On Raising Children

Annalise slept through the night three nights ago, and ever since then has been sleeping longer and longer stretches at night. Right now, it's 5:27 am and I've been writhing in pain for an hour, a problem most moms would die to have at 7.5 weeks postpartum. Blogging is my outlet for distracting myself from the pain in the meantime. Because, NEEDLES IN MY CHEST.

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A few days ago we had a favorite neighbor couple of ours, Lindy & Rob, come over to play games. They are both 75 years old. Rob reminds me of my Grandpa Ephraim (who I miss so much and think about all the time still) and Lindy is just a bubbling, unassuming, mothering type of figure. Samuel & I both love them. We were discussing parenthood as our babe's cries frequently interrupted our game of Pegs & Jokers (look it up, such a fun game that we only occasionally beat them at). Lindy was saying how, in her day, the "go-to book" for parenthood suggested taking the pacifier away at 3 months, and then the blanket away at 6 months, or something like that. Everyone did this with their kids. We laughed about how they used one of their child's blankets to move the fridge and then couldn't get it out. A scrap of blanket protruded from under the fridge, and they would often find their baby crawled up on the floor clinging to that last scrap of blanket with her thumb in her mouth asleep.

This book/theories were later proven to cause kids to become neurotic, although their kids turned out fine.

On a similar vein, my mother-in-law came to visit a week ago and we soon found out that the books I have read/theories on parenthood that I'm allowing to guide the millions of decisions I make every day with my baby are different than the way she did things.

"If the baby isn't sleeping well at night, keep her up during the day," she said.
My book says, "Sleep begets sleep, so help the baby to take good naps and she will sleep better at night."

"If the baby cries, nurse her/him." 
My book says, "Figure out why the baby is crying. Help them learn at an early age to put themselves to sleep by following a cycle of eat, awake time, sleep."

"Don't introduce a pacifier until later on or it could cause nipple confusion."
"Well I introduced a pacifier at 2 days and my baby was fine!" some people say.

"In my day, we nursed the baby to sleep when they needed to nap during the day or night."
"I break the nurse time up with the sleep time with a period of wake time."

Per recommendation of multiple friends, I read the book On Becoming Babywise when I was pregnant. It seems to be the "go-to book" of our generation (although I think it was actually written in the 80's?) Without going into too much detail, it's about understanding your baby's cries, and helping them establish a flexible schedule of eating-waking-sleeping so that they can sleep well and learn to self-soothe.

When I met with our lactation specialist early on, I mentioned I was reading Babywise and she responded with, "I hate Babywise" and then continued to label me as a "Type A personality." She then assumed I wanted to do all these calculations to determine how much food my baby needed, etc. Later on she told me she breastfed her babies until age 2 and co-slept. I don't want to cosleep because I'm pretty sure I would be paranoid about me rolling over the baby at night.

My point is, there are a billion ways to raise kids. And what works for some may not work for others. And we are all such different people that we will all mother differently. And that is fine. Luckily humans are resilient and most babies turn out fine. Or at least I'm hoping.

And what this means is to give each other (and ourselves) a break when it comes to mothering nuances. There are billion questions a day to answer as a mother, most of which I don't know the answer to, and to which the answer probably doesn't matter anyway.