Sprout

Guest Post on Cycling and More Good News

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

I have a contributor post over at the local smart growth blog Greater Greater Washington on the progress my town has made over the past few years on improving our bicycle-friendliness. We still have a lot to improve on, but I’m really proud of what we’ve done as a volunteer for our bicycle committee.

Check out the post: In Rockville, a quiet bicycling transformation takes place.

In totally unrelated good news, Sprout has fallen asleep in his crib (as opposed to in my arms) for three days now! He once fell asleep once in his crib while Chris stepped out of the room to wash his hands post-diapering, but that was a total fluke. In contrast, this shows the slow transition is paying off. In other, other good news, Sprout has learned to clap on his own. As of today, he actually recognizes the word “clap” and will excitedly bang his hands together when you say it. Needless to say, I’m a proud mama.

Six Months Gone By

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 10 Comments

We celebrated Sprout’s half-year birthday on Monday. If one minute with your hand on a hot stove feels an hour and an hour with an attractive person feels like a minute, then six months with an infant breaks the space-time continuum. The time before he was born feels like a different person’s life. These past six months really have been a whole life – his life so far – packed into a small slice of time.

Some people say that a child’s babyhood flies for the parent. Perhaps I’ll feel that way in the future, but now every day is so densely packed with experiences and emotions that it seems longer than it is.

I’ve never learned so much in such a short period of time. I had zero experience with newborns and little with babies before Sprout was born. Worrying about exams in graduate school is nothing compared to the potential for screwing up a tiny life. Also, learning-by-doing isn’t my forte. While I read stacks of parenting tomes beforehand, nothing teaches you the rhythms of your child like hands-on experience. He couldn’t tell me what was wrong, so I had to listen, experiment, and sometimes struggle. Chris and I shared stories, tips, and observations, building a better partnership than even before. But until recently, I didn’t realize how much confidence I’d gained. The other day, I picked How To Rock Your Baby off of our bookshelf, just to see if there was anything in their list of simple tips I had forgotten. Except for a couple of craft ideas, I kept thinking, “Nope, I know how to do that,” in response to every chapter.

In these past months, I’ve also cycled through so many intense emotions. Pain and joy and fear during the birth. After bringing him home, there was uncertainty if he was eating enough, fear of bumping his head, terror at the thought of health problems, exhaustion in the middle of the night, desperation at his constant crying, adoration when I watched him sleep, and amazement when I considered his very existence. I’ve never felt so many conflicting feelings, piling up like so many stacks of baby clothes threatening to topple over. Before, I could go through entire days with little change in my emotional state. Now, I may cycle through several before I even step out the door.

My schedule has gone through a complete upheaval too. I stayed home for the first three months of Sprout’s life. Full-time child care and housework is the opposite of my “regular” job, which involves a lot of meetings and writing on a computer. Then, when I went back to work, Chris quit his fine dining job. When you’ve hardly seen your husband on weekday nights for the past few years, it’s a welcome change to have him home. While most people spend less time with their spouse when a baby comes, I fortunately ended up with much more.

And of course, Sprout himself has gone through huge changes in his first six months. He started as a fragile, squirming little being who either cried or watched passively. Now, he’s a sturdy, even squirmier little person who has his own personality and preferences. I’ve particularly enjoyed watching him develop facial expressions and abilities in the past three months. As newborns don’t smile, it was so fulfilling to watch him learn to smile hesitantly at first and then whole-heartedly. It was even wonderful watching him learn to frown. When he’s displeased, he turns down his entire mouth in a cartoon half-O. Around the same time, he started babbling, making a variety of grunts, coos, whines, and gibberish. He also started laughing, a high-pitched, burbly giggle. In contrast to our initial interaction that was limited to “crying” or “not crying,” we started being able to truly engage with him.

Over the highs and lows of the last months, my favorite part has been getting to know him as a little person. I can’t wait to learn even more.

Who Needs Sleep?

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 7 Comments

“Who needs sleep?
Well, you’re never going to get it
Who needs sleep?
Tell me what that’s for
Who needs sleep?
Be happy with what you’re getting
There’s a guy whose been awake since the Second World War.”
– Barenaked Ladies, Who Needs Sleep?

I used to think my baby was a good sleeper. Now? I take back anything I ever said to that extent – I was clearly jinxing myself.

Sprout has never slept much during the day. Even in his first month, he slept no more than 12 or 13 hours daily, when the average baby sleeps at least 16 hours. Although I was nervous, our pediatrician reassured us that some kids just need less sleep than others. Nothing to worry about, especially because he’s a particularly chill kid.

Unfortunately, when he did sleep during the day, it tended only to be on my lap. When I tried to put him in his crib, he would open his eyes just before his head touched the mattress. I ended up stuck on the couch in “baby jail” quite a bit.

But things started getting better in month three, when I returned to work. Sprout was waking up only once during the night and rousing for the day around 7 AM. My husband, Chris, who is a stay-at-home-dad even figured out how to put him down for naps twice a day.

At month four, we decided to start a gentle form of “sleep training.” First, I would start rocking Sprout to sleep during bedtime rather than nursing him to sleep, so we had multiple options for sleep inducement. Then, rocking him to sleep, I would slowly decrease the amount of time between when he closed his eyes and when I put him in his crib. By stretching this period out over months, it would in theory teach him to fall asleep on his own without resorting to “cry it out” methods. Despite getting off-course when he caught his first cold and having one night of cranky annoyance, I was able to rock him to sleep in less than 10 minutes by the end of last week.

Then this weekend came and went in a blurry disaster. For three days straight, he has woken up every two hours for no apparent reason. I want to start moaning “braaainssss.” Potentially, this might be a brief phase. After all, this post from Pregnant Chicken points out “babies are constantly changing” and this other post from Sweet Madeline says, “There is no rhyme or reason or explanation!” But there’s also the fact that my mom recently informed me that I woke up every night every two hours for the first two years of my life. Even considering that possibility nearly brings me to a Darth Vader-type despair.

But my sleep-addled mind has come to two conclusions.

First, that you cannot treat a baby like a project. Babies refuse to follow Gantt charts or timetables. This is logically obvious – I know my son is a little person with his own little personality – but very difficult to accept, especially at 3 AM. I’m a planner by nature; I love crossing things off my to-do lists. But Sprout does and will continue to do things on his own time and I have to respect that. While establishing schedules is good, I have to make space and not rush the natural unpredictability of childhood.

Perhaps more importantly, I’m already learning that I can’t protect him from everything, even now. Although being sleepless myself is terrible, watching him toss and turn is even worse. Much of the time, he’s crying in his sleep, which then causes him to wake up. Watching him strikes fear into my own heart because I personally suffer from terrible, vivid nightmares. Although I don’t remember them consciously, I had night terrors as a toddler. I think I sometimes unconsciously deprive myself of sleep so that I don’t remember my dreams. Even though I have no idea what’s going on in his head, I worry that his imagination is causing pain rather than joy. And if it is, now or in the future, there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. All I can do is hold him and tell him how much I love him, and accept that it’s enough.