High Calibre Trouble-Makers

If you are yet to know the joys of parenthood and have asked yourself what all the fuss is about and if it's really as hard as parents make out, I've been thinking about the little things you may not have considered.

Tonight as I was getting the kids ready for bed I walked into the bathroom to discover my fancy makeup brush had been dipped into a pot of hair gel and then shoved back into my makeup bag so that everything was covered in a sticky mess. It's those awkward unexpected surprises that makes the more mundane tasks, such as getting the kids in their beds washed and fed, so much more exciting and demanding.

So you have to change your baby's diaper when you are out and about, not too bad you might think. You find a changing table, undress your darling child, and then discover their poop has squirted out of the back of the diaper and covered them all the way up to their shoulders. As you try to stay calm and start wiping and delicately removing the offending articles of clothing, your child, feeling the cool air on their nether regions, proceeds to pee, washing the poop, the wipes and the clothing into a pool of almost unimaginable poopy mayhem. I'm not making this stuff up.

Perhaps while you are waiting to pick your other half up from work, you allow your small children to play in the car to relieve their boredom. If they find your spare change stash and slot it into your cassette deck, the whole thing might need to be replaced. Replacing a fitted stereo is EXTREMELY expensive. It's no longer picking up your husband, it's spending hours trying to get the pennies out in new and imaginative ways, days without the car and never being able to leave any loose change in your car ever again.

Imagine a long haul flight with a child...then imagine there are actually two children...now please imagine you are traveling alone with them. Next I want you to imagine that both of them, after many many hours have finally fallen fast asleep in your lap, aww..little angels, how nice. Now...I want you to imagine that one of them opens her eyes, and a spilt second later with no warning, vomits at least a liter of very foul-smelling liquid into your lap. Imagine, if you will, that you are wearing a dress and that the dress catches the sick like a bowl between your legs. The sick is also seeping in its warm stealthy way around your backside and is soaking into your underwear. A member of the cabin crew passes you a handful of paper towels with a very troubled and sympathetic look on his face. Your children are both crying. You have to get off the plane with all your stuff, a very sick child, and only half an outfit on, having had no choice but to take the dress off, rinse the rest of your clothes off whilst wearing them in that tiny airplane sink, and put your cardigan on backwards to hide the fact that you are not wearing a top.

You move house, you set up your children with something to do and install your beloved cat in one of the bedrooms, you set up her litter box, her food and her water. When your beautiful, relatively well-behaved 3.5 year old girl asks if she can keep the cat company, you of course say yes. When you go to check on her, you discover she has mixed the kitty litter into the water bowl making a slippery cement which she has then thoroughly pasted all over a chest of drawers, that stuff is extraordinarily hard to clean up. Moving house isn't just moving house when you do it with kids.

So when you see a friend frazzled from the demands of parenthood and wonder if looking after a cute little baby is really that hard, after all... you miss out on sleep all the time when you go out at night, bear in mind she may have had to change at the last minute because her baby spit up over her shoulder, it may have run down the back of her top, if she was particularly unlucky, it could have made it's way into her underwear requiring she change every item of clothing except her socks. She may have put her shoes on only to discover food, sand, mud or soap in them. Her babies diaper may have leaked on the way soaking the carseat, she may have had to return home if she didn't have enough changes of clothes and had to line the seat with a plastic bag till she has a chance to launder the seat cover. Washing a carseat cover is very tedious and time-consuming INDEED.

Parents reading this, I would LOVE to hear about the ridiculous messy situations you have had inflicted on you, it will make me feel less alone ;-)

Oh and FYI, even when none of this stuff happens, it's all-consuming and bloody exhausting, but you do get the privilege of helping these incredible beings achieve their potential, that is the most rewarding and terrifying thing of all.

Go to Sleep my Baby

I have been avoiding writing this blog post. I want to write it but even as I sit down to begin I feel traumatized by the sleep deprivation I suffered for the first four and a half years as a parent.

