Friendly neighbor (FN): "How old is your little guy now?"
Andy: "Four months old."
FN: "Do you have him doing chores yet?"
Andy: "No, not yet..."
FN: "Well, don't wait too long. Parents nowadays treat their children as if they were made of gold..."
Andy: "Right. 'Spare the rod, spoil the child'..."
FN: "I'm not saying you should hit the kid."
Andy: "..." (clears throat)
FN: "I always told my son, you have two choices: you can either do the work now, or get punished and then do the work."
Just some friendly neighborhood banter.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Monday, May 11, 2015
Time to Be
Three minutes left until the blueberry muffins will be ready. Three minutes left to enjoy the surprising quiet of the back porch in my suburban home.
So quiet, each sound punctuates the evening air. The tinkling of the wind chime. The creak of the glider. The cackle of a neighbor.
Savor these three minutes.
Quiet is so precious to a mom, especially an introverted one, like me. Soon the timer will beep, beep, BEEP, and I will return to the everyday world of dishes, and finances, and decisions.
But all of that must wait. For now I will just soak in the silence. For the next three minutes, I will just be.
So quiet, each sound punctuates the evening air. The tinkling of the wind chime. The creak of the glider. The cackle of a neighbor.
Savor these three minutes.
Quiet is so precious to a mom, especially an introverted one, like me. Soon the timer will beep, beep, BEEP, and I will return to the everyday world of dishes, and finances, and decisions.
But all of that must wait. For now I will just soak in the silence. For the next three minutes, I will just be.
Labels:
Motherhood
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Do You Have What it Takes? My Experience with Attachment Parenting and What Works for Us
Everyone has an opinion about parenting. It
takes very little to provoke a passionate treatise on the benefits of, say,
co-sleeping and baby-wearing, or conversely, sleep training and promoting
independence from an early age. So, where do I fit in this conversation?
Before I had Mr. D, I agreed theoretically with attachment
parenting. I was ready, with Dr. Sears as my guide, to breastfeed exclusively
for as long as my child desired, to wear him in a sling most of the day, to
sleep with him at night. I found that attachment parenting seemed to jive with
what I thought of as “good parenting.” After all, didn’t I have a strong
attachment to my totally
breastfeeding, affectionate mom?
My Experience
Then, Mr. D was born. The labor was long and grueling, and
left me unable to walk unassisted for more than a week. I couldn’t get in and
out of bed without extreme effort, and relied on my husband to bring our baby
to nurse every couple hours.
Breastfeeding
And, oh, the nursing. I encountered (and, three months later still encounter) pretty much every breastfeeding challenge known to (wo)man. I tried, I really tried, to make enough milk. I nursed Mr. D round the clock, pumped when I wasn’t nursing, took way too many galactogogue supplements, sought the advice of several lactation consultants, attended La Leche League meetings, read websites and books. And it still wasn’t enough. Mr. D apparently required even more. After 48 hours without a wet diaper, we began the torturous road of supplementation with formula. That just about killed me. Here I was bending over backwards trying to make enough milk for my big little guy, and he needed more. Much more. I felt like a completely failure, as a woman and mother. Never mind that I had successfully labored and delivered a 9 lb, 13 oz healthy baby boy, with a head the size of Texas (okay, maybe not Texas…Utah). Postpartum hormones are cruel, and they don’t make allowances for failure, no matter how small.
Baby-wearing and Co-Sleeping
At first, Mr. D loved the Ergo baby carrier. He only seemed willing to sleep if he was touching one of us. So, the “co-sleeper” bassinet was used as nursing pillow storage for the first few weeks, while Mr. D slept glued to my side. That all changed during our trip to Hawaii when he was 6 weeks old. One night, as Mr. D fussed unhappily next to me in bed, Andy suggested that I move him more to the middle of the bed, so he wasn’t touching either of us. Almost immediately, his crying ceased. When we got home, he suddenly decided that he’d had enough baby-wearing time, thank you very much. We'd put him in the Ergo, and he'd arch his back and scream. As soon as we put him on the floor, he'd wriggle with delight. He’d discovered that having room to fully extend his body was much more exciting than skin-to-skin snuggling.
This revelation prompted us to try out the co-sleeper
bassinet again. He slept better than ever. Then we were so bold to move the
bassinet to his own room. He began to sleep even longer (which meant that we
were, too, thank God!).
We seemed to be moving more and more away from “attachment
parenting” to the “sleep training” camp. I began to realize, with more and more
clarity, how divided these two philosophies are. Parents we knew swore by Dr.
Sears and exclusive breastfeeding, and others swore by Dr. Ferber and
supplementing with formula if necessary…no big deal. But where did we fall?
With each side warring for our allegiance, I found myself fighting against both
simultaneously. I knew now that
all-out attachment parenting was not going to work for us, at least this time, with
this child. But I didn’t feel like I could impose my schedule upon Mr. D (You’re hungry again? Sorry, bud, but you
have to wait another hour. Don’t want to get off schedule!).
Conclusion
Three months in, my parenting philosophy can be summed up by two principles: Follow the child and Make decisions for the best of the entire family. Follow the child, a Montessori principle, allows us some flexibility in our child-rearing. It means that we adjust to our child’s current needs. At first, Mr. D needed to be close to us while sleeping, and we accommodated that need by co-sleeping with him. We all slept better that way. But we couldn’t just sit back and say, “Great, we’ve figured out sleep for Mr. D. Our job is done!” We had to pay attention to what he was telling us. Full credit goes to Andy for figuring out when co-sleeping wasn’t working anymore. Mr. D needed space. So we gave it to him at night, and allowed him playtime on the floor for him to move and groove to his heart’s content. We all slept even better, and Mr. D was much happier during the day.
Follow the child
also meant that I had to accept that Mr. D needed more food than I could
naturally give him. Supplementing with formula has been hard for me. For Mr. D, it has transformed
him from a fussy, cranky baby into a cooing, contented one.
Which leads to the second principle: Make decisions for the best of the entire family. When I was desperately trying to make exclusive nursing
work, I wasn’t doing much of anything else…including sleep. That’s one of the
ironies of milk production: you are supposed to nurse on demand, pump
often, and somehow eat and sleep well. With Mr. D, “on demand” meant I was
glued to the couch most of the day trying to fill a black hole of a stomach. Supplementing
has given me the freedom to continue living, and has increased the quality of
my days. I now have the energy to actually play with my son. I’m not just
frantically trying to feed him enough so I can please,
oh, please take a nap. Since I’m sleeping more at night, it’s not a big
deal if I don’t sleep during the day. And having Mr. D sleep in his room at
night means that I don’t keep Andy up at night while I’m nursing. I don’t pretend that this is the
best “parenting philosophy” for everyone. But, for us, this is the best
parenting philosophy for this child
and at this time.
So often, we judge other parents with different parenting philosophies (Don’t you know that one drop of formula will reduce the life expectancy
of your child? or Are you seriously
going to let your child sleep in the same bed with you? What if you
accidentally smother him?). What if we channeled all of that critical energy into trying to be the best parents possible for the children God gave us? I may not "have what it takes" to be an attachment parent this time around. But I do have what it takes to be the
best mom and wife I can be. And that is a goal worth pursuing.
Labels:
attachment parenting,
family,
lessons,
Motherhood
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