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For the past few months, I have been getting several emails a day containing passages such as this, from an email titled “More Help for Your Troubled Napper”:

Difficult sleepers don't necessarily outgrow their problems, so simply ignoring the issue can result in a lifetime of sleep deprivation issues, such as obesity, depression and behavior problems... not to mention the stress on you as a parent.  

Yes, I signed up for these. The Sleep Lady, Baby Sleep Site, etc.....each one lured me in with its success stories and miraculous testimonials. Each one made me feel like a failure every time I lay down for a nap with Gracie on my chest, or rocked her back to sleep in the middle of the night. This email’s nod to parental stress is ironic, as this approach to sleep causes more stress than it resolves, or so I have come to believe.

And only now am I beginning to question the wisdom and utility of such alarmist messages about the paramount importance of sleep. I had fully bought into this idea, which pervades baby books, blogs, and even the weekly emails I get from the hospital where I gave birth, that sleep is absolutely critical to your child’s development, so much so that it trumps all else. Without adequate sleep, the unrelenting message goes, her brain will wither, neuronal connections won’t be made, and because she was only sleeping an average of 10 total hours a day, Gracie would end up a moody, fat, insecure child with ADHD and learning disabilities (seriously!).  According to this logic, sleep is so critical that if your baby isn’t sleeping through the night and taking regular naps by 4 months of age, you should devote your every waking minute to figuring out the art, science, and magic of how to get her to sleep better. Half-hour naps, like Gracie takes, are called “disaster naps,” and lead to the cardinal sin of all sleep-obsessed acolytes: allowing your baby to become OT (overtired).

And the worst part is that every sleep expert contradicts another sleep expert. You can find equally compelling advice for: following your baby’s cues vs. putting her on a schedule; putting her to bed early vs. keeping her up later to make her sleep later; and, of course, letting her cry all night, never letting her cry, and everything in between.

I am finally starting to realize: This is crazy!

The “Teaching Your Child to Sleep” message board at BabyCenter.com is proof of that. There is a 500+-page thread on “early waking” alone, where SAHMs (they've gotta be) obsess over how to solve their babies’ problem with EWU. (There is also a big old list of acronyms that you are supposed to read and master before you even start posting.) Some of these ingrates actually have babies who sleep through the night and nap for hours, but are “desperate for help” because LO (“little one”) wakes at 5 a.m., before the textbook 12 hours of sleep have elapsed. They seem to spend all day micromanaging their LOs’ naps and feedings, trying to tweak ounces in bottles and nap start-times in 5-minute increments.

I just rushed into Gracie’s room and picked her up to comfort her after she woke up crying suddenly. I eventually saw a you-know-what (see previous post) on the wall, and think it may have been crawling on her and woken her up! AGGGHHHH!!!!!

My first impulse, after comforting her and putting her back down in the crib, was to rush to my Kindle (which contains five different sleep books) or the computer to look up what I was supposed to do, according to sleep training dictates. The sleep experts would’ve likely have had me wait at least 15 minutes before going in. The fact that I picked her up as soon as I heard her cry, because it sounded different than her usual wake-up cry, would have been described as a sure path to failure.

But guess what? I put her down, still awake, and she fussed a tiny bit before falling back asleep. She may wake up again in an hour. She may wake up again every hour all night. I’ll keep going as I have been, trusting my liberal arts education-imparted critical thinking skills (still paying off those loans, in case you’re wondering) AND the sleep training knowledge to help me figure it out. And then I’ll think of Mad Men, and remind myself that at least I’m not Betty Draper. I only let Gracie play with dry cleaning bags when she is closely supervised.

I promise this will be my last post about sleep. Next post will contain something about Ben. Like maybe how much fatherhood has changed him. No, wait, let's do it now:

Our lives are slowly getting back to normal. Ben made microwave popcorn again (his most guilty pleasure) for the first time since Gracie was born (the noise! Oh no, the noise!), but he muffled the noise by pressing a throw pillow against the microwave. 

Nooooooo!!!!! I just saw a you-know-what (it has eight legs) scurry under the covers of my BED! Ben got it, but I don't know if I will be able to sleep tonight. Now that Gracie has just started letting me sleep almost the whole night? Talk about bad timing. 

I guess we better start keeping the house a bit cleaner. So much for my last post. Boo.

real Real Simple

I used to subscribe to Real Simple magazine. With each month’s new issue, I would vow to start living the Real Simple way. I would scour the detritus of my life! Ban clutter! As Edie from AbFab would say, “Surfaces, darling! Surfaces!” For years now, I’ve made the same to-do list over and over, including:

• Buy big glass jars to store grains and beans. (Because storing your food in the package in which it came is so not Real Simple.) 
• Find the article that dictated how long to keep various documents, then purge our bursting files of unnecessary bank statements and other junk. (Because nor are filing cabinets in your living room Real Simple.) 
• Make my own cleaning products out of common household substances. (Tried this one, gave up, because it's too much work to scrub your bathtub with baking soda and then redo it with Soft Scrub when you actually want it to be clean.)