When we had our son, 26 months after we had our daughter, I was working on the illogical and highly optimistic assumption that we couldn’t possibly be unlucky with sleep again, that just wouldn’t be fair. Obviously the world is an extremely unfair place and we are pretty damn lucky in almost every aspect of our lives. When you are averaging about 2.5 or 3 hours broken sleep a night it is hard to remember how lucky you are, or in fact what your child’s birthday is or what your husband looks like.

For those four and a half years between my first child being born and my second child turning 2 and a half, sleep deprivation affected my life in plenty of unforeseen ways. I would freeze when someone asked me what I had done the day before completely unable to remember. I never really felt tired, just like I was in another dimension, removed slightly from reality and certainly not “myself”. I would break things and lose things but what bothered me the most was that I lost my sense of humor and to a large extent my ability to socialize with anyone other than close friends. I remember blankly staring at other moms during playdates wanting to make the effort to be upbeat and chatty but not being able to think of a single thing to say.

I’d like to give some background to the circumstances surrounding our children’s arrivals as I think the stories are definitely linked to my choices when it comes to helping my children to go to sleep at night. It may be a little traumatic to read, if you don’t feel up to it, skip a few paragraphs.

Our start as parents, as I have mentioned before, was rocky. Our daughter had to have surgery at 48 hours old and nobody ever reassured us that she would be OK, the day she was released from hospital at just under 4 weeks old with a feeding tube still attached to her tummy was the first indication we really had that she was going to make a recovery. Still to this day at 5.5 years old nobody has ever told us that she will not have any further problems or that she will be OK. It is plainly obvious to us that her problems are all behind us, she is a perfectly normal well functioning little girl with no serious medical issues. It wouldn’t have hurt for someone to put a hand on our shoulders and tell us “hey you know what, we’ve seen this before, she’s doing really well, I can’t make you any promises but I really expect she is going to do just fine”.  What we got was more than we ever dreamed of so I should definitely not be complaining. For a couple of years after she was born it was hard to understand how we could be so lucky.  I try to remind myself regularly of just how lucky we are, it’s easy to forget on those days when the challenges of parenting leave you frustrated, confused and tired.

When we were expecting our second child I had many scans to make sure our baby would have none of the problems our daughter experienced at birth. Statistically it was more likely he would have the same birth defect and statistically it is more likely our daughter will have a child with that birth defect. Something I’m not looking forward to explaining to her, but hey, at least she’s here, at least she should be able to have children should she choose to.  When our son was born by a scheduled repeat c section on a predetermined morning in December it was a very different experience than my first delivery. With my first child I was in labor for 45 hours and finally wheeled into surgery vomiting and in the firm belief I was dying,  that was before we found out our baby was ill, I shall hold on to that story a little longer.

As with my illogical theory on bad sleepers and not being unlucky twice, I also believed that there was no way my second baby could be born with a medical issue because that wouldn’t be fair. We were reassured by all the tests we’d had but I’d actually had extensive scans in my first pregnancy that never picked up any abnormality. When he was shown to me in the operating room I was overcome with the relief of finally meeting my boy and him being so healthy and strong. What I couldn’t hear in my euphoria was his barking rasping breathing. I’ve had it described to me by husband who was there but I was completely unaware of it, I guess I just believed he was healthy. They made light of taking him to be checked out in the NICU as if it really wasn’t a big deal but he ended up being in there for 10 days. Nobody has ever come up with a definite reason for his breathing problems at birth, it could have been pneumonia, it could have just been that his lungs were immature. The most terrifying part of his stay in hospital for me was how slow his progress was. When our daughter was so terribly sick after her surgery, her body swollen up to twice its width, she still made unbelievably fast progress despite the odd setback.  The surgeon who has been performing these operations her whole life told us our daughter was the best outcome and quickest recovery she has ever had. On Christmas eve 2007 I went to visit our little baby boy in the hospital and was so exasperated by how his recovery was crawling along so slowly it occurred to me for the first time that he really might not make it. This quickly turned into despair, and I became more and more convinced he was going to die. Then on Christmas day he started to improve slowly, I went to see him twice before and after dinner. A few short days after Christmas he was fully recovered and released from hospital. Incredible. Never ever underestimate a little baby’s resiliency; they are so much stronger than they look.

