A Day in the Life.

Someone asked me a while ago what our daily routine was like since Adelyn (thank God) sleeps from eight until six. I've also gotten a few e-mails asking similar questions.
And to that I say, "Ha! What's a daily routine?"
I'm all for giving and getting advice, but let me be clear, whatever Adelyn does or does not do during the day has nothing to do with me. I think Jason and I might have had a little to do with her nighttime sleeping habits. Thanks to great advice I received in the beginning, we always, always, kept it bright and loud during the day. From the first day home from the hospital. We put her in her own room when she was about a month old and started a pretty strict bedtime routine from there (bath every other day, baby massage with lavender lotion, Jason plays guitar or we sing, put her down and feed her the last ounce of her last bottle). Her angelic nighttime sleeping could have everything to do with our actions or it could just be the kind of baby she is. Whatever. I'm not second guessing it.
But during the day, that's an entirely different story.
I'm not really the kind of person or mother to buy books about parenting techniques and to structure my entire life around an intended "schedule" for an infant. And this might make my life a lot harder, because for all I know buying and using The Baby Whisperer or Baby Wise could change everything. But I don't have the energy or the patience for any of that, so I'm stuck with figuring it out on my own.
I did read a lot about Baby Wise in the beginning, and though I don't think I'll ever buy the book I think some of its tenets make a lot of sense. From what I understand it suggests a stringent bottle, play, nap schedule throughout the day, in three-hour intervals. And if that's all it is I guess the rest of the hundred-odd pages are filled with various ways of saying this, and again it reiterates the fact that mothers will buy anything and buy into anything if they think it will make their lives easier, myself usually included.
That's always been the idea I have for Adelyn's daytime routine. When she wakes up between six or seven, she eats her biggest bottle of the day (five, sometimes six, ounces). Then we play for an hour or so. Around eight she's usually tired again, so I put her in the swing. She'll then sleep for anywhere from an hour to two hours. Then it's another bottle.
And then the rest of the day is a jumble of spit-up, poop explosions, trying to get her to laugh and me trying to squeeze in brushing my teeth, writing, working, eating and being a human.
The only constants are in the morning and right before bed. The rest changes daily. The past week she's been in a funk of only eating an ounce or two at a time, and then begging for more an hour later. I called her doctor about this yesterday and she suggested putting rice cereal in her bottles to satiate her for longer periods of time. And I am, of course, nervous about this because I google and go on Baby Center way too often.
The picture above sort of says it all. The trash desperately needs to be taken out in the background, which is a perfect depiction of our daily lives. I took that this morning, after her first big bottle and before her first nap. And now that she's napping, I'm writing. This is the only consistency I can look forward to during the day. This beginning.
And it's not so much of an issue right now since she is my sole responsibility, but soon I will be--hopefully--working from home full-time, and if that job doesn't work out I will be going back to school for my master's full-time or finding another compatible job. At the moment her infrequent napping is only a nuisance as far as my ability to clean myself up and spend an hour doing freelance work or writing. When I start working, it will become an actual issue. One that will need a solution.
So for those that asked about the daily routine, this is your answer. Adelyn eats, sleeps, poops, and plays, and I just try desperately to keep up.

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Sleeping Through the Night.

Last night was the first night in weeks that Adelyn woke up before six a.m. We've all become accustomed to our little bedtime and morning routine, so much so that when it's thrown for a loop my body definitely notices. (Waking up at three a.m. felt almost impossible, even though I've done it more times than I can count the past three and a half months--well, really eleven if you count the non-stop nocturnal bathroom trips during pregnancy.)

At three a.m. on the dot I heard her on the monitor. But it wasn't the usual crying. All I heard was "Ehh." And then nothing. I tried to close my eyes again. Two minutes later, "Ehhhh. Eh."

So begrudgingly I dragged myself out of bed and into her nursery, where she was laying wide-awake. She took one look at me standing over her crib and the biggest smile I've seen yet spread across her face. I was tired, so so tired, but you can't resist that smile. I smiled too, broken sleep aside.

