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By admin, July 3, 2009 11:43 am

Recently I discovered several scientific articles which claim to support the safety of letting babies cry it out. I’m not going to link to them; if you google, you’ll turn ‘em up. After all, CIO has been practiced for eons, there is tons of evidence about how wonderful it is and very little scientific research showing that it is negative for babies.

I use science a lot in making decisions for my child, most especially with medical issues. Regarding vaccines, I’m quite passionate about the science behind it and have found that research has come out firmly in favor of vaccination, even with the occasional bad reactions. This is a case where the diseases can do so much damage, that a small amount of risk is definitely worthwhile. So I certainly don’t discount science, and I believe that the results of these studies may be quite reliable.

However, I also think it is quite telling; not scientific, mind you, but telling; that most of the moms I’ve encountered who have done CIO with their children, describe it as “The lesser of two evils.” Yes. If you are in a position where you feel like you are a danger to your child or yourself by virtue of those sleepless nights, CIO may be something that would work for you, and ultimately be the “lesser of two evils,” for both you and your child.

For myself, I’ve certainly done a lot of thinking on this subject. My child has been a horrendous sleeper since day one, and I think the only reason I’ve been able to survive it sanity intact is because I have the type of husband I can wake up in the middle of the night and hand my child to, so that I can get a break. I have also had to walk away and take a breather for a few minutes on several occasions. So I’m not saying my baby has never ever ever cried alone for a second, she has.

And in those moments where I was taking my breathers, and calming my self down, I was able to use the first tool in the scientific method; observation. I was able to observe my child and how she behaved when I did not respond to her in the night, and it wasn’t pretty. My child is and always has been the type to just completely panic and freak out if Mama ignored her. Not every child is this way; Ask Moxie has a great article about CIO and the different types of children and how it may affect them. But for my child, I was able to use my skills of observation to see quite quickly that CIO would never work for her, and would in fact damage her. Damage her faith in the world, faith in me, damage our relationship, potentially affect her self-esteem, and her ability to trust. I’m not ok with that.

I am not saying this to demonize moms who CIO; if you have to do that, you have to. If you choose to, well, I disagree with your choice. I’m trying to say (probably not very well), that there are other reasons than “what science has shown,” to make choices for our children. That we as parents have the ultimate power of observation and ability to see if something is harmful to our child, regardless what anyone else says. Attachment parenting is about figuring out what is the best thing for your child, not strict adherence to a list of “rules.” Some babies simply do better if left to fuss for a few minutes; but only the parents, not science, can make that determination.

Generally speaking, I am very very anti-CIO. I find that most parents who use it, tend to be the “never give in” type of parent which winds up in little babies left to cry for hours; I also have seen that many parents who do CIO wind up needing to do it over and over again, and that disturbs me as well. I do think that teaching yourself as a parent to ignore your child when they are in need of you, can have a negative effect on your relationship. Further, the reality is that the sleep of children will change throughout their childhood based on so many things; their growth, teething, developmental leaps. Trying to force those sleep patterns to fit what we would like them to be, usually doesn’t seem to work very well.

Obviously I cannot remember my experiences as a baby; but I do have memories from about three years on, and older, of my mother telling me to “go to sleep,” and ignoring me no matter how I cried. I remember a lot of this as a very painful time for me; I went through phases where my life was quite disrupted (divorce, lots of changes), and would be unable to sleep, and left to cry. I remember how it felt, and on more than one occasion I have found myself saying the same thing to my daughter… and then realizing that I do not ever ever want her to feel what I felt.

But I also recognize that I cannot make decisions for another parent, and my opinion on this topic is just that.

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By admin, July 1, 2009 10:18 pm

I recently read this story, about a Swedish family who are not revealing their child’s gender until the child chooses to do so. It’s quite interesting and a few important points before you even begin to ponder this; the child is not being forced, the child is being provided with accoutrements of both genders and allowed to freely choose, the gender of the child is not being *hidden* from the child, just not shared with anyone outside the family.

Really interesting to me in light of the fact that last night was the first time Bella ever corrected my pronouncement of the gender of a character in a book. Since so many books (the vast, vast majority) are written about little boys, or using “he” pronouns throughout in the case of animals, I often switch it up and just say that the character is a little girl with short hair.

Last night Bella said to me, as though it were obvious; “NO Mommy, he is a boy!”