So all that background leads up to me explaining that my kids both woke up, from being a couple of months old, every 20 minutes to every hour and a half all through the night, every single night and would never nap for more than 20 minutes. For my daughter this stopped around 2 years old and for my son a few months later. With my first child, I had the dubious luxury of being able to control her sleeping environment. I bought several books that I read over and over, I tried everything. I tried leaving her to cry it out once, I lasted 20 minutes and then went in to check on her and the sight of her tearstained face sitting up in her crib put me off forever. I still feel guilty 5 years on. Suffice to say I am indeed a MAJOR soft touch, so sue me. I would always think back to my daughter’s first month when she slept alone in the hospital every night. With my son the similar sleeping patterns led me to eventually let him cry, but after 90 seconds, that’s seconds not minutes, he vomited. It turns out, and it is still true to this day, that if he gets too upset he will throw up, copiously, all over the place. So that was that. I went back to trying all these different techniques I had read about really to no avail. I think since my children have matured into their sleeping, my endless sleep research has finally benefitted us, but not at first. Now they go to sleep at 7.30 most nights and wake at 7am, regular as clockwork, and we do not hear from them in between unless they are unwell. Now here comes my finest most “groundbreaking” piece of advice learned from many many hours of research and trial and error: PUT THE BOOK DOWN, CHILL THE HELL OUT, YOU CANT FORCE THEM TO SLEEP, IT WILL BE OK, YOU’LL MAKE IT THROUGHT THIS, ASK FOR HELP. I do wish someone had told me this, although I don’t suppose I would have listened, how could you not try when you are getting so little sleep. I was miserable. Those books convinced me that I could change the situation if only I would follow the steps correctly. But it never worked, so I blamed myself for not doing it properly. It makes you wonder, there are a lot of people making a lot of money from desperate mothers just like me. Making us feel like it’s our fault. It’s not your fault. A baby is a person too, you can’t control her, you can only guide her and hope she does what you want. And by the way, nothing lasts forever, and women are strong as Hell when we need to be.

As an afterthought, anyone else who wants to know if we will try for #3, please see above.

Weaning from breastfeeding

I’m not for or against weaning a baby from breastfeeding. It’s such a personal thing to each mother and each child. With my two children my experiences were polar opposites. Weaning my son was not an issue as he stopped way before I was ready at 9 months old. He made his opinion pretty clear by biting me every time I came near him with a boob (I’m sorry did I say that biting has not been an issue in our family in that earlier post?).

My daughter who is the oldest was a completely different story. Born with a birth defect which necessitated major surgery at 48 hours old and a month-long stay in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), we didn’t get an early start to breastfeeding. I faithfully pumped for her and the nurses gave her breast milk through a tube that went directly through her tummy to her stomach. It helped to be able to do this small thing for her when I was otherwise completely unable to ease her pain or help her grow and heal. When I was finally able to nurse her it was rough for a couple of weeks as she was used to a bottle but with the help of some very sweet and kind experts we finally got there. Nursing became her absolute favorite thing to do and who was I to deny my baby that close comfort she hadn’t been able to have for her first month. There were many days in the NICU  we had not even been able to touch her and we would just sit for hours watching her sleep.

Fast forward eighteen months, we have moved to Los Angeles from New York City and my daughter is still incredibly attached to nursing. I would have carried on longer but for a couple of other circumstances. The month before I had miscarried an early pregnancy and I had just found out I was expecting again. My doctor my mother and my darling husband were all very concerned about the potential for another miscarriage. Although I didn’t 100% buy the notion I could cause another miscarriage by breastfeeding, with all that concern I felt that weaning my 19 month old was the right decision.

