Life with a Four Monther

My Pooh
Originally uploaded by deirdred75.

When I envisioned having a baby, I fantasized about being a hip cool mom who was completely chilled out. Instead I was really upset when I was reading about parenting types in one parenting book and realized that the only category that really fit me was the highly-strung.

My problem is that I am too wishy-washy on too many counts. I conceptually like the idea of Nathaniel being on a structured routine, but I don't actually have it in me to do what it takes to put that in place. But I also can't deal with a total free for all lifestyle where naps come whenever and Nathaniel goes to sleep whenever he feels like it. So instead I occupy the no man's land middle ground and feel guilt stricken and idiotic as I read all the parenting books.

Problem number one is sleeping. Nathaniel was a pretty good sleeper for the past months--giving me six to seven hours of sleep at a time most nights. But bedtimes were a bit of an ordeal. He would fall asleep nursing, then wake up 35 minutes later crying and demand more nursing to sleep. Sometimes he would wake several times during the evening so that he wasn't actually down for the night until 10 or 10:30. I was growing rapidly depressed sitting up in his darkened room nursing him back to sleep (especially as I listened to the sound of Doug flunking his dance off in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas). Plus many of the parenting books rank nursing your child to sleep as one of the seven deadly sins of parenthood (sure to lead to a breastfeeding 21 year old they promise).

So I decided briskly and with resolve that we would stop nursing to sleep. Enter in a week of horrible nap and bedtimes and punctuated with crying and three hours to get to sleep. Then he started waking up three or four times in the night. Then he started crying when I even walked into his room with him. So I decided that was not working at all. I switched back to nursing when he needed it (that would be at almost every sleep period) and decided to revisit the problem once we had got back to normality. Unfortunately that hasn't happened yet. He is up three times at least a night, hungrily eating. Because I think I started tinkering with his sleep just as he has reached the point where I am no longer capable of giving him enough calories to eat. So I am trying to give him a bit of formula to try and tide him over while we get ready to go onto solid foods.

But that of course leads to yet another of these parenting issues. Some books say no solids until six months old, lest you want your child to become an obese heart attack prone diseased adult. Others say get your child on foods as soon as you need to--mainly when he starts waking up in the middle of the night hungry after being a good sleeper. So who knows? I will of course continue on this path of parenthood which I think mainly involves reading a thousand books, being more confused than when you started, tentatively choosing a path, then feeling for sure that you are doing it all the absolute wrong way.