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Sophie can’t truly walk yet, but she can almost walk, as long as she’s pushing something. Here she is pushing her boyfriend, Landon. Aren’t they cute?
A great white shark killed someone this morning at my local beach, two blocks from where we used to live. Shark attacks are unusual, nearly unprecedented for San Diego. And the swimmer was doing everything right: he was a triathlete, swimming in a group, fairly close to shore. The shark thrust him up out of the water, lacerating his leg 22 inches from thigh to shin. His fellow triathletes swam him into shore, where the lifeguards drove him to a medical helicopter – and he still died.
There’s more info here.
Ben was biking by when it happened, and my neighbor was jogging by: this is just our normal morning space. We go in that water all the time.
The beaches are closed today, but people are still in the water. Seals are beaching themselves, though: a sign that there’s a large predator out there. A baby great-white washed up last week. The murderous shark may be a grieving mom.
The waves are small today, so Ben isn’t in the water, thankfully. I don’t think he would stay out if the waves were good, despite the seals fleeing the water right now.
Sophie’s first birthday is just a few weeks away, and I can’t decide whether to tell people that it’s a gift-free birthday.
She already has two whole toy-baskets full of stuff – and she mostly ignores it all. Her favorite toys this morning were the empty box that my teabag came out of and the wire whisk that I used to make cream-of-wheat. She does like some actual toys, of course. She’s got a push-rider that she always goes straight to, before anything else, and of course there’s her pink-bunny, some duplos, a water-table, a ball, a couple trucks & trains, a xylophone, an incredible indoor mini-gym-for-babies that we scored at a garage sale, some nifty stacking cups, and a few books that she’ll play with regularly. And that seems to be enough, especially since what she really likes to do is push the kitchen chairs around the room.
It would be nice to resist baby consumerism. It would be nice for the environment, and for our friends’ pocketbooks, and just for keeping the birthday a low-key celebration of what really matters, which is enjoying the company of friends & Sophie’s first year.
On the other hand, there are some toys or clothes or other baby-stuff that she might like. She doesn’t yet have a drum, or tambourine, or enough push-toys to practice her almost-here walking-skills. And I don’t want to stop anyone from getting her things that they might enjoy giving. Yesterday, before class, one of my Orange-County students was telling me about her niece’s exciting birthday party. When she asked about Sophie & I said I was thinking of making it a presents-free party, all my students gasped as if I were planning something tantamount to child abuse.
I know we’ll have a few people over for pizza, and I know that I’ll make a low-sugar cake that the babies can eat (maybe some cupcakes, so they can really make a mess & enjoy themselves). I just can’t decide about whether to have presents. Any suggestions?
According to this article in the New York Times, the US has nearly six times the number of prisoners (on a per-capita rate) as the worldwide average. We have 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners. Sometimes I’m ashamed to be American.
The way Sophie’s light-red hair curls on the back of her neck is enough to melt my heart. You all can see in Ben’s pictures that she has giant blue eyes that are sparkling, kaleidoscopic pinwheels – but you can’t see how good she smells (like pure sweet cream) or how her giggles ring.
I don’t want this blog to become all sentimental gushing, but now that I have finally gotten some sleep, I can’t help wanting to post this little gushiness. You should see her giggling exploring, studiously examining, generously connecting.
Yesterday Ben trimmed the tree in our front yard, saving the wood for the outdoor fireplace that we’ll eventually get, and setting up one perfect branch for Sophie’s future swing. Today he’s planting hop-vines for his beer-making. We just got back from the beach birthday party of a one-year-old friend, where others, too, were talking about the joys of gardening & baby’s smiles. This probably all sounds hopelessly suburban, and I guess it is, but it is also a joy.
Sophie slept through the night last night.
One day shy of her eleven-month birthday.
This is momentous.
My only remaining question is, how long will it be before I too can sleep through the night? I still wake up, listening for her, expecting to feed her & comfort her. But now I don’t have to get up. I swear, there are more birds singing today than usual.
One of the only objective measurements that parents have of whether we’re doing an okay job at guiding this little being to adulthood is when does our baby start walking.
We have plenty of subjective feedback: my baby seems to smile a lot, she seems to have a sense of curiosity and a sense of joy, she even seems to care about other people in really sweet ways. She has a new sippy cup that she really likes, and so what she keeps doing is thrusting it in my face, to share her joy with me. I think she’s growing into being a really wonderful person. But that’s all subjective. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.
The only objective measures we have are height, weight, head-circumference, and at what age does she start walking. The irony is that none of those objective measurements mean squat.
Sophie started crawling early, at 6 months, so I was proud, although also a little frightened at her hurry to be independent. But now that she’s such a good crawler, she isn’t in a hurry to walk. She has other skills: just yesterday, she learned how to ask for a piggyback ride. She’s not late to walking, but she’s not early either, and so I am particularly aware that it doesn’t matter at all. Parents at the playground tell each other this all the time: late walkers often develop into great athletes, spending a long time crawling may help kids get better connections between the left & right sides of their brain, early walking isn’t anything to be particularly proud of. We keep saying this because we need the reassurance.
So I’ll be letting you all know whenever she does walk. As much as I can analyze it away & claim it doesn’t matter, I am still curious to see when Sophie chooses to walk.
