I was thinking just now about how Carla is getting pretty co-operative about things she used to be downright impossible about. Like teeth brushing, for example.

C has had a rough time in this life as far as dental health goes. I blame it all on the fact that when she had her first trouble with cavities, we were broke and had lost our good dental insurance. Having no money, we turned to our new insurance for referrals within their network. We ended up with Dr. Nightmare and followed up with severe emotional trauma followed by months of therapy and now, years later, I think we are still feeling the pinch. The fillings that Dr. Nightmare so clumsily blasted into her three year old mouth are now cracking and needing replacement.  Still lacking good dental insurance, but now having learned our lesson about going to the in network option, we now pay, um, through the teeth. Our new dentist is an angel, and worth every penny– but that doesn’t stop Carla from thinking hard about her teeth and how they got that way.

She still sometimes mentions Dr. Nightmare, enough that his name has become a household name with enough villainy to it to put him in the same camp as George W. Bush.  Annie agrees heartily, even though she’s never even met the evil dentist (nor Dubya, for that matter.)

When it’s time to brush her teeth, and to floss them, she opens her mouth up willingly for me; she lets me at them. I do the best that I can.  But I am waiting for the thoughts to click into place…. At what point might she turn on me and ask how come I didn’t take better care of her teeth in the first place?

Which I ask myself, too. Though I DID start brushing her teeth daily once she even had teeth. I did what was recommended of me, even when she was a rebellious two year old.  She also nursed a lot, up until she was weaned at age two and a half.

Here I am, FIVE YEARS LATER, wondering HOW COULD I LET MY CHILD GET CAVITIES? And then further make the mistake of letting some A-Hole Dentist butcher her up. I STILL ACHE about this. I still doubt my abilities to protect her. To brush her teeth well enough.

And not just teeth, either. There’s the million and one things a mom’s supposed to do. What if I fail at another thing, and another? She’s on antibiotics this week as a preventative against the rare and unlikely complication of rheumatic fever as a result of an untreated strep infection.  We’ve missed some doses, and she knows this.

She stares hard at me and asks, shouldn’t she just take the missed dose together with her next one? I know that’s not how you’re supposed to deal with missed doses and I tell her so. The wheels in her mind are turning and turning, though.  I think she is disappointed in me– if taking medicine is important then how could I have missed giving her a dose?

Well, how could I?

Can someone toss me a rope down here, cuz I think I need something to grab onto. I wonder how I managed to mess up her teeth. What if she gets rheumatic fever. What if I don’t tell her about STD’s soon enough. What if I miss her prom. What if. What. if. What. What. What. If. If. If.

What if I to bed now and catch up on some sleep? Clearly, I am losing my mind.

Or, more likely, it was already gone. (see previous post).

PS… it turns out my first share of veggies will come next monday; and fruit in about three weeks or so. Will keep you posted.

I have been thinking a lot about sleep lately. In part this is because I had so much time to consider it these last couple nights, lying awake in bed, when I should have been actually sleeping rather than just thinking about it*. Another reason is my incessant obsession with reading baby blogs, and all these moms with adorable little babies seem to be, in general, not getting enough sleep.  (Go figure.)

I remember well the sleeplessness of early motherhood. It was an other-worldly experience, being so acquainted with the many hours of the night. For my first baby, I was very vigilant with making sure she was a) still breathing  and b) fed as often as she wanted to.  Thus, a peep from her, and there were the feedings: the 1:10 AM, nurse for 20 minutes, watch her sleeping in awe, slump off to sleep, and then… by  3 AM, doing it all again. Then the murky 4:33 AM when you really, really feel there is no justice and sleep seems like a strange thing to try to do so many times in one night. By 6 AM, daylight would creep uninvited into my room, making me bitter and annoyed. Go away. I am trying to sleep. Again.

On the other hand, I also remember the joy of the nap with a baby and cats. And a book nearby at all times. Oh well, can’t get up, I’ve got a baby to nurse, a cat I can’t disturb, and I’m also not yet done my chapter. Read and nurse, and doze, and pet the cat. (”Dear, just leave that whole pie right there by the bed. And that water bottle… I’m gonna need it…”)

Now-a-days I’ve still got parenthood-related sleep complications. I often fall asleep in the bed with my 4 year old, soothing her down to rest and making sure she’s cozy and comfortable. There are times when I wake in her room with the sun, having never returned to the big bed and the arms of my mate.

There are also nights where I lie awake thinking and thinking and Not Sleeping; where thoughts intrude on the restful night. There are no babies crying, or requiring nursing. No leaky diapers (or breasts) to soil my sheets. Just tension and worry, or an inability to fall asleep for No Particular Reason. By comparison, those multiple feeding  nights were softly blissful, even while making me weary as heck. There was a miracle, a reason, a rationale for feeling so tired the next day. It is a badge of pride, that kind of sleep deprivation.

I remember calling into a radio show at some point when my babe was young; it was a bone-headed MD guest on some local talk program, droning on and on about how mothers shouldn’t have to sacrifice their sleep, that it would be better to just get someone else to feed the baby so they can have a full night’s sleep. This was so entirely counter to both my own good sense about how to care for a baby, and how to survive parenthood, that I called in. I was put on the air. I asked if there were any studies to show how sleep needs change during early motherhood? Because the truth was, aside from a handful of very difficult nights, I was finding that I felt well rested in spite of frequent wakings. I felt sure there must be some biological change that the human mind can manage in order to survive with less sleep, in order to properly care for our young. The dumb MD had no clue, and no answer, (no surprise there), so I stick with my hypothesis: humans need to do stuff at night to care for their young — we may not always like missing sleep, but we can adapt it.

