I think we finally beat the 2-6 week level of the parenting video game… The 6-week growth spurt boss is behind us, and our little Mo is ready to start the 6-12 week level.

Mo slept for 9 hours on Saturday night. Unfortunately, her 9 hours started at 7:30 p.m., so I still had to get up at 4 a.m. She did 8 hours last night, also starting at 7:30. How do I start the timer at 11 pm? We’re going to try waking her up to eat at 10:30 today, but based on past experiences, that probably won’t do the trick. We’ll see.

Her naps have also improved. Some things that I think have contributed to less crying at naptime:

I’m no longer waking her up to eat. She seems to be on her own 3 to 3-1/2 hour schedule anyway, so there’s no need to wake her up.

I’m not being such a schedule nazi about her naptime. I wait until she is basically asleep and then move her to her crib. She wakes up, but has been able to soothe herself back to sleep after about 5 minutes of crying. No more forcing her to lay in the crib until she’s asleep.

White noise machine. It has some kind of hypnotic hold over her.

Unswaddling one arm. She was getting soooo mad about being swaddled, but her arms still flail a LOT when she sleeps. We compromised with one arm out. Only for naps. We’re not messing with that 8-9 hour nighttime sleep. yet.

I’m sure I’m jynxing myself, and she won’t sleep at all tomorrow, but the last two days have been pretty good. I think I’ll probably keep her!

and so is this week six growth spurt…

So much for the schedule. Mo has been eating every 2 to 2-1/2 hours, and she’ll only eat a few ounces at a time. After that she screams and whines, even though i can tell she’s still hungry. She napped for an hour this morning but spent the rest of the day fussing and crying.

Oh well.. I knew the last few day were too good to last. Let’s hope she’s back to her old self soon so I can resume my regularly scheduled quiet reading and pedicure time.

As soon as I published that last post, Mo started crying and she is refusing to take her evening nap. Obviously that would happen. So now she’s sitting in her bouncy chair with me on the couch, hangin’ out. Hopefully falling asleep.

In today’s episode of “Being a Stay at Home Mom is the Hardest Work There Is,” I gave myself a pedicure and read a book while sitting outside in the sun.

I was reading a message board for my cohort on What to Expect When You’re Expecting and realized just how lucky I am to have an easy baby. While a lot of the women on that board are posting about how they haven’t showered in weeks and they don’t even have time to poop and what’s a toothbrush again?… I have showered every day of my maternity leave, during Mo’s morning nap. I’ve read 3 books, done countless loads of laundry and even started cooking some rather elaborate dinners.

Yesterday, after a week of fighting Mo over naps, she finally seemed to get it and started going to sleep on her own within a few minutes of getting put in her crib. Even though I spent so much time worrying about getting her to do it, when she finally started doing it, I still felt like maybe something was wrong with her. That’s my life now — worryworryworry. If it’s not one thing it’s another.

I found this quote today that kind of spoke to me: “That feeling of being left at the end of the day with yourself … the everyday experience of being a parent, being up against your own monologue whomever you are talking to.” I totally feel this. Maybe since Mo has been pretty easy so far, and I’ve had too much time to sit and think, but I am constantly second-guessing everything and worrying about every little thing.

Ugh. Anyway. Yesterday, with the naps all in place, I was having to wake Mo up to eat, and she was so sleepy that she would only eat 2 ounces or so and then fall back asleep. So then I would burp her and she’d wake back up and be hungry and eat another ounce or so. Then, after I changed her diaper and she was still sleepy, I’d go to put her back to bed and she’d cry because she was still hungry, so I’d feed her another 2 ounces (she regularly eats 5 ounces at a time). But then, since almost a whole hour had passed since she originally woke up, she was only about an hour and half away from her next scheduled feeding, and then she wasn’t all that hungry for that feeding either.

So today, I switched her to a 3-3.5 hour schedule instead of a 2.5-3 hour schedule. She didn’t actually make it to 3.5 hours, so really, she’s just on a straight 3 hour schedule. It seems to be working out pretty well. I’m hopeful that this will lead to her sleeping through the night very soon. (Once she does that, what will I have to complain about?)

Mo slept 6 hours on Saturday night! 11 pm to 5 am is not exactly a full night’s sleep for most normal human beings, but for a 5 week old human-ish baby, I’m not complaining. She hasn’t repeated the feat since then, but we’re working on it. I know it’s just a matter of time – hopefully less time as opposed to more. I feel like it could be any day now. I’m not asking for a lot – I would settle for 11 pm to 6 am for the time being. Jay gets up around 6, so I’d consider that to be morning.

Today my hectic schedule included reading a book on the patio, gardening and taking a walk. Whew. it’s so hard to be me sometimes.