For the record, this is the book, and it is positively lovely.

This comes simultaneously with her telling me, yesterday, for the first time ever; that her favorite color is… pink!

I want her to be who she wants to be, but I worry so much about the exposure and influences of the world around her.  When a child chooses a thing, that choice is reinforced (or not) in so many ways. 

Say a little girl chooses a pink dress, and people go on and on and on about how pretty she is in her little pink dress, and isn’t she a little princess… and then at the bookstore walking around browsing, she sees so many books with little girls dressed in pink dresses or dressed up like princesses… and then she sees a few Disney Princess movies… and then she sees a few commercials featuring princesses…And the next thing you know, a princess obsession is born and your house looks like a giant pepto bismol spill.

Don’t get me wrong; I love pink. Just not too much pink!

I really hope that if my daughter chooses to be a princess, I can help her become one of the self-rescuing kind.

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By admin, June 20, 2009 12:48 am

This is probably what I get for waiting until the very last minute to do what I wanted to do for Father’s Day, but this week has been cuh-razy… hence the whole no posting situation. So tonight I told my husband to go lie down, he is exhausted and wasn’t feeling great, and I’d stay up with Bella. So that we could…

Bake COOKIES!

Chocolate chip cookies, to be specific, because those are my husband’s absolute favorite. I don’t make them often because, hey… I love them too, and I’m trying to lose here, not gain. Also, self control? I haz none. So. Cookies! I made this recipe, and if I may say so; this is The Cookie Recipe. Oh, my gosh. They came out AMAZZZZZING. To die for, really, and I have made many a batch of cookies before for Charlie. But they just came out so big, so soft, so chewy, so perfect in every way! And I swear, I am not that great a baker.

While the cookies were cooling, I took Bella upstairs to her room to play. While there, she ran into the bedroom to poop on her little potty in there. (In our house, “her” room is her playroom, and the bedroom is all of our bedroom, and her upstairs potty is in there.) She had a ginormous poop, then ran back to play. I got everything cleaned up, went into her room to check on her. Lately, she’s gotten very very scared of our dog. This seems unrelated, but it’s not; every time she thinks she hears him coming, she runs to “hide” from him. Which is crazy because it is not like he comes up to her; but he is a big dog, and has accidentally run over her one time too many I think, in spite of my best efforts at prevention. Anyways, hearing him coming or thinking he is coming is really stressing her out lately.

I decided to run downstairs to plate up the cookies and make her a bedtime bottle, and closed the door to the bedroom before I went. I wanted her to know Tramp would not come and bug her in her room while I was gone for a few minutes. Just as I turned to go downstairs, she let out a HUGE fart, and I had this very brief flash of “Oh, maybe she needs to poop again.” But I knew she had just gone a HUGE one so decided she was probably just gassy.

Famous last thoughts.

I ran downstairs, made a gorgeous cookie tower for my honey, put his card there, and got her a bottle. I kept listening, but did not hear any hollering, shrieking, stomping, or other assorted panicky or distressed sounds. I even called up once to let Bella know I was almost done. I was only gone for about five minutes.

As I went back upstairs, I heard whimpering type sounds coming from the bedroom, and then as I reached the upstairs landing, Bella came running out to me saying “Mommy, I so FRUSTRATED! I did a poopy on the floor Mommy!!!!” Oooooooh, my! I said, “You did? Can you show Mommy?” She showed me, and. Well. It really wasn’t that huge a deal, honestly, but it was a pretty messy poop. Kind of adorable how there were a few specks on one side of the room and then the big end result in the corner, behind her playstand, like she went to go hide and poop in the corner.

This whole time I am thinking that this is my fault; I closed the bedroom door, so she literally had no access to her own potty. And I was having flashbacks to being about 3 or so and for some reason pooping on the floor right next to the potty, and getting spanked, and feeling so ashamed. So with all that running through her mind, I got things together (wipes, got her cleaned up, etc), and told her that it was not her fault, it was Mommy’s fault, and I was sorry, and that it was ok. She just kept saying “I so FRUSTRATED Mommy!” As I picked up the mess, she said “I feel better now, I’m happy now Mommy!” My sweet angel!