And I am fascinated at the ways she subdivides the task. She can stand while holding onto something like a kitchen chair, then move to holding onto something else like the side of the table, and sometimes she’ll waver between the two holds in what is almost an independent stance, except that it is quite precarious, not yet a steady stance. Lately she is working on pushing things across the room, like an old person with a walker. It’s almost as if she knows the skills she needs, and how to break it down. When I sit on the floor, she leans on me, slowly walking around my body, but pausing when she’s holding on to my back & shoulders, because she has discovered that that’s the way to get a piggy-back ride. Her sense of discovery is wonderful to watch.
Last weekend we went to the Wild Animal Park, where she wouldn’t stop pointing at the cheetahs, & gibbons, & some odd people in the crowd too.
Last night, she woke up on her habitual schedule, every three hours, at 10pm, 1am, 4am, then 7am. But every time she woke up, she got herself back to sleep within five minutes – so I never had to leave my bed. It is the first time that I have spent all night in bed in more than eleven months.
Then tonight, Sophie went down to sleep without me nursing her – she went down even before I got home from work. Alleluja, hosanna in the highest, sleep-training may be working.
I think I frightened my students today with all the energy I had. I wonder how long it will take me to catch up on eleven months of missed sleep — or if this tiny miracle will even last.
We’re sleep-training Sophie, again, and miracle of miracles, it seems to be working. Last night she slept in her own crib all night long, from 8:30 pm to 7:45 am (that’s a very late morning for her, a very nice morning for me) — and she had only one major wake-up around 2 am. Then she went down for a nap today at 9:45 am and is still sleeping while I begin typing this, almost two hours later. This is amazing. She needed her sleep. So did I.
Unless you are a parent who has gone through eleven months of sleep-deprivation (or maybe a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay) I’m not sure you can understand what this feels like. Last week, she was starting to wake up six or more times a night, and by 5am I was crying too, so we decided that enough is enough.
We had tried to train her, back when she was five months old. We read every sleep book we could get our hands on. It got to the point where, when we read sleep advice, it simply repeated what we already do. We have a good, calming, consistent bedtime routine. We feed her well during the day. We have a more-or-less consistent daily nap schedule. We have taught her multiple ways of falling asleep (nursing, walking, in the car, in the stroller) – although we have failed to teach her to fall asleep on her own in the bed, despite many many tries. Fortunately, her daycare lady somehow taught her to sleep on her own. Her daycare lady is a saint. We have given Sophie a lovey, a reassuring stuffed animal that she holds while nursing & sleeping, to soothe herself. We have good lullabies, comfortable pyjamas, a dark & calm room, and even code-words that we’ve trained Sophie to associate with sleep. Ben wanted the code-word to be, “Check the oil,” but what it has become is me saying, “Sleeeep, sleeeeep, wonderful sleep.”
We have done everything except let her cry it out, and we even tried that back when she was 5 months old. It just didn’t work. She would spend up to 90 minutes crying herself to sleep, then whenever she woke up, she’d still be panic-crying. It was torturous for all of us, but we kept it up for weeks, until finally we just decided to throw out all the theories that were making no difference anyway and just follow our instincts to hold her and soothe her. I resigned myself to frequent night-wakings. As long as she sleeps for four hours at a time, I get my deep REM sleep and can almost function okay in the day – but still, this wasn’t sustainable. Especially not last week, when her night-wakings got so frequent I could barely count them.
So now we’re trying again. Here’s the new system, thanks mostly to Sarah. We moved the crib out of our room, so that Sophie has total privacy – and we get our bedroom back. That alone is good. Then we get to soothe Sophie to sleep in whatever way works. For us, that’s a bath, then massaging with baby lotion, then nursing and rocking in the rocking chair in the dark, with her cozy green fleece blanket and her lovey bunny. If she still needs more, we walk around the block singing Raffi’s song, “Thanks a lot.”
I don’t know if its the sibilance or the droning repeptition, but it works. I have composed my own verses to “Thanks a lot,” and it goes on and on and on until she is solidly asleep. Ben says if he hears one more chorus of “Thanks a lot,” he may have to shoot someone, but I don’t care as long as Sophie is asleep.
Then when she wakes up at night, we let her try to put herself back to sleep. We let her try for up to an hour. She cries, but it’s not a desperate cry, it’s just a sort of announcement that she’s reaching for sleep & can’t find it. After an hour, I nurse her down, but I don’t succumb to the temptation to let her sleep in our bed. We’re keeping her in her crib all night long. If she wakes up again, I may go to her sooner than an hour – but after having that first hour struggle, she seems to stay asleep longer. I think she is learning to solve the little night-wakings before calling for us.
I’m worried she is losing trust & a sense of security, but then I see her in the morning, grinning & so happy & finally rested, and I know that she knows we love her. Getting to sleep at night lets me be more joyful with her in the day.
That’s the whole system: soothe her solidly to sleep, but ignore her cries in the night as long as possible.
It’s working, so far. Knock on wood. It can’t possibly be this easy, so quickly. We’ve been trying this for three nights, and each night there’s fewer wakings and longer sleepings. Sarah says that sleep-training usually takes one night for every month of a baby’s age. Sophie is advanced, so I’m planning on longer than 11 nights. But we’ll see. If every night is like last night, I will be singing alleluja all day long. I am singing, most of today.
But I probably jinxed it by posting here. We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.