But the episode made me realize just how lucky we are that Adelyn is sleeping so well at night. I sort of had an inkling from the beginning that we'd be blessed with a baby who liked to sleep. And I've read that the patterns they show in the beginning, although they can vary from week to week, stay pretty consistent throughout childhood. And even with that fact under my belt I'm almost scared to write about how well she sleeps because then the baby gods will come down and screw it all up.

I don't know if what Jason and I do has anything to do with Adelyn's nighttime routine or if it's completely random. I do know, however, that I'm not about to go messing with what works.

Around eight every night, the ritual starts. Every other night she gets a bath. After that, I give her a pseudo-baby massage (I say pseudo because I have no idea what I'm doing, I just slather on some Johnson & Johnson Nighttime Lavender Lotion and say job-well-done). We then change her into a comfy onesie and get ready to feed her the last bottle of the night, usually about 4 ounces. A lot of the time we sing to her during this last feeding, usually we just talk. In the beginning I read to her every night and I vow to do this more, starting tonight, in fact. Once she's almost finished, we lay her down in the crib on her Nap Nanny. Our doctor recommended this ridiculously-expensive product after I told her Adelyn liked to sleep propped up. My mom graciously got it for us otherwise I never could have justified spending so much on a contoured foam sleep thing, but Adelyn loves it. And, as it turns out, the thing is huge and she'll be able to use it for a long time to come.

(We don't strap her in because I'm evil and because I have no idea where she's gonna go all swaddled up inside of there.)

Then we turn on her noise machine. We have the Cloud B Sleep Sheep and love it--it clips right on to her crib. At first we used the heartbeat sound, but that started to sound sort of creepy to me night after night, so now we've switched to the sounds of the ocean.

We lay her on top of her swaddling blanket, already in the crib on top of the Nap Nanny, because she used to hate the act of being swaddled and this minimizes the disruption. We started out with the Miracle Blanket. That thing started to become more of a hassle than it was worth, though. The whole process of getting her in it took too long and upset her too much. And once we switched to the Halo Sleep Sack with swaddle, she started sleeping longer than ever. It's so much easier to get her in, it's so, so much softer, and I feel like it keeps her a little bit more cozy. Again, I have no idea if her improved sleep is by chance or because it's a great product, but I'm not gonna second guess it.

Finally, we feed her the rest of the bottle. Adelyn hates pacifiers and looks at me like a crazy person when I try to give her one. But she usually polishes off another half an ounce in her crib, and then once her eyes are good and heavy Jason and I leave the room and shut the door.

Because Adelyn is going to bed earlier (between eight and nine), Jason and I get a few hours of alone time to, you know, watch and discuss Lost without screeching in the background.

I've said it before and I'll say it again--sleeping through the night is the newborn-parenting holy grail. That first time you get it, when suddenly your eyes shoot open and you realize you've been sleeping for hours uninterrupted, once you get over the initial paralyzing fear that your baby has not woken up, it's like winning the lottery.

A while ago some woman on Baby Center went on a rant about how she annoyed she is with all this "sleeping through the night" talk.

"Why is everyone so obsessed with their babies sleeping all night?" she asked us. "Didn't you know you were signing up for no sleep when you got pregnant?" And I say to her, and anyone else thinking something similar, we are obsessed with it because we are human and like to sleep.

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Maternal Alarm.

This morning my eyes shot open at six a.m. on the dot. I couldn't believe how amazing it was that Adelyn was still asleep--it had been more than six hours since she went to sleep. Immediately I started making lists of all the things I could do before she woke up--eat breakfast! shower! blowdry my hair!--and before my feet hit the floor the first "waaaaahs" were coming through on the monitor.

This internal alarm clock thing is pretty convenient, actually. It would definitely put Kramer's to shame. It often keeps me from being woken up right in the middle of a deep, delirium-inducing sleep (often, not always). A lactation consultant told me a while back that this was a breastfeeding thing, this instinctual alarm. And that was one of the thoughts that kept nagging me when I knew I was going to have to give it up, one of many nagging thoughts that you're not doing the right thing for your baby if you switch to formula.

