Left Coast Mama » sleep

Some Things Aren’t Any Easier the Second Time

Gwen — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:21:10 +0000

I am well aware that Quinlan is his own little man and in a lot of ways totally different than his brother. I love that Quinlan share his brother’s sense of curiosity. I am a little less enthused that he shares Aidan’s and let’s face it, mine and Anthony’s, stubbornness and inability to do things on anyone else’s timetable.

His attachement to the soother is another blog post altogether.

With Aidan the big issues were sleep in the beginning, and toilet training. Of course Quinlan came along and there was a regression in any progress we made and I was sure that he would never be trained. One thing that was never a problem, or even a real worry with Aidan was transitioning from the crib to a bed. It happened because we needed to turn the crib into a toddler bed after part or the crib rail broke. He didn’t get out of his bed at all. He went happily to sleep and in the morning he slept late and called for one of us when he wanted to get up. It got to the point that we WANTED him to get out of bed on his own.

Quinlan is being as stubborn about the toilet training as Aidan ever was. I thought in the beginning that he would be a breeze compared to Aidan. Not so, if anything he is more stubborn. Quinlan has a sense of when he goes and he tells us right after or while he is doing his business that he wants a diaper change. He can hold for long periods of time and there are a number of nights when he wakes up dry and then REFUSES to go on the toilet. Anthony had him on the toilet one morning for almost 15 minutes before he let go. I am not sure how to proceed at this point. He doesn’t want big boy underwear and our rental carpets are bad enough without adding a toddler running around naked.

Me Play Drums By Myself!

I am not sure about transitioning Quinlan from the crib to a bed. I think Anthony and I are scared about what may happen, rather than what will happen. Will Quinlan be a monster to put down for a nap or to bed at night? Anthony and I are afraid to try at this point, though we really need to get a move on if we want him in a bed by the time we move, whenever that might actually be. So we are conflicted, do we change the crib to the toddler bed and go for it? Do we keep the crib as an alternative and use the bed under Aidan’s? I have no idea.

© 2011 Left Coast Mama | Permalink | No comments
Related: Bed Time, children, milestones, Quinlan, sleep, Toddlers, Toilet Training.

I Dream of Sleep

Gwen — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:34:27 +0000

I am coming up to the year and a half mark of little or no sleep. When I do sleep it is only a few hours at a time and let me tell you I am a woman who needs her sleep. I love sleep. I love the way it feels to wake up after a full 8 to 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep. I love the way it feels to have enough rem sleep. I love being able to remember even a few of my dreams, well at least for a few minutes.

I dream about being able to sleep for more than two hours at a time. I marvel at how amazing even three hours feels. I dream about not having to listen to an audiobook to get back into a sleeping patten. I dream of comfy sheets and pillows and darkened rooms and sleep, beautiful sleep.

I dream about being so well rested that it isn’t difficult to balance my other passions in life, my husband, my kids, writing. I want to have enough energy so that I am fully engaged with my kids. I want to have enough energy so that I can concentrate on more than one thing at a time, and maybe be able to articulate myself again.

I dream of so much sleep that I can discover new passions and rediscover old ones. I want to be energetic and enjoy being outside. I want to be able to take an evening class in jewelry making or photography and feel like I am giving the artistic side of my personality a chance to shine again. I want to be able to sing again. I want to feel like singing again.

I dream of a time when I am once again a woman with passions. I dream of being a better woman than I am now. I dream of sleep.

***********************

This post was inspired and written for Mabel’s Labels Blogher ’10 Contest. The premise is this: Electrical storms are going to wipe out the Internet (perhaps forever). You have one day left to write about your passions: what do you want to say to the blogosphere in 300 words or less?

The grand prize is a fully paid trip to the BlogHer conference in NY, including airfare, hotel and conference pass, and a year’s blogging contract for the Mabel’s Labels blog.

Wish me luck and sleep.

Gwen

Guilty and Sleep Deprived . . . Again

Gwen — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 06:08:06 +0000

I sometimes wonder if I have offended the sleep gods/goddesses somehow. I love both my children but the night wakings and early morning wakings are starting to really take their toll.

I envy my husband his ability to go back to sleep in an instant, but I think if we actually had the room he would be sleeping in a different room until the sleep train comes back into our house. Then I might not feel so guilty about having him take the boys from about 5:30 am until he leaves for work. The last couple of nights/days there was no way I was going to be able to cope with the day if I didn’t get that small window of sleep time from 6 to 8.

