing, we'd all assume whatever our baby was doing is normal without the expectation of anything else.
Okay, now for those of you who know me as the "nap nazi", you might be saying, "ha! Just wait until he's two and you're still rocking him to sleep just like Emily". And I'm not saying that won't be the case, that these "bad habits" aren't hard to break. But my god, in the big picture, they're babies for such a short amount of time, why wouldn't we want to spend our nights snuggled up with our little guy, so when he wakes up to nurse at 4am, just as the sun comes up and light begins to fill our bedroom, I can stroke his soft hair and stare at his perfect little eyelashes.
Because these moments truly are so fleeting, and although I often wished I had a nickle, god, even a penny, for every hour I spent trying to get Emily to sleep, I now can tuck her in, say goodnight, and I don't see her until Ian kisses her goodbye in before he goes to work at the god awful hour of 5:30 and she says, half asleep, "Bye Daddy, can I go back to sleep now?".
Because seriously, aren't we parents under enough stress as it is? I guess, aparently we're not, since most of us actually seek out information that make us feel inadequate. Emily had a playdate this week with Blue, who attends a montessori school. Her mom was telling me about an article she just read about parent stress, and how kids that attend an "educational" preschool actually preform worse than kids who don't. Oy.
The Return of the Emils
Yes, I'm back to being a parent of two again, after a very relaxing week with just Will. While I did miss Emily and the house just seemed so empty without her, it was so nice going a week without having to argue about hair brushing.
Now that we're just a few weeks away from her fifth birthday, she's so excited. Kindergarten is rapidly approaching, and since making friends doesn't come easily to Emily, I thought some role playing might help her get comfortable. We were taking a walk yesterday up to campus and I try it out. I tell her how to introduce herself, "Hi my name is Emily, what's your name?". So I tell her to pretend that she doens't know me and try it out. She says "I already know you, you're my mom". Hmmm, I remind her that we're pretending and try to ask her, to which she replies, "You know my name". Okay, I explain the whole thing again, and she just says "Oh, no thanks". Well at least I tried, she's just really not a conceptual person. I just feel so bad that she doesn't have many friends, it's kind of the nature of living in a college town, people move away. Last summer there was a pack of four and five year old girls running around. This year it's pretty much just Emily and a lot of older kids. And I'm really, really not sure about her playing with them.
Hopefully she will transition into kindergarten and make a few friends there. I just hope so much that she's not the odd-kid-out. Remember when you were in school and there was always one kid that nobody ever wanted to play with? My fear is that Emily's quirkyness will not translate well to the plaryground. Meanwhile I'm trying to walk the thin line between talking about kindergarten so she's excited and not talking about it so much that it stresses her out. Believe me, the last thing I want is Emily in tears, asking if she can just go back to her old school.
I tell you, people stress way too much over the baby years. Breast vs. Bottle, Vaccinations, "Sleeping through the night" - ha, just get over it and enjoy the years when your only worries are whether the baby is fed, rested, and (relatively) clean.
The short answer is that Will is definitely not "sleeping through the night", and I don't even have that expectation at this point. Will wakes up a few times during the night, makes some grunting noises, and then as I feed him in our nice warm bed, he drifts right back off to sleep (and so do I). Ian asked me one morning this week, "Did Will wake up last night?", and I thought about it and said "I guess he did, but I don't really remember". What I don't understand is the pressure about sleeping through the night. I think that maybe if all the parenting resources never mentioned the whole thing, we'd all assume whatever our baby was doing is normal without the expectation of anything else.
Okay, now for those of you who know me as the "nap nazi", you might be saying, "ha! Just wait until he's two and you're still rocking him to sleep just like Emily". And I'm not saying that won't be the case, that these "bad habits" aren't hard to break. But my god, in the big picture, they're babies for such a short amount of time, why wouldn't we want to spend our nights snuggled up with our little guy, so when he wakes up to nurse at 4am, just as the sun comes up and light begins to fill our bedroom, I can stroke his soft hair and stare at his perfect little eyelashes.
Because these moments truly are so fleeting, and although I often wished I had a nickle, god, even a penny, for every hour I spent trying to get Emily to sleep, I now can tuck her in, say goodnight, and I don't see her until Ian kisses her goodbye in before he goes to work at the god awful hour of 5:30 and she says, half asleep, "Bye Daddy, can I go back to sleep now?".
Because seriously, aren't we parents under enough stress as it is? I guess, aparently we're not, since most of us actually seek out information that make us feel inadequate. Emily had a playdate this week with Blue, who attends a montessori school. Her mom was telling me about an article she just read about parent stress, and how kids that attend an "educational" preschool actually preform worse than kids who don't. Oy.
The Return of the Emils
Yes, I'm back to being a parent of two again, after a very relaxing week with just Will. While I did miss Emily and the house just seemed so empty without her, it was so nice going a week without having to argue about hair brushing.
Now that we're just a few weeks away from her fifth birthday, she's so excited. Kindergarten is rapidly approaching, and since making friends doesn't come easily to Emily, I thought some role playing might help her get comfortable. We were taking a walk yesterday up to campus and I try it out. I tell her how to introduce herself, "Hi my name is Emily, what's your name?". So I tell her to pretend that she doens't know me and try it out. She says "I already know you, you're my mom". Hmmm, I remind her that we're pretending and try to ask her, to which she replies, "You know my name". Okay, I explain the whole thing again, and she just says "Oh, no thanks". Well at least I tried, she's just really not a conceptual person. I just feel so bad that she doesn't have many friends, it's kind of the nature of living in a college town, people move away. Last summer there was a pack of four and five year old girls running around. This year it's pretty much just Emily and a lot of older kids. And I'm really, really not sure about her playing with them.
Hopefully she will transition into kindergarten and make a few friends there. I just hope so much that she's not the odd-kid-out. Remember when you were in school and there was always one kid that nobody ever wanted to play with? My fear is that Emily's quirkyness will not translate well to the plaryground. Meanwhile I'm trying to walk the thin line between talking about kindergarten so she's excited and not talking about it so much that it stresses her out. Believe me, the last thing I want is Emily in tears, asking if she can just go back to her old school.
I tell you, people stress way too much over the baby years. Breast vs. Bottle, Vaccinations, "Sleeping through the night" - ha, just get over it and enjoy the years when your only worries are whether the baby is fed, rested, and (relatively) clean.
posted by Kate @ 8:28 PM
<< Home