But look! I formula feed, my milk supply has long dried up, and my body still hasn't lost it. My body still knows its the body of a mother's, despite how much I wish my tummy bulge would forget.

Speaking of formula--after another round of squirming at the bottle and hardly eating last night, Jason ran to the drugstore around 10 p.m. to get Similac Sensitive, pre-mixed, instead of what we'd been using, Similac Advanced in the powder form. A last ditch effort before going to the doctor.

She screamed the entire twenty minutes he was gone--that horrible, horrible scream when she's been fed, burped, changed, entertained, and rocked, and you know there is absolutely nothing else you can really do. He got back and we hurriedly got the bottle ready. The second we put it to her lips she latched on and didn't let go, didn't even stop to squirm once, for an entire five ounces. Then she slept from 11:30 to six this morning.

My biological alarm clock might still be working even though I gave up breastfeeding, but dear God this formula stuff is a hassle.

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The Patience Game.

There's a key to this whole beginning part that I think I've been missing. Or at least lacking.

Patience.

I don't have a lot of it. I never have. I'm an instant gratification sort of girl.

The hardest parts of my parenting day come at the very beginning and the very end of the day, when my patience is at its thinnest. In between, there's very little crying or mommy breakdowns. I feed her when she's hungry, play with her when she's awake, change her when she's wet, and put her down when she's sleepy. It's really not much more complicated than that.

First thing in the morning, though, I'm usually half-asleep. And since I've been sleeping until I hear her crying to eat, she's already hungry. So I have to listen to her crying for a good five to ten minutes while I make a bottle, warm the bottle, change her diaper, and try to slap myself out of exhaustion. (I know, especially by now, that crying is all she can do. I still haven't gotten used to the sound, though. I'm still not inured to it. It still makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong. I thought that would've gone away by now.) By the time the bottle gets to her mouth she's frustrated and gulps it down. Which means she usually spits up midway through, and an hour later, once she's been fed and burped and calmed, I invariably have formula all over my shirt, my hair.

The hardest part is at night, right before bed. I always get nervous around eight, anticipating what this bedtime ritual will include. And the harder I try to figure out a solution, the more we struggle.

At night, I'm tired. I'm ready for a break. So I probably don't burp her long enough; I'm anxious to get her quiet and in the crib. And rushing makes it worse--if you put her down too soon, before all the air is out of her little, confused tummy or before she's had a chance to really get sleepy, she's crying again in five minutes. That's when Jason and I start to scramble, trying to figure out what's missing. Is she still hungry? Does she need to burp again? Are you going to go warm another bottle or should I? Can I go lie down? Are you sure you don't mind if I go lie down?

Every night, it's the same struggle.

On the nights that I go to bed early and Jason finishes the last feeding by himself, everything seems to run more smoothly. I've said it to Jason and to myself countless times but I feel like he's just so much more patient than me. He always take a lot longer at nighttime, feeding her, rocking her, comforting her. When we do it together, I get stressed because I'm tired. I try to follow a routine I've concocted in my head rather than what she's demanding because I'm so anxious for it to work.

I don't know how it is that you learn patience. I listen to Adelyn wailing for a bottle, and I want to teach her that the bottle is coming, to just hold on. But I'm smart enough to know that I'm the one that has to teach it to her--every survival mechanism she was born with is telling her to wail for that food and to wail louder the longer it takes to get there.

In most ways it's getting so much easier by the day, this whole parenting thing. As she stays awake longer during the day, though, there's more pressure to move beyond the eat, sleep, poop equation, to start teaching her things when her eyes are open. To establish rituals that let her know the bottle is coming, that it's time to play and time to sleep.

The more I try to follow advice (from my doctor, from stupid books and parents who have been there before), the more stressed I get. When Jason puts her to bed, he just does it.

I'm impatient. Anxious for the day I can rationalize with her, to tell her that a warm bottle takes just a little longer than a cold one.

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Forgiveness and Stuff.

Adelyn and I made it through our first fight, and we're now getting along perfectly. I forgave her for her non-stop screeching the night before, the screeching that had me pulling out my hair and pleading, and she forgave me for not being able to figure out what was wrong.

