Sweet Baby – Week 28

Initially this post was titled “Sweet Baby – Week Uh. Uh. Uh.” but I looked in my calendar and saw that this is indeed week 28. 7 calendar months but only 6.5 real ones.

STILL NO TEETH.

Man, when I think back to a few months ago when I first saw those teeth glinting at me in the sunlight from under his gums and I was all, hey, he’ll have teeth before Christmas! I want to cry for the naive wee parent-ette I was then. I live in hope that one morning I’ll see a full mouthful but I know the way these things work. It ain’t gonna happen.

Let’s see. This week we continued our attempts to Nap In the Crib. I did great – but then I’m a little eager for sleep, regardless of location – and Trombone, well, he did not so great. On Thursday I bought a copy of Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Everyone! So Do What I Say, I’m A Genius! by Dr. Marc Weissbluth. I also bought three Boynton books (Barnyard Dance, Pajama Time! and Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs!) and a small Dr. Seuss (Mr. Brown can Moo – Can You?) for the baby. We had a gift card for Chapters. Obviously.

I must tangent. What’s up with the parenting books? I have read several and noticed a recurring theme: they all read like magazine articles that got enbiggened to Real Book size by an enbiggening machine (AKA grad student)

The first evidence of this came in a book called Baby Bliss by Dr. Harvey Karp (Called The Happiest Baby on the Block in North America) Baby Bliss puts forward the theory that babies are born 12 weeks too early so that their heads don’t permanently cripple us when they come down the birth canal. In order, then, to soothe the newborn baby, one must perform 5 actions which start with S. Shush. Swaddle. Swing. (or jiggle) (hold the baby on its) Side. Suck. (No, one does not suck the baby. One allows the baby to suck.) If one is exact about these actions, the baby will think it is still in the womb and not cry because would you cry if you were still in the womb? I wouldn’t.

There, I just told you everything the book tells you. (please don’t sue me, Dr. Harvey Karp) Except the book tells you over and over and over again, with anecdotes and illustrations and in-set boxes reminding you “Babies are born too soon! Help them feel at home and they’ll fit into yours!” and the good doctor’s theories on colic, gas, gas drops, colic cures, infant brain development, how that affects colic, how colic is related to gas, how gas is probably not your fault, nor is the colic so just do the 5 s’s and you’ll be fine!

You get the idea.

A tangental aside: What was really useful was the DVD version. It was a scant 30 minutes long and showed Dr. Harvey Karp hypnotizing babies. These screamy newborns would get Swaddled, laid on their Sides, Shushed, (jiggled) Swung and given something to Suck and they would just POOF shut right off into blissland. It was astounding and a very useful tool for us. We didn’t have to get to the level of all 5 S’s very often because Trombone only had nonsensical screaming fits from weeks 5 – 16? roughly? and not that whole time, but when we needed him most, the vision of Dr. Harvey Karp wooing newborns was right there in our heads to coach us.

We thought it unfortunate that Dr. Harvey Karp had seen fit to create a whole franchise around one good idea but we didn’t begrudge him, necessarily. Man travels around the country wooing newborn babies, he’s got expenses, right?

Then I was lent a copy of The Lull-A-Baby Sleep Plan by Dr. Cathryn Tobin. I read the whole thing. It’s all about sleep habits, how babies depend on you for sleep, how the best time to teach your baby to sleep is when the Window of Opportunity (WOO) is wide open (when the WOO is WO?) Then you’re to sit by your baby’s side and talk. Chatter soothingly (lullingly) or sing softly or read aloud from Quantitative Methods for Political Analysis, Volume I – whatever keeps a constant soothing buzz going so your little dude will relax & go to sleep.

Again, though, pages upon pages of reiteration and rephrasing the same idea twelve different ways with a brave attempt to make each chapter seem new and differently relevant. Just like that sentence. I have an Arts degree. I recognize padding an idea when I see it.

