The Latest Post-Partum Depression Fix: Flamboyant Baby Boy Clothes (from the Momplex Blog archive)

June 5, 2014February 27, 2023 JennyLeave a comment

My baby son is dressed like something out of Brokeback Mountain right now. He’s wearing a plaid flannel get-up that runs from head to toe with mother-of-pearl snap-buttons. My husband almost barfed when he saw it this morning. I purposely dressed the baby in something completely horrid-adorable (there is such a hybrid, you know), because I need a good laugh. There’s one to be had somewhere at this stage, isn’t there? I mean, sure, he can’t fall asleep or stay asleep without gobs of hair-raising crying or being bagged. And sure I basically have to wear him on me 10 or so hours every day. But isn’t there a bright side?

Heck, yeah! It’s the fact that little 12-pound baby boys look downright hilarious in flannel coveralls with mother-of-pearl buttons. They also look pretty funny in fake antennae from Gymboree, particularly when they’re crying. Oh, and a miniaturized huntsman cap with earflaps, like something out of the movie Fargo, is an excellent outfit for babies with colic, too.

He’s crying right now in his swing. He’s been up since 6 a.m. It’s almost 9 a.m., and I’ve been trying to get him to sleep since 7 a.m. His brow, as usual, is all knitted up . (I think the kid’s going to need Botox before he’s four.) His little stiff John McCain arms are shaking, and his mouth is in the shape of a big O, wailing. My nerves are completely frazzled, and I’m so tired and jittery that I’d probably fail a roadside sobriety test. I’ve had the reprise of this song, which I blasted on the radio to lull him to sleep in the car yesterday, running like a broken record through my head for about 18 hours now. I stink like spit-up.

But, man, I still don’t think it’s an emotional breakdown that a size 0-3 fuschia leopard-print unitard with a miniature clip-on bowtie couldn’t remedy. And, after all, it’s not couthe to start pouring martinis this early in the morning…

Is it?

babies · colic · motherhood · sleep

Infants are Such (Sun)Downers

April 11, 2009April 9, 2014 Jenny4 Comments

It’s 10:20 p.m. Both my kids are in bed. But really, they’re still running around in my head, one of them saying, “Mom! Watch what I can do! Look at me! Look at me!” and the other just going, “Waaaaah! Waaaah! Waaaah! Waaaah!” I’m not sure which one makes me want more to crack my head open against the wall. It’s sort of a dead heat for now. No, wait. It’s definitely the infant, because while my preschooler’s incessant need for an audience has been quelled by the sandman for the night, my baby is now going on hour four of fussing and fighting sleep. (I have been lying down near him, patting, shusshing, breastfeeding, rocking, blah, blah, blah — for most of that time, and now my husband’s on his shift, because I’m near my breaking point.) The baby does this every night, and every night as we tag-team him through the colic, it drives my husband and me to the brink of insanity.

Why are some babies’ witching hours so much more horrendous and long-winded than others? And more pointedly — a question I intend to ask the Creator when and if we get the chance to meet — why were we blessed with two babies that don’t know how to fall asleep?

Barring any late-night visits from the big J.C. to put things into perspective for me, I have an observation I’d like to have checked out by somebody over at the National Institute for Health:

Alzheimers and dementia patients commonly experience an agitated state in the evening hours — sometimes lasting through a fat portion of the night — that keeps them from falling asleep. As with colic, nobody knows for sure what causes this troubling phenomenon, but its existance is well documented. Called sundowning, the behavior is widely believed to be linked to end-of-the-day exhaustion. Several articles I’ve read say the agitation and sleeplessness associated with sundowning may also be linked to the following:

– an upset in biorhythms, causing the patient to have day/night confusion

– reduced lighting and increased shadows

– disorientation due to the inability to separate dreams from reality when sleeping

What’s equally compelling to me is that the nighttime restlessness associated with sundowning typically peaks in the middle stages of dementia and diminishes as the disease progresses. That’s interesting, considering that the phenomenon of late afternoon and nighttime fussiness that strikes most infants, hitting colicky ones particularly hard, also peaks in the middle stages of infanthood and diminishes as they grow out of the disease that I shall heretofor refer to as Womb Exodus Syndrome.

