Little House in the Big, Advanced City

Like most of you, reading before bed is an important part of our sleep routines. I have been reading to my children since they were born; well I like to think that but honestly there were some gaps.  Some nights, bedtime just has to happen a lot faster; other nights a game or some other project takes precedence.  When I was in my first trimesters, I would pass out while reading and have to give up mid book due to nausea.  All in all though, we do a pretty good job reading to our children.  

We had to wait about 20 months for Clara because she was always chewing on books or pushing the book away eager to watch her brother instead.  Loewy was ready for books early on like her brother.  Books have for the most part been a peaceful facet of our routine.  We of course went through the arguments about how many and which ones and at other times had to hide certain books due to scary content or images.  You honestly never know what is going to freak a child out until it is too late.  

My husband and I also like and have patience for different books.  Over the summer, Graham and Alistair read Call of the Wild, and now Alistair is convinced that Santa will bring him his very own Buck.  I just couldn't get into it, preferring Ramona - an oeuvre that Graham couldn't really embrace.  You see, it evens out.

However we have finally found a book that is magical and a series that should prove to be just the thing for our little reader, Clara.  Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder is the perfect mixture of story and information to appease us all.  Alistair, now reading on his own, fades in and out, listening sometimes.  Laura Ingalls Wilder's book is perfect because it reaches every reader in this family.  I loved these books as a girl, and now as a grown up have learned so much.  Below is a list of the skills I have recently acquired thanks to reading this book to Clara before bed, and of course being a sleep dork I especially enjoyed 19th century family sleep culture:

Thanks to Little House in the Big Woods, I now know how to:

1. Feel safe in my bed even though there are wolves outside, or in my case annoying, tick infested, suburban deer.

2. Butcher a pig, make a ball for my children with the bladder, and offer my favorite child the pig's tail.

3.  Stock a larder and pantry for winter.

4.  Escape a panther.

5. Make bullets.

6. Make cheese, candy, and more cheese.

7. Line dance.

8. Make a cameo pin out of wax.

9. Deal with multiple bee stings on a young child.

As for 19th Century, family sleep culture.  Here is what worked for them, maybe we can make it work for us in the 21st century:

1.  Make your house very cold, using just a dying fire and its embers to warm your room(s).  It helps if your house is a cabin with a sleeping loft.

2. Have your dog, sleeping by the dying fire, to protect you from the wild animals outside.

3.  Did I mention the two 19th c. ways to keep your 19th c. children sleeping in their beds? very, very cold floors, a very, very cold trip to parents bed and the threat of wild animals.

4. When you attend a party be it a 19th c. maple sugaring party or a 21st. c. office party, bring all your babies, swaddle them tight, and then place them all in one bed together, to fall asleep while the fiddle plays.

5.  Speaking of fiddles, have one member of your family play a fiddle to help your children fall asleep.  It works like a charm for Laura and her sisters.

Stay tuned for future posts, as I promise to try to connect the dots between old-fashioned sleep and today's sleep culture.  Laura and her family have a lot to teach us beyond making our own butter.

knowing when (and how) to ask for help

In my line of work, I keep meeting parents who say either, "where were you 5 years ago", "I should have called you 3 months ago", and "I thought I could go it alone".  This piece is not a big I TOLD YOU SO nor is it a plug for my business.  Rather I am asking my faithful and few readers to consider why we wrap ourselves up with hard work and suffering when we could look for support.  And by support, I mean a glass of wine with a friend, an honest conversation with a doctor, or a sit down brain storming session with a partner to ask for help.  

I am guilty in each of the above situations - all of the time.  Rather than have a mature conversation with my husband, I will act angry and put upon, hoping that almost by osmosis he will know I need help and somehow read my mind and give me exactly what I want and need.  When I go to the doctor, I always say, "I'm fine", when sometimes I am far from fine.  Certainly as a parent, I have tuned my spirit to suffer first and enjoy later.  When my son was an infant, I just assumed that sleeplessness was normal and would always be a state of being for our entire family.  Three years later, my daughter needed me and only me for all bedtimes because I never took a moment to say, "help, you do this, I need a break."  Any of my friends would tell you that I am very good at bringing up and complaining about my problems.  However it takes a lot for me to reveal that I am not just complaining and that yes, I actually could use a little assistance.

How does this connect to sleep and sleeplessness for parents and families?  

I am asking you to pause for a moment and make a decision for the good of the family.  This does not mean hire me (or maybe it does).  Rather, decide to deal with your suffering constructively - tell your pediatrician and your ob what is going on, actually truly happening.  Call a friend and say I need you to talk and to ... babysit, cook, fold laundry, whatever it is.  Trust me, they will say YES.  During a power outage recently (thanks Hurricane Irene), my friend did all of my laundry, all of it, and she has two boys to take care of, plus a husband, a job, cats, etc.  In another example (there have been quite a few lately), even with the power back on, my life was growing more and more busy with not enough time to take care of my responsibilities.  After a few days of mucking about and being mean to my husband and probably my children, I reached out to another parent in my school community and asked her for some help.  She said, YES.  Here is the thing; people like to help each other, it is our nature.  

To that end, I must mention my incredible experience speaking to the moms at babybites Westchester yesterday afternoon in Larchmont.  I commend these women because they were at lunch with their babies, looking great, and helping each other.  They asked such good questions of me.  However I was even more impressed by their willingness to help each other.  They listened to each other so attentively and so sensitively; it made me feel confident and lucky to be in a place personally and professionally where I can ask for help and get it.  That feels great.