Last night was a horrible night. I am not sure why, but Quinlan had a bad night and to make matters worse, when I finally got to sleep after the 1:30 ish wake up, I woke with sinus problems folled by a horrific case of insomnia. There is nothing like not being able to get to sleep when you know at least one of your children will be waking soon. I figure I got about around 3 and a half hours sleep all told last night. Let me just say it is not enough.

At least I know I am not the only one who is the walking dead lately.

Where is a Sleep Guru When You Need One?

Gwen — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 03:54:06 +0000

When my now 10 month old was only 2 months old he slept like nobody’s business. He would go to sleep around 11 pm and not wake until 5 am, nurse for a bit and go back to sleep for another few hours. I still like between 8 and 9 hours of solid sleep myself, but it was doable. Then somewhere between 5 and 6 months Quinlan decided (well at least his body decided) that it was time to actually start pushing out some teeth. They take forever and come in 1 at a time. They must also hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. At least this is my inference because of the waking and general crankiness. Just so you know, the waking happens between every 1.5 to 3 hours. Quinlan usually gets his biggest chunk of sleep from 7:30 pm till somewhere between 11 pm to 2 am. Unfortunately I hardly get to sleep before 11 pm at the earliest. It is usually closer to 11:30 or midnight.

Quinlan is still not much of a napper unless he is attached to the breast, in the stroller (moving), in the car (also moving) or lying on my lap on the nursing pillow. This is not a good thing either. About the only good thing I took away from the Weissbluth book was figuring out your child’s tiredness signals. At least with this Quinlan shows them much better than Aidan ever did. These signals are what told us that Quinlan needs to be going down to bed at around 6:45-7:00 pm. If we push the time it is harder to get him to nurse to sleep, though Anthony can usually lie down with him and get him over the edge to sleep.

The Good Old Sleeping Days

So with Quinlan waking so many time during the night now Anthony and I are incredibly sleep deprived. I have a hard time getting back to sleep especially if I get up to soothe, feed and generally move Quinlan back to sleep in his crib. I will do this for the first session but after a while Quinlan ends up in the bed with us. Neither Anthony or I sleep well with Quinlan in the bed. He doesn’t sleep for longer periods, we just don’t need to have the extra step of going into the boys’ room to get him. He has started shunning the soother (in the wee hours) and will cry when Anthony tries to soothe him. I am at my wit’s end.

Before we get any comments about this, we don’t want to keep co-sleeping and we have no intention of ever trying Cry It Out ever again. It was horrific for everyone when we tried it the Weissbluth way and didn’t work except to make it that much harder to get Aidan to sleep at all. We will not try it for Quinlan and because we need to have the boys share a room it isn’t something that is at all practical either.

I will be checking out a number of sleep books from the library and some twitter friends have promised to lend me some as well. Watch the blog for updates and reviews of the sleep books and training methods. Maybe there is something we can do with the child who stands up the nanosecond he stirs.

© 2009 Left Coast Mama | Permalink | 4 comments
Related: Bed Time, My Boys, parenting mistakes, Quinlan, sleep, teething.

Sick and Tired

Gwen — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:46:47 +0000

Adorable Grin

I feel guilty in admitting this, but I am sick and tired of baby puke. I know, it is called spit-up to make it more palatable, but baby puke it is. There is not a day that goes by that I am not regurgitated on (several or dozens of times) by my now almost seven month old, and it is getting old. I keep hoping he will grow out of it and start to keep his food down.

I sometimes worry about his digestive track, and I have forcefully kept myself from google because of this. He hardly ever has what I consider to be a normal bowel movement, it is always very wet, yellow and hardly ever has “curds” in it. If he wasn’t growing like a weed and in the 50th percentile for weight and 80-90th for height I would be really worried. I hesitate to talk to my doctor about it, because I don’t want to seem like one of those moms who worry all the time about their children’s pooping habits, but I am one of those moms. Is this really a bad thing? Should I worry more about my child’s pooping issues? Does this mean that since he is an almost exclusively breastfed child that I am eating the wrong way? Should I have started solids sooner?

It has only been the last week that I have made a concerted effort to really try to get Quinlan to eat solids. He didn’t even want to try the rice cereal and it is only this week with sweet potato and now carrots that he has shown any interest in solids at all. Sweet potato got the thumbs up as well as a few raspberries. He would show his appreciation (or so I thought) by eating some and then blowing raspberries and getting sweet potato everywhere. Then I tried carrots last night and low and behold, just eating, no raspberries. I haven’t yet tried this morning but I am hoping it will go as well.

