I Thought Parenting Was Supposed to be Easy...

WARNING - if you want to see cute pictures and videos of Mira, skip ahead to the end and ignore the wordy crap. If you feel like getting inside my head, keep reading. :)

This post is going to be more reflective than picture overload or Mira updates but what the hey, maybe someone will be interested in what I'm saying. If anything I can look back on this in a couple of years and snicker at myself for thinking I'm having a hard time now.

So I've been really struggling with what to do about Mira's night waking and how hard it is for me to get her to take a nap during the day. I talk to friends who talk about how quickly they got their babies on a schedule and how important it is to get the baby in a routine and they never let their babies do this and so on and so on and I just worry and worry that if I don't do the same thing now, Mira will be really difficult to handle in the near future. I worry that I'll do something to scar her for life (more than a parent usually scars their child for life, that is), and I've been so stressed about how to approach this that I've lost sleep and shed some tears over it. I've worried that when she wakes up at night and I bring her to bed with me that she'll learn only to sleep in bed with me and I've imagined the worst sorts of screaming temper tantrums when she's finally banned from our room. I've felt like an incompetent, useless, worthless excuse for a mother, I've felt so overwhelmed, I've felt angry at myself for my indecisiveness, and I've wished someone would just tell me what I'm supposed to do that will be guaranteed to work. I've read and heard all sorts of advice on what to do, from giving her increasing amounts of time by herself to help her self soothe, all the way to just letting her cry it out. I've been exhausted and tired, not just from the night waking but from my stress level. For awhile I've felt like I was handling this by myself, because when Mark and I are both home I was still the only one to get Mira when she woke up. That's changed since Mark became aware that I need to not be the only one doing this - that's helped tremendously.

So after weeks of agonizing and stressing and worrying and feeling angry and resentful that my perfect baby who used to sleep through the night has regressed and I can't seem to fix it, I had a couple of "eureka" moments. The first one came a few nights ago when I was rocking Mira back to sleep and I was thinking about how fast she's growing up and I had this sudden thought: "When she's bigger and I don't need to rock her to sleep anymore, I'm really going to miss this." Well, that's all it took. My emotional outlook has done a complete 180 since I realized that. I had this epiphany that life is short, Mira will only be a baby for a year of her entire life (and half of that year is already over) and before I know it, she'll be too "big and grown up" to get hugs from Mommy anymore. I realized that I absolutely have to savor every second of this baby time, even if it means I'm more sleep deprived, because once it's gone, it really will be gone, and I would just hate it if I looked back on this time of her life and felt regret that I didn't spend more time cuddling her when she was little. After all, it's not like hugging or cuddling or rocking your baby will do anything detrimental to them.

So that part got cleared up. The next thing I did - and I'm kind of surprised I didn't think of this sooner - I asked my parents what they did with us when they encountered this problem. Funny how your parents suddenly become geniuses when you become a parent yourself. I figured that whatever they said they did with us I should probably try myself, since I would say my sisters and I are about as normal and well-adjusted as you can get and we have great relationships with both parents.

I asked my dad what they would do when we woke up in the middle of the night - namely, did they ever let us cry it out or did they come into our room? "Oh, we never let you girls cry it out," he said. Somehow I knew that would be the answer. If we needed our parents, they always came to us. I've always had this innate sense that no matter what my parents will always be there for me and that may be part of it.

Next I asked my mom what she suggested that I do. Her opinion was that she doesn't understand why there's this push to get kids independent so soon. When we were babies, if we woke up crying she would take us into bed with her - which is pretty much exactly what I've been doing. She said that it's completely normal for a baby to need emotional and physical comforting from its parents and it doesn't make sense to her to deprive a baby of comforting when it's needed, just to make sure that the baby becomes more "independent." That will come with time. In fact, she said, she thinks that the more physical bonding time the baby gets when it's little will probably make them more prepared sooner to be on their own that way. The more you push away to encourage independence, the more likely the child will be clingy for longer and the more likely s/he will feel some sort of void. To me, this made a lot of sense. Kinda like how if you push a kid to be potty trained before they're ready it just makes things worse and accomplishes nothing. When they're ready, it'll happen. And my mothering instincts tell me that if my baby needs me, I should go to her instead of listening to her cry. And I have to say that I feel that whatever my parents did with me, worked, so their methods deserve serious consideration.

So the bottom line, according to my mom, is that "Having a baby is definitely inconvenient for you. But it's only a phase. And the more time you put into it now, the more she gets out of it."

So I guess I'll be downloading some good books onto my iPhone to read in the middle of the night while I'm rocking Mira back to sleep, but if I can just remember why I'm doing this, I think I can handle it.

Okay, enough introspective crap. Time for some good stuff! The other night I gave Mira a bubble bath for the first time. I took a handful of bubbles and blew on them - and this is what she thought.

I can hold my feet AND clap them together!

Playing in the front yard.

She is sooooooo close to sitting on her own! Okay I guess she can sit on her own for a little while but you still have to watch her because sometimes she forgets that she can't just throw herself backwards anymore. She's almost got it though! She keeps trying to scoot forward - luckily she hasn't figured that out quite yet. She gets really mad though because she scoots backwards and can't figure out why. She can pass objects from one hand to another and her version of clapping her hands is flapping her arms up and down. It's so funny and cute. I'm trying to introduce a sippy cup and sometimes she gets the hang of it and sometimes she just wants to use it as a teething toy.

I just love how happy she is! People have already been suggesting (not very subtly) that we should have another baby just because of how cute Mira is. My response is that having one cute well-behaved baby is no guarantee that any subsequent baby will be either. In fact, having kids is sort of like gambling in Vegas - you should stop while you're ahead! Well and another reason is that if I were to have another kid, I would want to wait awhile - like 4-ish years - so that I could spend plenty of time with the new child without as much competition from a needy 2 or 3 year old. And I know Mark would never go for that. So I figure this way I can focus all my time and resources on my one child, and the research says only children are just as well-adjusted socially than kids with siblings - the bonus being there won't be siblings for her to get into fights with.

Here's a video of her clapping her feet together. The crickets are from a mobile on the side of her crib.

And some more pics...

Most beautiful baby ever

Hmm, my legs appear to be crooked...

Yup, I still love to smile and grab my feet!

I guess the bottom line is that everyone has a different way of parenting and whatever works for you, works for you. As long as the child grows up to be happy and well-adjusted, the rest doesn't really matter.