What, this again?

If you have the stomach for yet more dispatches from the You Call That News? annals of parenthood, read on. Otherwise you might find it more interesting to go enjoy this genuinely fascinating piece about scurvy, which I mentioned a little while ago on the food blog, or perhaps this soothing live videocam of itsy bitsy rescue kittens.

Our child may be very small—indeed she is the merest tiny peanut—but evidence suggests that her world-weariness is already quite large.

Every time she settles down to feed, she produces a supremely dismissive "huh!" just as she latches on. Just now, her eyes flew open and she advised me: "Lie!" And when the cat was being extremely annoying yesterday, she suggested: "Glue." Whether she meant that it should be applied topically or that he should be turned into it remains unclear.

I often hear people mentioning that their babies have schedules. This sounds nice but unimaginably difficult to arrange.

What happens when the baby sleeps when she is supposed to be eating and then as a natural consequence is starving when you thought she was going to be sleeping and so on and so forth and the next thing you know all is frustration, shrieking, and remorse? If some days there are three naps at god knows what times and other days there is one long nap at some completely other time, and bedtime is whenever she has deigned to eat her fill and conk out of her own accord, so be it.

This still seems roughly correct to me. There will be no withholding of things that make the baby quiet and content, because quietness and contentment are always devoutly to be wished. I certainly by god am not going to wake up a gloriously unconscious infant just because I think she should be eating, nor do I want to revisit the memorable day of prime boneheadedness when I forced us to endure forty minutes of vocal distress rather than JUST FEEDING THE DAMN WEE THING EVEN IF IT IS THEORETICALLY "TOO SOON" YOU IDIOT.

But! Recently it has occurred to us that we might anticipate these events, and there sure is something extremely gratifying about swaddling up the baby, plonking her down, and watching her obligingly go to sleep on what one might conceivably, if generously, call schedule.

What we have here, obviously, is a state of affairs in which the baby has trained us to dance exquisitely to her tune, much as the cat did before her. Still, it produces a pleasant illusion that someone, somewhere, has things under some semblance of control. I am well aware that such an illusion can only be fleeting, so we are enjoying it while it lasts.

"I'm afraid it's off to the glue factory for you."

Comments

[Elizabeth]

That is a remarkably cute picture of Jane. Please continue your series of You Call That News? It makes the notion of raising children much less terrifying than how I feel after reading mommy blogs.

[Jessica]

I completely agree. Mine eats and sleeps when he wants to and doesn't when he doesn't want to, and nothing seems to persuade him to act otherwise.

This is a good website for trying to spot a pattern, especially for sleep: http://www.trixietracker.com/ I used an app for my phone for months before that, but it didn't have the visualization aspect that Trixie Tracker has, which was exactly what I'd been wishing the one on my phone would do.

However, I don't recommend starting it just as your five-and-a-half month old decides sleeping through the night while teething is overrated. I'm not sure I needed to be able to visualize the demolition of what schedule we did have.

[redfox]

Elizabeth: Thank you! I very much like being able to feel like an ambassador from the nation of Parenthood Is Maybe Okay After All.

Jessica: Ooh, that looks handy. And ooh, in the opposite emotional valence, re: schedule demolition. I fear the dark spectre of teething and the havoc it will wreak on our happy sleeping times.

[LizardBreath]

We never got the hang of any kind of schedule other than sleeping at night until the kids were quite old, but it didn't seem to be a problem -- total surrender to whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it, seemed to be a reasonable way of coping with the infant period. And oh, she is charming looking alertly out of her sling.

(Also teething? Not necessarily a problem. We sort of breezed through it without any fussing that we were certain was teeth related. This was pure luck, of course, but it's at least a possibility.)