Now, I’ve entered a new REAL Simple phase, having realized that it takes hours upon hours each week to achieve the kind of aesthetic “simplicity” that is prized in today’s sleek, overly-influenced-by-media world. For the first few months of this phase--can you guess when it started?--I was ashamed and apologetic for the state of our house. Now, I’m ashamed to think about how I used to judge people who lived amid clutter or even--gasp!--dirty dishes. Now, I have made peace with the state of our house, which is unlikely to change anytime soon:

• A ten-pound bag of brown rice sits on the kitchen counter permanently, next to the rice cooker, even though we have cabinet space for both. Because the only way to cook rice while holding a baby is if everything is already on the counter.
• Piles of paper are everywhere, but they are meaningful. If a bill needs to be paid, it better get let in the middle of the dining room table. 
• While once I’d imagine tasteful woven-reed baskets housing Gracie’s toys discreetly amid our objets d’art and stacks of books proving our intellectualism, we now have a system of toy piles: the pile next to the sink needs to be washed, the pile on the kitchen island is there to divert Gracie long enough for me to gobble down a few Dove promises (whose wrappers I sometimes leave in the bowl), and the other piles are where they are because what’s the point? 
• When a kind friend asks, “Where’s your vacuum?” (hint, hint), the answer is, “wherever you last vacuumed” 
• In fact, everything is kept out wherever it is used. If something is in a cabinet, or a clever objet d’art disguised as a storage container, we’ll forget to use it. Like dental floss.

In other words, every household task is neglected (save those essential to not living in utter filth and squalor) if it will allow one second more to nuzzle with/dance for/ensure the survival of Gracie, or to be spent in pursuit of sweet, elusive sleep. That, to me, is the REAL Real Simple. And for now, it's kind of refreshing.

Coming out of the dark

Remember when Gloria Estefan’s tour bus crashed? People died, and she broke her back and had an amazing comeback with an album containing this song? Much like “Through the Rain” by Mariah Carey (lyrics: I can make it through the day....) ran through my head during much of my teaching career, this song is my latest earworm. I remember hating both songs when they first came out, but up they pop at crucial moments, apparently having taken up residency in my memory in the early '90s.

I guess I’m saying that I’ve finally turned the corner--months later than most new parents--in my motherhood (ew! break out the Mom jeans and flowered mugs of tea), from feeling utter panic at all times to feeling, and sometimes successfully ignoring, mild panic at moderately frequent times. This is huge for me. Up until very recently, the following things filled me with shame and hopelessness when I compared them to my inability to accomplish them:
* The cloth diapers I researched so meticulously are sitting in a bin, waiting to be sold on Craigslist, which I’ll probably never get around to doing, while our trash fills up with endless boxes of Huggies from Costco
*Our supply of nontoxic wooden toys and European cloth toys languish while Gracie gnaws on any BPA-laden plastic item she can get her hands on, and I let her
* All my friends’ babies were drinking from bottles, allowing such things as “dreamfeeds” (the husband feeds the baby a bottle late at night, to help the baby sleep humane hours like 10 pm to 7 am) and “leaving the house for more than two hours while someone else watches the baby”
* All my friends’ babies were gobbling down solid food--organic, homemade purees or chunks of meat and vegetables, depending on the mother’s stance on baby-led weaning--while I was lucky to get Grace to accept a milligram of Gerber (oh, the shame!) baby food, if I could find the will to make it to the grocery store to buy any. Assembling the food processor and peeling carrots? I might as well try to run a marathon after not exercising for over a year.
* All my friends’ babies were, variously: Loving being toted in their mei tais/slings/Ergos (while I was still putting Grace’s joint development at risk by letting her ride in her preferred Baby Bjorn). Going out for date nights while sitters (whass that?) watched their happily sleeping babies. Sleeping while their babies slept through the night.

Ah, there is the crux of it. Grace’s inability to sleep longer than two hours at a stretch--which, of course, turns out to be my inability to let her learn how to sleep--had the domino effect of making every single other thing about parenthood difficult for me. I have been getting 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night for the past six months. Turns out, that is not so healthy. I’d heard somewhere that Barack Obama only sleeps four hours a night, so I kept saying, “If it’s good enough for Obama, it’s good enough for me!” Now I think it was Jed Bartlett, but anyway. I’m no Obama, and proud of it.

And now that I’ve started getting occasional nights of 5, or even 6, hours of sleep, the world is sparkling and new!

I now understand the origin of “I love you so much that it hurts inside” (yet another song that exposes my bad taste), and why people talk about being in love with their baby. Today while I had Grace in the Ergo (which she finally likes) while shopping at Trader Joe’s, the checkout lady (sorry, sales associate) said, “Wow, talk about being in love with Mommy.” I looked down, and Gracie had her head hinged back 90 degrees with her wide eyes gazing up at me. Maybe she was thinking, “Damn, woman, get me the hell out of this kangaroo pouch!” or dreaming of getting back to the lead ink-tainted book I let her chew on for hours on end, but I choose to believe she was gazing in adoration.
At least, that is what I do these days.