And yes, I did try the lull-a-baby solution with Trombone one time. My throat got dry, I ran out of conversation topics and he spent the whole time kicking his feet and generally getting more worked up. I guess he disagreed with my theories around political analysis. Whatever. He’s just a baby.

Finally, Dr. Marc Weissbluth graced my bedside table. (I am proud, actually, that I have read these three books and paid for none of them.) He padded his idea so much that it took me till three quarters of the way through to realize what it was. What he gently refers to as the “Extinction” method for solving your child’s terrible sleep problems is actually the method where you leave your child in his bed to cry. Ah, I see! He has chapters and sections and everything, where he describes every sleep-related problem in the universe that your child might have, tells you how your child will be a serial killer if he doesn’t nap properly, tells you all the things you might try then tells you how none of those things will work well/for long/for keeps and guess where all the roads lead? To your child crying in his bed. (I’m not for or against crying it out. I am for a coherent argument, presented in an easy-to-understand format. And much as you might disbelieve me, given what you are currently reading, I actually am a big fan of brevity.) Here are a bunch of studies (no footnotes, though – man, I have been married to SA too long if I’m sneering “Cite, please” at a pop psych book) backing him up. There are a bunch of anecdotes (I must admit a fondness for anecdotes, especially the ones that describe my own child to me and give me hope) taken from his practice as a pediatrician. And everywhere are the in-set boxes. “Parenting tip!” they say, “You don’t feed your baby junk food! So don’t let your baby get junk sleep!”

I don’t disagree with the parenting tips or with Dr. Marc Weissbluth, necessarily. He sounds like a smart, sensible man. Dr. Cathryn Tobin and Dr. Harvey Karp, also smart, sensible people. I agree that children need quality sleep. I think Dr. Marc Weissbluth is onto something with the nap scheduling (ah ha ha hahahahahaha ha haHAHAHAWooooooohhh hahahaha) and the early bedtimes and the different methods of teaching babies to self-soothe. But you know, parenting book-writers, if you don’t have anything else to say, maybe you should write, you know, a pamphlet or something rather than a whole book.

Trombone continues to enjoy food and drink. Of late he is particularly enamoured of my jewel-bright green water bottle so I bought him his own small cup to use to pour water on himself.

Sadly I have no photographic evidence of this. Yet.

He is now using conversational tones in his babble. For example, one early morning last week when I was preparing to nurse him, Saint Aardvark turned on the light in his bedroom to try and find the soother-which-always-rolls-under-the-crib. Trombone paused mid-nurse, looked up at the light and said, “There’s a LIGHT? Why didn’t anyone SAY anything?” Only it sounded like, “Blah BLAH blah?”

When he pushes up on his arms now you can see his biceps ripple.

A not-so-gentle-hippy on the bus the other day told me Trombone is going to be a lady-killer with his big blue eyes and his red curly hair. Then he told me that chivalry isn’t dead: it’s just waiting for the feminists to make up their damn minds. Then I got on the bus before him, at his behest.

He (Trombone, that is) had his first swimming class on the weekend. He was a little unsure at first but then he cottoned on to the thousands of plastic toys floating around in the pool. Once he had a red, plastic rake shoved halfway down his throat, he greatly enjoyed the swimming class.

One day, he was going through my wallet and stealing my things.

So I took it away.

The last few days have been rough. Partly it’s the teeth, partly it’s the crawling-lust, partly it’s that the ground is snowy and icy and not passable by stroller so I’m hauling him around in the bjorn all the time. Partly it’s that he would prefer to only break for two 40 minute naps a day where I continue to cramp his style by insisting on more and longer.

But since we started reading to him from Winnie the Pooh before bed, his attention span has increased greatly. And since I started holding the board books out of reach so he can’t eat them but must read along with me, he has started laughing before the funny bits and turning the pages himself.

And when I offer him his teddy bear, he says “yay.” Or sometimes, “Yayayayayayayay.”
So it’s all right, really.

And yay that he got his father’s nose!