I was very concerned about causing my young daughter emotional upset as she took so much comfort from nursing and I was determined to find a gentle way to do it. I started by tackling daytime feeding as that seemed to do be the most sensible place to start. I came up with a time, say 5 minutes, and I would let her nurse whilst watching the clock. Then I would take her off. If she cried I would let her nurse again but for only 2 seconds and then take her off again. At first it would take a good few 2-second feeds before she would finally give up but it happened. It was annoying to her so she would stop without complaint. She quickly learnt it wasn’t worth arguing about the 2 second feeds as I would just keep repeating the same pattern. Within days I was able to cut the 5-minute nursing periods gradually down to 10 seconds. Before I knew it I was only nursing at nap time and bedtime. Nursing before she fell asleep took a little longer but I repeated the same pattern, slowly slowly reducing the time. I had just gone through a very tough couple of months teaching her to fall asleep without nursing so that she would be able to sleep better during the night so I had already laid the foundation.

I miss those quiet times with my little angel who now barely sits still long enough to hug but I’m pleased we came through it none the worse for wear and now she has that little brother to play with.

As far as teaching her to fall asleep without nursing is concerned, there was no easy or quick way to do this. Every night I would cuddle her when she got up and lie her back down in her crib…over and over and over again, until weeks later it finally stuck.

Biting...ouch

A few evenings ago I was busy tidying the kids’ room for bedtime whilst they played together in the front of our apartment in their heady after-bath excitement. Out of the contented chatter I could barely hear suddenly came the most sickening scream. I thought my 3 year-old had trapped a finger or otherwise gravely injured himself so I dropped what I was doing and sprinted to where the kids were playing. To my surprise it was my 5 year-old daughter screaming and in such agony but I couldn’t work out why. Eventually when she had collected herself enough to make herself understood she showed me her back where my son had sunk his teeth into her. Ouch, it looked so painful. I received the odd nip from my children when they were teething babies so I know how painful it can be but thankfully until this point biting hadn’t really been an issue for us.

I recently read an amazing book: Siblings Without Rivalry: How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. A friend sent the book to me, she had finished with it and wanted to pass on the love. Well, to date I have read it twice and I am sure I will read it again soon as I want every bit of information to remain in my poor forgetful brain.

I saw the situation in front of me as a very important learning experience for all three of us. I realized my response to what happened might be vitally important. I quickly dragged to the forefront of my brain what I had learnt in Faber and Mazlish’s book and went first to my poor daughter. My son tried to come in for a cuddle but I gently pushed him away without looking at him and hugged my daughter and talked to her about how much the bite must hurt and how I imagine she had also had her feelings hurt. We talked about how her brother needed to find another way of getting her attention without addressing him directly. I carried her to the sofa where I inspected the bite, gave her a colorful bandage and helped her to put her pajamas on. Only when she was settled did I turn my attention to my son. He was sad and shocked. I believe he has no idea, as it should be, how much it hurts to be bitten. I explained to him how very much he had hurt his sister and asked him to apologize, which he willingly did. Then I kindly told him he would be going to bed now before his sister and with no story. He protested a little but quickly settled down. Then I had time to comfort my daughter alone and she was feeling important and cared for by the time she went to bed.

My son explained to me that he had been trying to talk to his sister and she was ignoring him and that is why he bit her. I was pleased he was able to articulate what had happened and it gave me the opportunity to talk to him without anger about finding another way to get her attention. To date the situation has not reoccurred.  I was so relieved to have been able to find a way to deal with a horrible situation without relying on anger and raised voices.

Faber, A. and Mazlish, E. (1987). Siblings Without Rivalry: How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

hi thanks for reading...

I want to write about my parenting experiences, the ups and the downs, in a non-judgemental way that informs, supports and amuses parents and non-parents alike. This is NOT advice!