At any rate, I think I’m going to start telling people that my baby is suffering from the effects of sundowning associated with infant dementia, or I.D. for short, because nobody takes colic very seriously. I’ll just coin a new term to amuse myself through this hideous, hideous stage where nothing, and I mean nothing, soothes our baby to sleep at night. And while I’m at it, I’m going to start calling dementia geriatric colic.

babies · daughters · manipulation · military life · motherhood · sleep

Not Enough Mom to Go Around (from the Momplex Blog archives)

December 17, 2008February 27, 2023 Jenny3 Comments

From the Momplex Archives:

My better half (and I really mean that) has been gone for almost three weeks, working on getting a bunch of soldiers ready for deployment. He’s in the National Guard, and what’s normally a two-week annual training in the summer turned into a three-week annual training in December. I miss all heck out of him, and not just because he makes a mean meatloaf and thinks I’m cute. It’s just been such a juggling act trying to take care of a restless 4-month-old and a 5-year-old who’s still trying to figure out how to share Mom. I was right to have dreaded this training for all the months leading up to it. During his absence, I have had at least one veritable nervous breakdown. Tonight I thought about having another but then decided I could instead just bust out the Redi-Whip and eat all the fruit in the house with whipped cream on it. Ah, self-medication.

The thing that’s eating at me is what I heard my daughter saying over the monitor as she was getting ready for bed in her room. Well, it actually started a bit before that, when she came home from the neighbor’s house to the sound of her baby brother crying (again) at bedtime (again) over his monitor (again). First, she sort of retreated to a corner behind the Christmas gifts. I am sure this is because I get so short with everyone when the baby’s crying. She didn’t want to deal with That Version of Mom. But as all kids her age seem to do, she also just couldn’t seem to resist the temptation to poke the rattlesnake with a stick. “Mom,” she said. “I have to tell you that I’m always hungry right now.” Ye Olde Bedtime Procrastination trick. So original.

“Sorry for you,” I said. “But we don’t eat at bedtime, and it’s time for bed.” I told her to get going upstairs and get ready for bed, and she snapped something snotty back at me. I think it was “FINE” or “WHATEVER” or something equally ‘tweenish. At any rate, it cost her a piece of our usual bedtime routine.

“No book tonight,” I answered. She knows this means she’s crossing the line. She turned on the ball of her foot, nose up in the air, and started stomping theatrically away from me. “No story either,” I then added. “You need to change your attitude before you lose songs.”

Yes, I know: We have an elaborate bedtime routine. It consists of all sorts of rituals that must occur in exactly the same order each night. Potty. Toothbrushing. Flossing. Mouthwashing. Jammies. Book. Prayers. Spoken-word improv performance by Mom or Dad. Songs. It seems like a lot, but it does the trick for us, and I totally enjoy that quality time we get together at the end of the day. Parents out there, I know you’re feeling me on this one, right?

Anyway, as she was upstairs putting on her jammies, I heard her say that she wishes she had a different mom. That she doesn’t get any time with her mom, “not one speck.” She started whimpering, “I love my baby brother! He just gets all of her time. I will go away and never see her again, and she won’t even miss me!” Poke a butter knife in your heart and turn it five times to get the full effect of how this made me feel. Because I totally miss my time alone with my daughter. I miss having quality time with her at all. Particularly with my husband gone, she has gotten the bottom of the barrel in that department. It flat out sucks.

When I went upstairs, I asked her if I’d correctly heard her say she didn’t want me to be her mom anymore. She said, “Yup” and when I nodded, she said, “But I was saying it because I feel like you don’t have time for me anymore. I feel like you’re always taking care of the baby, and I don’t even have a mom anymore.” I pointed out that we always had good time together at bedtime, and she retorted, “Yeah, but that’s the only good time I really get with you.” She’s right. Her eyes were full of held-back tears, which started spilling down her nose as she tried to raise her quivering chin in a show of fortitude. What could I do, but scoop her close in my arms and hold her tightly in the bed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It must feel terrible to feel like that. You are so important to me, and I’m sorry that this hard time is going on for so long.” Words don’t go very far with a kid her age, though. I know I have to carve out better time for her. I know that my world needs to quit revolving around the baby’s sleeping skills, or lack thereof. Which makes me all that much more obsessed with getting him to sleep better. For the love of all that’s holy, can this baby please learn to nap alone?

It’s amazing, how my daughter asked me today to explain what “below zero” means as well as asked me who made God. These are high-minded questions for a kid her age, and they bend my brain into a pretzel. As complicated and layered as she can be, nothing she says or asks fazes me quite as much as this recurring theme of Not Enough Time with Mom. How the hell did Mrs. Walton do it? Pleeeaaaze, Mr. Walton, come home!