My greatest lesson as a parent

is not a lesson rather it is a list of what I am not good at.  I'll be honest; I am good at sleep, really good at sleep.  Almost to a fault, I know when they should go to bed and what should not happen before they go to bed.  Take the crazy game of peek-a-boo with a giant llbean box right before Loewy's bedtime last week.... NOT a good idea.  I found her jumping in her crib with her shirt off screaming, "belly, belly, belly," 20 minutes after she went to bed.  Or perhaps letting my son watch the first Harry Potter movie just so I could eat dinner with my parents and not be disturbed.  He ended up freaked out and in my bed.  Once he was alseep though, I watched True Blood on my ipad - luckily he didn't wake up during.  That would have really freaked him out.   

Now on to what I am not good at.  By the way, this list became especially evident the last few weeks as I 'vacation' with my children and extended family in Rhode Island.  It is also very vacation-centric, and I am confident that my at home 'not good at' list would be long too and parallel much of what is revealed here.  Finally, before I get to the list, can we parents just make it clear that a vacation with young children is not a vacation in the old, pre-kids sense of the word, at least in my world, it is simply a trip.  Anyway, on to the list:

1. Putting on sun screen evenly.  Alistair is very tan, and Clara has kind of a tie-dye look to her back.  Loewy is just working the farmer's tan.  I just scheduled a trip to a new dermatologist to pay my dues in the fall.  At least my kids didn't get burned.

2.  Quiet, calm, gastronomically interesting meals.  Even after farm camp, Clara thinks that eggplants deliver eggs.  If I do stray from the usual, I get wild protest and screams and cries of indignation.  When we do eat, we are loud, messy, barbaric and speak mostly about three subjects ... 1)bribes to eat veggies or something new, 2)threats to eat veggies or something new, and finally 3)bathroom stories and the like.

3.  Being loving and open to mess.  Even as my husband plays cards or backgammon with the children, all I can think about is picking the cards/game up and putting it away.

4.  Choosing appropriate music - too much to say on this one - let's just say that Loewy screams for Beiber and Ke$ha (did I spell that right), and Clara dances, ummm, movingly to Katy Perry.

5. Cleaning the sand of my children before they get in the bath.  I deserve future plumbing problems, I really do.  

6.  Rainy days, we have handled them with trips to the Providence Children's museum, yet somehow we can get there and back and have lunch at Loui's (a nod to our college days) all before 12:30 pm.  Not Fair!

7.  Keeping track of my children - Alistair has been roving our small beach town, and so far he has made it home every time, but I don't always know where he is, and he is 7.

I'll stop here.  And remind myself that my clients have children that are sleeping, finally, and that is a beautiful and magical thing!

oh yeah, that other parent

Well Graham, you deserve it, your 'shout out'.  I have been working on this business for almost a year and these blogs for a little more than 6 months, and you keep saying, what about me?  Don't I get a mention or at least a photo credit?  He, kind readers, is the family photographer.  He appears in very few family pictures (except when I am pregnant in which case I am mysteriously m.i.a. in pictures - for obvious and big reasons) and I always feel a little guilty when I down load them off of the camera.  Our recent trip to Fire Island, you would think that I was some awesome single mom, he's nowhere to be found in photographic evidence.

This post is dedicated to the partners - the partners who do not have milk dripping, spraying, need I say more?, out of their bodies.  Like sweet Graham who kept asking how can I help as I cried, post partum and swollen?  Who endured my 'you do nothing' rants at the end of a long day; a day that he spent on endless, painful conference calls.  

The past few months for me have been a wake up call.  Partners deserve their name.  I have met with a fair number of sleepless families, meeting dads and moms who want nothing more than to chip in and help.  I have learned too over the past few months that I have been very busy that being a good partner can simply mean unloading the dishwasher or changing a gross diaper.  I feel like I went into parenting with the belief that I would do a lot of work, and Graham better do his share.  Should parenting be a punishment between partners?  Sometimes that is what it might feel like.  Isn't having an angry newly minted 5-year old stomp on your foot punishment enough; why do we need to extend the pain between ourselves?

In honor of my partner, Graham, I invite you nursing, often sleep deprived and tortured, mothers to think of ways your partner can be, well, you guessed it, a partner.  

So what is my partner doing right now?  He's at yoga leaving me to bathe all 3 kids and put them down for the night, post swim birthday party.  Am I bitter, ummmmm, yes of course, but he did leave a crazy work day to swim with kids and serve chicken nuggets.  Don't worry, it will even out, believe me.

sometimes I just need to forget

that I am a sleep coach.  As I write this, my almost 2-year old is 25 minutes past her bedtime, practicing drums with her father.  Not just baby bongos - full on drum kit, like you might see in a Poison or GnR video (my husband just heard this and has insisted I switch it to Led Zeppelin or even ACDC).  My 7 year old is exhausted, crazy tired, from his long week at camp and rather than winding down from his week is at his friend's house watching a scary movie.  My almost 5-year old is catching up on her beloved girl shows because her brother is away, and yes ... she had a brownie after dinner.

Wow, I sound like a sleep coach equivalent of a dermatologist who bakes in the sun or a nutritionist in line at Mickey D's.

Like all parents and all professionals, I pride myself on or rather don't judge myself for being human.  Most of the time, my children are lovely sleepers and respectful of bedtime and routines.  It is nice to cut loose from time to time, enjoy life, and then when ready return to the sanctity and sanity of routines and rhythms.  I also like to forgive myself and sometimes even forgive my children for being human - messing up and getting back on track.  I have found myself sharing with clients my new sleep maxim - what happens on vacation stays on vacation.

So on this July 1st, I reach out to all of you big sleepers and little sleepers, happy sleepers and troubled sleepers ... enjoy your summer, find a moment to break the rules, and when ready return to the safety of structure and predictability, knowing that you had a good time on 'vacation'.  I promise, I won't tell.