Kathryn
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Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Kathryn" journal:
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03:58 pm
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whine of the day
I think I should only have to deal with one species' urine in any given hour.
Current Mood: wet
Current Music: "Splash, mommy! Messy!"
Tags: lillian, parenting, potty training
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03:13 pm
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This is how it starts
We recorded an episode of Bob the Builder during the Week We Let the TV Raise the Baby. I resisted showing it to Lillian, a LOT. For DAYS. Because it is a boy show.
I bought her shoes that did not stay on securely, that interfered with her ability to run and play, because the only shoes that DID stay on securely were olive drab and navy, or black and silver, or brown and orange. Boy shoes. Mind you, my comfy shoes are white and navy, and I am not a boy.
Months ago, I let her pick out a book at the bookstore. She chose a book called "I Love Trucks." I almost put it back. Because it is a boy book.
What the hell is wrong with me?!!? How can I purge this awful instinct, which if I saw it in anyone else I would rant about it for hours? She's not a living doll to dress up, she's a human being, a strong, tough human being who loves to play rough and hard. Ack.
Tags: gender wars, lillian, parenting
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11:38 am
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adventures in parenting
Lillian was trying to feed me animal crackers. Yes, so cute, but she needs to eat them and I don't. So I was doing what she does when she doesn't want to eat, clamping my mouth shut and turning away (and trying not to laugh). Lily was laughing and laughing and trying to pry my lips apart and shove the animal cracker inside, saying "Noo! Noo! Noo!"
Then she sat back, looked at me, and reached out and pressed my nose and said "Beep!" (We play the nose-beeping game a lot.) Well, I burst into absolutely unrestrained laughter, at which point she hucked the cracker into my mouth and looked quite pleased with herself.
Tags: lillian, parenting
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12:25 pm
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Helicopters vs. submarines
Are you familiar with the term "helicopter parent" ? In a nutshell, it refers to the parent who is always hovering around her kid, ready to leap in and lend a hand. Every teacher has a helicopter parent horror story; you can find dozens of them by googling. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Oh, are you back already? OK. The urge to helicopter around is very, very strong at this age; it's so easy for Lillian to capsize over and hurt herself, and she's so small that she can very easily get pushed aside by larger children who are neither mean nor selfish, just two, and therefore developmentally appropriately concerned only with themselves and with their own happiness. (You can model polite, sensitive behavior for a two year old, and you had better if you want them to ever start being a worthwhile human being, but their boundless, overboiling minds and personalities are literally incapable of internalizing it until they are older.) I love her like I love my own heart, like I love my own skin, and I want her to sail through her entire life, cradle to grave, without ever experiencing anything that so much as makes her brow furrow. . .
. . . but that's not what's best for her. What's best for her, particularly if she's going to be small, is that she learn to push back a little, to hold on to toys when bigger children try to take them from her. If she practices the confidence to assert her own bodily sovereignity now, maybe she'll still have that confidence when she's seven, or twelve, or sixteen, or twenty-two. She needs to know that if she cracks her head or stubs her toe, she can cope with that, either by having a little cry and then recovering or by looking to get the help she wants and needs. She has to figure out for herself that if two people want the same toy, well, something has to give. And she's never going to learn any of that if I'm always stepping in and taking that power away from her.
That's not to say that I'm not there, not watching. Some things are too dangerous to learn about by doing, like traffic, and butcher knives, and drain cleaner, and strange dogs (or strange men). But instead of being a helicopter, I think I want to be a submarine parent, running silent and deep, but constantly with the sonar running to monitor the waters around my child for land mines and enemy ships. Maybe even take them out before she's even aware of them, so that she can feel safe navigating her own waters.
Current Mood:  contemplative
Tags: lillian, parenting, submarine parent
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06:46 pm
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Now is a great time for all the other parents on my F-list to speak up
Suddenly -- SUDDENLY -- I find myself needing to time-out Lily. Or else do something else to punish her. Seriously like two hours ago she decided that a fun thing to do would be to pinch Mommy so hard she shrieks, and just keep doing it while laughing delightedly. This is obviously a teachable moment or whatever the hell the parenting people say it is, but what should I do? The first time, I said "No" and she did it again and I said "NO" and she did it again and I said "NO! THAT'S IT!" and put her down on the floor, where she wailed and screamed piteously for two minutes until I picked her back up again.
Not ten minutes later she was doing it again, and again we went through three "No!" iterations and then I stuck her in her crib, where she arched her back and threw a full-on tantrum. We had kisses and cuddles after three minutes or so of that, and now she is playing happily on the floor, but what the hell do I do about this? I don't want her to associate her crib with punishment, right? That should be Happy Night-Night place? She's walking (barely) and talking (barely, she has like 20 words), but I don't see a good end to, say, telling her to sit in the corner. I'm not going to smack her, no matter how much everyone swears it's totally OK. But it's also very, very obvious to me that this is the sort of thing that has to have Consequences. Help a mama out!
Tags: discipline, lillian, parenting
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11:26 am
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strong evidence that it really is just sleep deprivation
Last night, Lily slept in her crib all night long. She cried for about an hour in the middle of the night, and Erik got up a couple-three times to pat her and reassure her, but I didn't even wake up all the way. I woke up when Erik woke me, at nine o'clock, because Lily was awake. That was another nine hours of sleep, only semi-divided.
This morning, I was drinking my tea while I heard Lily playing in the recycling. I considered stopping her, made the decision that she could make a mess but wouldn't get hurt on anything in the recycling, and kept drinking my tea -- until I realized she'd been REALLY quiet for a while and I went to check to see if the baby gate into the TV room was closed.