The trouble is, getting back into some new kind of sleep groove seems tough.  I once had a co-worker who told me that he hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since the birth of his first child.  At the time, his youngest was 5 years old; the older was 11. That’s eleven years of sleep disturbance and apparently not much hope in sight!

For a really fun and interesting insight into sleep research and the value and purpose of sleep, I highly recommend that you listen to this episode of Radio Lab (#302). Radio Lab is a little bit like The American Life only its focus is science, and it’s more hip, and more upbeat.

* I started this post months ago… actually this week, I’m not having trouble sleeping at all. Trouble waking, yes, but trouble sleeping, no. Bleh.

My old college pal Stacie bore twins last summer; she’s chronicling her adventures in sleep deprivation and has reached a true milestone:  Tandem nursing 13 month old twins in public.  In honor of this, and because she was so sweet in claiming that mere advice from me (cause, like, it’s all about ME, right?) helped to towards this accomplishment, I am publishing this tome to her:

Say!
I do so like tandem nursing twins…
I do! I like it Pann-I-am!
And I would nurse them in a boat.
And I would nurse them with a goat…

I do so like
Tandem Nursing Twins!
Thank you!
Thank you,

Pann-I-Am

That’s how cool we are, according to our neighbor’s grand-daughter, Maya.

Maya, 6 years old, going on 16, comes over a couple times each week to play with my daughters. Her parents are divorced and her father is battling for custody of her.  She spends a lot of time over our house.

Today she and I and my younger daughter, A, were sitting around the table having a snack and chatting about butterflies.  I told her about how we’d found a dead monarch butterfly, which she saw up in C’s room (it’s beautiful, and is in a little plastic container).  C maintains that she never opens the container because it stinks.

Maya: Does that butterfly really stink?

Me: C says so, but I wouldn’t know. When I find a dead butterfly, I don’t go up to it to smell it.  I just look at it, and put it in a container because it was beautiful, but you won’t see me going around sniffing it.

Maya (cracking up): People would think you were crazy if you did that!

Me: Well, actually I am a little crazy.

Maya: Well… just a teeny tiny bit. (gesturing with her thumb and pointer in a tight pinch)… But you’re cool.  Y’all are all cool.  You’re cool from Africa to China and back, 800 thousand times. That’s how cool y’all are. 80 hundred thousand percent COOL.

That’s just what I needed to hear. Earlier today I’d been feeling like a total slacker. I was really tired and fell asleep on my elder daughter’s new loft bed.  It’s really cozy up there. Then I realized at some point that it was already 2 PM and I hadn’t prepared any lunch.  When I’d been hungry myself, rather than take that as a cue to get lunch together, I munched some tortilla chips. Looking back on that, at 2 PM, I really felt like a lame mom.  I mean, really, #1 job responsibility is feeding the kids, isn’t it?*

Meanwhile, on the “career” front, I’m excited to report that I had a Job Interview for the first time in a long while, and have a 1 in 3 shot at getting a really challenging, fun, rewarding job working with kids in an after school program.  And back to reality, the job I currently have, that of running a web hosting and design business is on hold but the clients don’t really know that. I have to return some phones calls and I’ve been putting it off because I am not really sure what I want to say.

I want to have some kind of plan about what to say, because I fear I’ll just act on gut impulse if I don’t plan it ahead. They wants answers not more hedging.  I’ve been putting off these people for long enough.  Sure, I’ll have two weeks of child care in a couple weeks, but is that enough to work on the projects?  And what if I get the JOB I just interviewed for?  I feel like I just can’t commit to the work, even though turning down two grand is kind of hard to swallow.

Think. Think. Think.

Well…. At least I’m cool.

* These days, I’m struck with the irony of how hard people say it is to breastfeed… I found that pretty easy. But preparing meals that are nutritious and delicious, 3 a day, for the whole family, especially when each person’s tastes vary… that really takes a lot more effort than rolling over and pulling the hungry little mouth to my breast.

On top of the effort it takes to feed ‘em all properly, I don’t think there is any consensus on what the Right food for us to eat is, whereas, when my lil ones were babes, I was told repeated that I was providing the Perfect food. Wow, perfect. Yeah, and it was free and pretty easy too. And I could do it in my sleep. )

I was tagged by Stacie to describe what a real mom does.

Real moms do lots of gross stuff. For one thing, having a baby is pretty gross in the first place. There’s that 9 month training period where you’re waiting for a baby to come out from a rather personal space… While you’re waiting for birth to happen, you get to enjoy many fringe benefits like swollen ankles, constipation, crying and eating binges, emotional upheaval, workplace discrimination… finally the day comes when your baby is going to be born and you may get to have the opportunity to poop in front of a team of doctors and nurses; puke all over the place; soak a midwife with amniotic fluid; and subject yourself to all kinds of pains and discomforts, medical procedures and more.

By the time you’re through this ordeal, you get to experience the shocking realization that you are personally responsible for the health, safety and happiness of a tiny and completely vulnerable human being. Read the rest of this entry »

Breastfeeding was a central theme in my life for about 6 and a half years, from the day that my first child was born, until the time that my second child was weaned.

I was going through some folders today on my computer and came across this picture, which I took of my first child while nursing her. I thought it might be nice to share this on the blog.