I was shocked to realize that my disability leave ends this week. If I couldn’t afford to take some unpaid time off, I’d have to go back to work on Monday. Holy crap, what a travesty. Not to get all pinko on you (right, like I care about that), but I can’t believe this country doesn’t have better maternity leave. For all the lip service those mofos give to “family values” you’d think they’d want to encourage people to spend some time with their newborn babies. I guess “family values” are only good for rich people who don’t have to work.

So anyway, we are totally blessed (lucky? What is the right term for what we are? Oh yeah, privileged) that I can take an additional 6 weeks unpaid. Still, 12 weeks is the maximum I can take before they will give my job away, and I like my job, so that’s all I’m going to take. Still not nearly long enough, though. I think 6 months is an appropriate amount of time. Maybe at 50% pay. Vote for me!

It’s bad to wake a sleeping baby: fact or fiction? | Psychology Today.

It’s ok, it’s not ok. It’s ok, it’s not ok.

SOMEONE TELL ME WHAT TO DO.

I’ve become obsessed with creating healthy sleep habits for Mo. Rationally, I know that I shouldn’t worry too much about this, because, as I said in a previous post, I believe it’s pretty difficult to mess up your kid significantly more than anyone else…

We’ve gotten nighttime sleep down pretty well, and I’m confident she’ll start sleeping through the night in the next 2-4 weeks. Now my problem is napping. How long should she stay awake? Should I wake her up to feed her? Is she napping enough or too little?

I downloaded “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child,” and although I’m still only about 20% through (gotta love the Kindle app) it is significantly better written than “On Becoming Babywise.” So that right there is one reason that I tend to put more faith in this book. I have now spent around $50 on baby sleep theory books, and I hate, hate, HATE that I’m helping to prop up what is so obviously an industry based anecdotes and quackery. But what else is there to do? I’m a horrible improviser. I just need someone to tell me what to do.

So far, Healthy Sleep Habits doesn’t diverge significantly from Babywise except on one point: waking up the baby to feed her. I’ve been waking her up every 2.5-3 hours during the day to eat, so that she starts to understand the difference between day and night. Also, I was under the impression that if she eats more during the day, she won’t need to eat as much at night. Now I feel like maybe I’ve been ruining her sleep.

Is she going to turn into a serial killer if I wake her up to eat? I don’t know, maybe… Probably not. It does seem a little counter-intuitive to wake up a sleeping baby. On the other hand, it also seems like she’ll be hungrier at night if she eats less during the day. I think I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing until I’m done with the Healthy Sleep Habits book, and then make a decision from there.

And if I still can’t decide what to do, I guess I’ll just download 25 more books on the subject…

Today was Mo’s one month check up. Since she was still not up to her birth weight at her two-week check up, I was pretty anxious to get her weighed again. She eats 30 ounces a day, so it’s kind of inevitable that she would gain weight (her family is not known for our awesome metabolisms after all), but I was still anxious to make sure she’s growing properly.

She is growing properly, as it turns out. A lady never reveals her weight, but she had gained 2 pounds in a little over 2 weeks, and grew 1″ longer.

The doctor didn’t intentionally make me feel guilty for switching to formula, although he did ask me why we decided to switch. I’m not exactly sure why he wanted to know – my first reaction was “none of your business” – but he seemed totally fine with it.

In the mean time, I am still working on the productivity issue. Today, I managed to make a batch of Milk Chocolate-Guinness ice cream. It’s pretty good, and as an added bonus, I had half a can of Guinness left over, which I promptly drank. I mean, I couldn’t waste it, and it would have gone flat pretty quick, so I drank it. At 3 p.m. Yeah, whatever.

I have a long list of other things to get done this week, but there is an episode of Bones on the DVR waiting for me. Maybe tomorrow…

The little girl went 5 hours between feedings last night! According to my sources (the Internet), that is technically considered sleeping through the night. I respectfully disagree, but it was pretty nice sleeping from 11:30 – 4:15 last night, so I’m not complaining. Twice is a trend, so we’ll see what happens tonight. So far today she has been a peach. (I was gone for half the day, but my mom assures me she was a peach.)

So, my mom babysat today because I had a doctor’s appointment. Since Mo was asleep pretty much the whole time, my mom cleaned the patio. This is what I love about Polish women. You can’t just sit around while the baby sleeps. But my house is pretty clean, so there aren’t a lot of options for a restless babysitter. So, she took the hose and some bleach and washed the moss off of pretty much everything out there. My real estate agent will be pleased.