It wasn't.
There was a slice of fudge in there.
Guess who found it?
Fudge was EVERYWHERE, all over the table and all over one of my knitting books. And I was still in my jammies and had been trying to figure out how to shower anyway.
Two days ago, this would have completely destabilized me. Today, what I did was to run a lukewarm bath in our Big Red Bathtub and have both of us get in -- I mopped the fudge off her and then washed myself off too. The whole thing was pretty funny, honestly. What a difference two nights of mediocre sleep makes.
Tags: fudge, lillian, nervous breakdown 2007, parenting, pictures, sleep, sleep deprivation
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07:08 pm
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La La La La
Man, there is no way to launch into this entry that doesn't sound like a complete drama whore calling out to customers.
OK, so I lost it yesterday, told Erik that I was having fantasies about hurting myself badly enough that they'd give me a nice calm place to take a rest. (It was a bad morning; I had to change clothes 3 times before noon. Then I was out of clothes. I had poop in my hair until 4.) Erik called the Microsoft CARES people, which are the emergency oh-shit-I'm-freaking-out people, and read my IM transcript to them. The CARES lady was of the opinion that I probably should see someone before the sun set. So that is how we ended up at the Overlake ER so that I could get an emergency psych consult!
A very nice sweet social worker saw us -- all three of us were there -- and she listened to me talk, asked me about the hurting myself thing, I told her that I didn't really want to actually get hurt as much as I just wanted a rest and saw that as a possible means to an end. She said "It sounds like this is less about suicidal ideation and more about creative problem-solving," which made me giggle. She very neatly zeroed in on the crux of the problem, namely that while I am OK with getting help, I am not OK with needing help, and therefore I'm only psychologically capable of asking for help when I don't need it, which doesn't really work. Having identified that disconnect -- and honestly, she did it with all the precision and skill of a trauma surgeon looking for an internal hemmorhage -- she lined out the various options that the hospital could offer me.
"There's urgent psychiatric evaulation, which I think I can get you into tomorrow. There's ongoing outpatient therapy, which can be either two hours a day, three days a week, or five days a week from nine AM to three PM, sort of a Therapy Day Camp option. And then, there's sleep-away camp, inpatient hospital care. Sleep-away camp is usually very short stay, two to five days. Our primary concern is the safety issue, yours and Lillian's. What do you think you need?"
I told her that I thought I was probably OK to go home, that I didn't need sleep-away camp, but that I was very interested in her professional opinion. Lillian is very important to me and I didn't want my pride to compromise her safety. She went and talked to the on-call psychiatrist, showed him her notes, came back and said "We think you need to see the urgent psychiatrist tomorrow, and that you're safe to go home today if AND ONLY IF you can get the night off. Dad, can you take the baby?" Erik stepped right up to the plate and volunteered to be on duty all night long, sleeping in the nursery with Lillian.
I slept for ten hours, thanks to heavy-duty earplugs. Lillian was up screaming for two of those hours in the middle of the night, refusing milk or juice from a sippy and pointing frantically at the door that I was on the other side of. That says pretty definitively that she doesn't desperately need to eat in the middle of the night, she just wants me.
Today, I went to see the shrinky-dink. He was a great guy, very personable, and when I told him "I want to know if you think that all I need is some sleep and a break, or if I need a little somethin-somethin to help level me out, or ongoing counseling, or what" he was pretty eager to help. I told him the whole situation, including my history of depression, and he said that in his opinion, I might have an underlying thingamabob going on, but that it was impossible to tell underneath the military-grade sleep deprivation. When he found out that I hadn't had more than two and a half or three hours of sleep at a shot for two months, and haven't been getting eight hours of sleep regularly since May ("See, seven months of that is just too much for --" "Oh, no, Doctor. May of 2006.") he said "I'm truly impressed that you walked in here of your own accord,then. I'm amazed that you aren't on the verge of a nervous breakdown every single day." ("Yeah, Doc, about that.")
So, basically, his diagnosis is sleep deprivation so severe it's causing personality and mood disorders, and he gave me three options: 1) Just flat quit tending Lily at night, letting her cry it out; 2) Hire a night nanny; or 3) spend a week at sleep-away camp. He has a 3-year-old, and two years ago they had to move to brutal Ferber cry-it-out because they were going mad, so he had a lot of sympathy but strongly recommended the first option.
"I want to make it clear," he said, "that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with children wanting to sleep with their parents. I don't think it's harming her or anything. But it's killing you; you can't take much more of this without there being severe and possibly permanent consequences. You need the sleep. It will suck for all of you, and it will be a harsh awakening for her, but she'll be OK."
So, that's what we're going to start doing. Not lookin forward to that, let me tell you. The other half of the plan is that every day, my next-door-neighbor has an hour of shuffling kids around in a minivan that she has to do (she has to drop one kid off at school and pick the other one up) and she has offered to take Lily along for that ride, so that I can get an hour to myself EVERY SINGLE DAY.
So, there you are. I still feel kind of doofy going to the ER because I couldn't handle one perfectly sweet little baby, but the shrink was very clear that this was definitely an urgent situation and that being poleaxed by this level of sleep deprivation has nothing to do with weakness or anything else, that it would happen to anyone, even Supermoms or Marines.
Current Mood: better
Tags: depression, er, erik, lillian, nervous breakdown 2007, parenting, sleep, sleep deprivation
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