Jason and I had some trouble getting her to sleep last night, too. We started the bedtime ritual at nine, and at midnight we were taking turns trying to solve the puzzle and stop the cries. Once she fell asleep, though, she slept for six and a half hours.

I still can't figure it out. There's no rhyme or reason to her night time ritual yet; the same thing that works one night infuriates her the next.

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Night Terror.

I think I bragged a little too much about our incredible sleeping baby. Adelyn spent the last week sleeping in consistent six, sometimes seven and a half hour stretches, and I let this fact be known. To everyone. People who asked and people who could care less.

Sleeping through the night is like the newborn holy grail. There are those women, the ones on BabyCenter or whatever forum, who just casually say, "Oh, she's just such a good sleeper. It just happened naturally." And when you've been up since three in the morning and have formula powder all over your pajama pants--the same ones you've been wearing for three days straight--or two huge wet spots on your shirt where your milk is leaking and you forgot to put in new breast pads, you want to take those women by the shoulders and shake them until that smug grin or emoticon wipes off their faces. Maybe this is just the sleep deprivation talking. But that's what I want to do to myself, two days ago, back when I thought I just might've figured the nighttime riddle out early.

We put her in her nursery for the first time on Saturday. I didn't think I'd be ready to put her in her own room this soon, but I realized I was barely sleeping, even when I was, since I could hear every one of her little grunts and snores. And her nursery is just steps away from our bedroom.

The first night we had her home, and I was in the depths of a sleep deprivation I hope I'll never find myself in again, we laid her in the Pack 'N Play and nervously tried to shut our eyes. I really couldn't, though. I tried to sleep on the side facing away from her, because otherwise I would have just stared at this strange, unpredictable creature I'd created snoring next to me. So, instead, I asked Jason every ten minutes if she was okay. Rather than turning over and looking for myself. If I looked, I'd want to stand up, go over to her, put my finger under her nose to make sure she was really breathing. I tortured Jason for at least two hours, making him sit up to look. And then, finally, the sun was up and neither of us had slept.

Six weeks later I've gotten oh-so-much better at just letting go of watching over her.

The first night she slept in her crib was that magical night where she slept for seven and a half hours, and I naively thought I'd stumbled upon that parenting holy grail so many blindly grasp at for months, even years.

I don't know what I was like when I was Adelyn's age; I do know, however, that I struggled for way too long with a need to sleep with my parents. I had an insanely active imagination as a kid, one where vindictive skeletons were rattling around in my kitchen and that distant beeping noise from the leaving room was a bomb a team of Nazis had assembled. I spent years trying to sleep by myself without concocting these wild fantasies. My parents tried everything; they bribed me to sleep through the night on my own, rationalized with me, explained the unlikelihood of Nazis in Middle Tennessee. I don't even remember when it stopped. Actually, I don't know if it ever did. I've just learned to better ignore the fear and focus on sleep.

I don't want Adelyn to go through the same thing. Not that it's preventable. The only thing my parents ever did wrong was encourage me to read and imagine as much as possible. But now that I have a child of my own and I get to try to fix whatever was wrong with my own childhood in her, I want to start early.

So at six weeks, she was going to sleep in her crib like a big girl.

Last night. Oh, last night. Jason and I gave her a bath (which she loves). We sang to her. Read to her. Swaddled her. Fed her one last time. She fell asleep at 11. At 2:30, I heard her crying over the monitor. I woke up, warmed her bottle, fed her with all the lights off. She ate four ounces and then burped like a champ. And then proceeded to cry for four more hours.

Nothing was working.

It got to the point I had hoped, prayed, it would never get to. When absolutely nothing was calming her and the screeching was starting to ricochet through my brain like nails down a chalkboard. I put her back in her crib. Turned off the lights. Shut the door. I walked outside to my back porch for exactly five minutes. I hope this doesn't qualify as "crying it out"; that really wasn't my intention. I just needed a minute--or five--to quiet myself.

When I went back upstairs, she was fast asleep.

Two hours later, I heard the crying again. I had just fallen back to sleep myself. She was fed and burped, and has now been asleep for three and a half hours.

I need a nap.

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