Then I put her on my back and attacked the carpet with the carpet cleaner, and now she is snoozing peacefully upstairs. My sweetie. I feel terrible that I put her in that position, but also so proud of her and that she was not ashamed, just frustrated, that she was not scared to tell me what happened, that she knew she could ask me for help. Those are all amazing, wonderful things. So much of the way I parent has to do with things that happened to me as a child (ie: aforementioned spanking), and the way those things made me feel, and the fact that I don’t ever want my child to feel those things.

The other thing running through my head is that I am a lucky lucky lucky Mommy to not have a child interested in painting with poop!!!!

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By admin, June 15, 2009 8:57 am

So yesterday I was feeling like *making stuff*, and I made Bella a little shopping bag for her kitchen/cash register experience. Mostly I wanted to practice putting felt pieces together in anticipation of the felt block I’m working on. I used colors of felt I happened to have handy, and blanket stitched it (not well, but I did blanket stitch!) up.

Then, last night after Bella went to sleep, I was inspired to try my hand at painting little wooden dolls. I was inspired by lovely little dolls like these, or this one.

You can see here, the first one I did is on the left with the oddly blobby eyes. I never claimed to be good at this!

But I must say I didn’t expect all of this to be rejected out of hand by their recipient. She said she just “doesn’t like” the little green shopping bag, and the dolls are “bad and angry.”

Back to the drawing board!

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By admin, June 11, 2009 2:27 am

For ages now, I’ve been working on getting Bella to reduce the amount of milk she drinks; specifically, milk in bottles. This has been a huge struggle for me, because her comfort items are breasts and bottles, in that order, but both very very important to her. She really doesn’t have a blanket or anything like that, any kind of comfort object. But I really want her to eat more actual food, and less milk. I’m thrilled to report that I’ve finally gotten her 100% off of formula (who would’ve thought a child could LIKE that taste?), but she is still taking bottles (1% milk with a tiny bit of sugar).

Due to this situation, I find myself struggling all the time for exciting ways to tempt her to eat food. It doesn’t help that she is in the midst of the Worst Ever Picky Toddler phase right now. My lil’ one who at 9 months old would slurp curry sauce off of my spoon now refuses… well, pretty much everything. So I put spinach in anything that she will eat: egg drop soup, spaghettio’s, scrambled eggs. I offer a LOT of peas, because she does love peas. And the other day I tried again a tactic I had used when she was a new eater, but not in a long time… the muffin tin snack tray.

There it is. It looks so pretty, doesn’t it? I’ll let you figure out what’s in it; the only thing I think might be a little unrecognizable are the mother’s graham bumpers, which is an organic cereal that is super sweet and delicious, right up her ally.

She didn’t eat much of this. I think she ate the cheerio’s, and that was all. *sigh* I’ll keep trying!

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By admin, June 10, 2009 1:37 am

My first time jumping in to WIP Wednesday, so be gentle… I’m all new and vulnerable and stuff. This is the Lion brand baby hoodie towel, supposedly anyways. I’m not sure I’ll ever have the patience to finish it, since it is pretty borrrrring to knit. I do a row here or there where my daughter will let me.

Can one of you knitting gurus out there tell me how I’m supposed to knit past the limits of my needle size? Do I need to switch to circulars? Because circulars make my head go BOOM!

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By admin, June 9, 2009 12:38 pm

With this whole posting every day thing, am I? I blame myself, and the lack of a schedule we have around here these days. Bella’s sleep has been all over the place to the point where I literally broke down and cried the other night at 3 am when she would. not. go. to. sleep. Thank goodness for my husband, I need all the help I can get!

But Bella is now and always has been a high needs child. Never a mellow child.

Her latest antics include, if I raise my voice the slightest bit and for any reason (hello, biting my nipple!), she will stand up, stare me dead in the eye, and scream as loud as she can right in my face… “YOU STOP DOIN’ THAT! STOP DOIN’ THAT MOMMY!” It gives new meaning to the phrase “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

On the bright side it’s made me much more aware of my tone of voice, and I try to watch myself and stay more gentle… which is indeed what I prefer anyways. I was raised in a home with lots of yelling and loud people, so I tend to be fairly loud myself even if I’m not angry. I try every day to be a more gentle parent; honestly the “hardass” approach simply does not work with this child, at all, and even though I was raised that way it’s time to learn a new way.