Not wanting to waste a babysitter, I managed to do a little shopping at the second-hand store. I love buying used clothes. I can afford to buy new clothes, but buying used clothes is so much more rewarding. I got 6 shirts and a pair of shoes for $80. Oh! Remember when I used to post “stuff I bought?” Here we go:

• Blue Banana Republic tank top
• Grey and white Gap tank top
• Cream BCBG MaxAzria tank top
• Teal Lucky Brand tank top
• Cream Calvin Klein cardigan
• Floral Olian tunic
• Brown Kenneth Cole wedge sandals

Well, the tunic is technically a maternity top. I kind of could tell by how it fit, but you know what? I am still wearing some of my maternity tops, and I don’t care who knows it. I lost all the pregnancy weight, but I could still use a few hundred sit-ups, so flowy tops are my friend, ok? No judging.

I also brought in a bag of maternity clothes to try to sell. They were a little backlogged, so they hadn’t gotten to my stuff before I left. Unfortunately, they can’t tell me over the phone how much they are going to give me (WTF?), so I need to go back tomorrow. Normally, I wear my clothes until they are nowhere near buy-back condition, but since I only wore the maternity clothes for a few months, I think this is probably my best chance to make a little money back. So we’ll see…

Right now, I am trying to get the little one to take a nap. Her schedule has been a little weird today, so she’s not wanting to sleep right now. What I want to avoid is her falling asleep right before her 8:30 bedtime meal, because then it will be harder to feed her. She needs to sleep now so she’s awake enough to eat 3-4 ounces. She’s totally overtired right now but fighting sleep. I wonder where she gets the stubbornness from?

So another way I am ruining my baby (besides formula feeding) is by following the “On Becoming Babywise” book. Parenting books are all, as far as I can tell, horrible, and this one is no exception. I also read “The Happiest Baby on the Block” and it is horrible in all the same ways that Babywise is. Both books could essentially be boiled down to 1500 word how-to articles, which would save everyone a lot of time.

The basic outline is to start out by telling you how the baby will change your life. Just flip past the first 3-5 chapters, trust me. Then, there are numerous “case studies” comparing babies who were raised using the book’s method to babies who were not. Invariably, these examples illustrate that following this particular book will produce a happy, healthy baby, while other methods will produce crying, whiny sociopaths and are tantamount to child abuse. About 2/3 of the way through is the actual meat of whatever method is being discussed, and then the conclusion just repeats everything one more time for people who have poor reading comprehension.

Obviously, most babies turn out to be happy and healthy, no matter what ridiculous parenting book or theory is used. For example, my parents used a method that was popular in their time, called “Put the baby in the corner and ignore it.” This worked pretty well for me (I am happy and healthy, and only a little neurotic), but I was looking for something a little more nurturing.

But also, most babies also turn out to be somewhat f-ed up adults, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you sleep in your parents’ bed until you’re 5, you’re going to be f-ed up in one way, and if your parents park you in a crib on the other side of the house, you will end up being f-ed up in another way. In this way, raising kids is both a win-win and a lose-lose proposition. On the one hand, there is nothing you can do to not mess up your kid. On the other hand, you have to really go out of your way to mess up your kid more than anyone else.

So back to Babywise. The Babywise method suggests getting your baby into a Feed-Wake-Sleep cycle as soon as possible. We achieved this in week 2. Mo’s cycles last 2-1/2 to 3 hours, and the only bad thing is that I occasionally do wake her up to eat after 3 hours during the day, which according to the “Put the baby in the corner and ignore it” method is extremely taboo. Needless to say, my mother does not approve. But, at three weeks, she is in a good routine, usually going 4 hours and 3-1/2 hours at night, so I can get close to 7 hours of sleep per night. Supposedly, she will begin sleeping through the night (7-ish hours) somewhere between week 6-8. We’ll see…

Babywise is controversial because of 2 types of people: People with poor reading comprehension and people who think women should not have any personal needs beyond nurturing a baby every minute of the day. I guess some babies have become dehydrated and failed to thrive because the first type of person reads Babywise and thinks that it says that you should only feed your baby every 3 hours, even if it’s hungry before then. Let me just say this: Yer doin’ it wrong.

The second type of person is a proponent of what is called “Attachment Parenting” which suggests that removing your baby from your nipples for even 10 minutes is child abuse. Interestingly, the Babywise authors suggest that Attachment Parenting is child abuse because it produces sleep-deprived, whiny babies. Can’t we all just agree not to call each other child abusers?

I didn’t actually get around to reading The Happiest Baby on the Block until after we discovered that swaddling the baby fixes everything. (Hard to read a book when your baby keeps CRYING.) Coincidentally, this book is a huge proponent of swaddling, so by the time I read it, I didn’t really need it anymore. There are 4 other recommendations for calming a fussy baby, but we didn’t need them so I won’t even waste your (my) time.