I am not, however, permissive. Today after the aforementioned nipple attack, my subsequent holler, and Bella’s subsequent SCREAMING in my face, I took a few deep breaths and sat her down for a talk. I told her that I did not mean to yell, but that she hurt me and needs to be more careful nursing. I told her that screaming at Mommy like that is not ok and hurts my feelings. She replied with a hug and said that the bite was “a accident.” Sweet angel.

Later at the playground, she came up to me again and said “I sorry yellin’ at you Mommy!”

And again at the bookstore. “I sorry I yelled at you Mommy!”

Think it’s getting through? Now, rinse, lather, repeat times a million!

Who knew that my daughter would be teaching me so much? Who knew that so much of mothering would involve learning how to let go? Let go, and don’t hold a grudge, because how can you against a tempestuous two year old? Let go, and don’t bother making up some big punishment that she cannot understand anyways. Let go, because this is just a phase, and there is a more gentle way to handle it. Just take a deep breath, and let go.

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By admin, June 4, 2009 11:23 pm

Check out my beautiful kale, growing happily in a pot on my balcony!  I am so excited!

I’ve been dying to try my hand at actually growing some food, but we are currently renting at our home in Morgantown, so I don’t want to plant stuff in the ground.  Not only do I not have landlord permission, but if we wind up moving in October I’d have to leave all my goodies behind.  Last year in our (also rented) other house, I grew one lone red bell pepper, and a small basket of cherry tomatoes.  I killed some lettuce, so the kale made me quite nervous.  But look how pretty!  I actually cut some of that back and threw it into a fabulous spicy Mexican-esque chicken soup I made.  Yum!

Here’s a few more plants.

That’s a yellow tomato plant, and you can see a blueberry bush and a red bell pepper plant in the background.  Check out my wee tomatoes!  Squeeeeeeeeeeee!

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By admin,

My hero is my husband.  He has always been an inspiration to me, from the moment we first met.  He just gave so much of himself to me, right away, and never wavered in his love of me.

I was a smoker when we met, and I was one of those really obnoxious smokers who did not understand why other people didn’t like cigarette smoke, or why throwing cigarettes on the ground IS indeed littering, or why smoke in restaurants is so annoying.  But for some reason, I never wanted to smoke around my husband.  I did, I mean, don’t get me wrong.  But I always felt guilty.  I had always known I wanted to quit smoking (my mom died of lung cancer at age 51), so once things started getting heavy with him… once I knew I wanted to have his babies… I quit.  With his support, and without it, I never could have done it.

These days he still inspires me with his strength, calm, and love for his family.  He can usually stay cool when I am flying off the handle, losing my shit in the face of overwhelmingly frustrating toddler behavior.  When I need to take a break, he is always there to step up for me and his daughter.

Meanwhile, he is still working on our business, PacketProtector, updated his CCIE certification, and is speaking at 2 conferences in the next few months, including DefCon.  Usually while I sit around chatting on mommy message boards, he is doing something productive.

And, to top it all off…

He does the laundry.  That’s right bitches, be jealous.  (And never mind that he mostly does it because I’m terrified I’ll fall down the stairs if I try to carry those big baskets down our two big flights of stairs!)

Baby, you rock my socks off!

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By admin, June 1, 2009 3:53 pm

My daughter is going through some developmental leaps, all of a sudden.  I am feeling a bit bewildered;  whether this is due to PMS or her ability to suddenly “read” so many books, I’m not sure.

When I say “read,” of course she is not really reading.  She is pretending to read books she’s memorized.  But the latest, “I like me,” really took me by surprise!  We’ve only read that about 10 or 15 times… a far cry from the dozens upon dozens of times we’ve read many of the other books she can “read” that way.

She put herself to sleep for the first time this week, making her mama proud and sad all at once.  I gave her a bottle and tucked her in on the couch with a tiny little pillow and a little stuffed panda bear given to us by a flight attendant on the way home from San Antonio.  She went right to sleep, believe it or not.

She now says things like this.  Me:  “Bella, do you need to go potty?”  Bella:  “NO Mommy, I just WENT!”  She sounds so grown up, I am not even sure how to deal with it!

Meanwhile, she is also tantruming more than ever, louder and harder than ever.  She is far less reasonable than usual, crankier, and more willing to fight.  I’m seriously bewildered and at my wits end.

So I better enjoy this nap while I can!