I was also told that if we started him on solids he might stop wanting to get up in the middle of the night to eat, that it was habit. I am now not so sure. For quite a while Quinlan was sleeping from about 10 pm until 5ish. Now he goes to sleep at about 7:30 pm (I feed him to sleep) and starts crying for a snack about 2:30 am. He then wakes up again betweek 4 and 5 am for another feed. It is making me a little cranky. I can’t blame him or ignore him, so I am getting really tired. If I wasn’t a morning person before it is really unlikely I will start to become one now.

So the bottom line is I need some advice on stopping the puking, and helping his bowel solidify some of the poop. Or maybe I just needed to vent a little and then some reasurance that despite my fears, since Quinlan is a happy and well adjusted baby, he probably isn’t suffering with his pooping and puking problems.

Quinlan Happy in the Sun

Last Night: The Wake Ups, Part 2

Gwen — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 01:51:43 +0000

Anthony and I got to sleep sometime after midnight only to be wakened by a horrific scream in the alley out back. The screaming kept on going followed by a man yelling and the woman still screaming bloody murder. (Well no those weren’t her exact words, but it really sounded bad.) There was also a dog (obviously big) barking loudly. The. Whole. Time.

Anthony decided to grab some pyjama pants and run outside to see what was happening. He didn’t take a phone, nor shoes, nor shirt, but went outside and yelled at the couple to see if everything was alright. Mom was up on the balcony and asking if she should call the police, and a bunch of people from the front of our complex came out back to see what was going on. I grabbed some clothes and went upstairs to get the phone that was working so I could call 911 if needed.

The view from the balcony was kind of strange. A number of people were outside in various states of dress, what turned out to be a police officer with a police dog, a couple of plain clothes police officers and unmarked cars, and a woman who was tracked to a garage alcove in the complex behind us after allegedly stealing something. The police officer with the dog was yelling at the bystanders to calm down “She did a thief,” or something to that ungrammatically correct effect. So we had in our alley a “police incident.” It was very loud and frightening (the woman sounded like she was being assaulted,) and a big burst of adrenalin for the second time that night.

I tell you waking up to a woman screaming like that is very very disturbing. I can only thank god that Aidan slept through the whole thing.

Getting back to sleep was difficult. Not only did we have the after effects of the adrenalin push, but it stayed noisy and confusing in the alley for quite a while. About ten minutes after Anthony got back inside (fully admitting that he really should have put on some shoes and brought a phone) it got quite loud outside again. The woman yelling “You have already told me my fucking rights. I don’t want to hear them again.” The police officer(s) obviously telling her again. The paramedics doing something or other but not using the siren. Again I say thank god Aidan didn’t wake up.

I suppose there are several pieces of good news in this scenario.

Anthony wasn’t hurt and now realizes that if you go out to help a screaming woman (he did stay far away and ask if she needed help) you first put on shoes and bring a phone.
Aidan didn’t wake up.
Anthony finished listening to his audiobook since he didn’t get back to sleep till after 3 am.
I realized once and for all that I do not want to be a police officer. (Not that I was actually thinking of changing careers.)
It gives my mom a good story to tell when she gets back home.
I got to use the word “allegedly” in a grammatically correct manner, I think. and
It makes one hell of a blog post.

© 2007 Left Coast Mama | Permalink | One comment
Related: Aidan, Anthony, Gwen, Nana, Police Incidents, Real Nightmares, sleep.

Last Night: The Wake Ups, Part 1

Gwen — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:33:59 +0000

Last night started out great. Mom and I went out to dinner and afterward for a tea and it was lovely. We had a great time and a nice chat. It was really nice to just relax and talk and not worry about the time.

When we got home everyone was tired so we got ready for bed. Anthony and I changed Aidan (boy he hates being woken up and put on his back) so he doesn’t get absolutely soaked through by morning. It has been working, and really since diapers were not getting him through the night, it has been worth it. The previous two nights Aidan just went right back to sleep and didn’t wake until morning. Last night not so much. Yes he went back to sleep, but he decided to wake up (well I think a car woke him up in that critical 30-40 minutes after getting back to sleep) and he let us know in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to be. Another weird fact is that he didn’t want to go back to bed. He would fall asleep on me but would not go back in to his crib with out screaming, that is until he had time with Daddy as well. Sometimes one parental unit is not enough. He went back down for the night after he had his cuddle with Daddy. If that had been all it wouldn’t be too bad, asleep by about midnight we could handle that. But that was not all . . .

Real Moms Laugh in the Face of Adversity, and Spit Up

Gwen — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:39:41 +0000

A while ago I posted a meme started by Kristen Chase of Motherhood Uncensored and now she has a lovely Mother’s Day contest. I am reposting in a slightly different format, but the idea is still the same. I am a real Mom, warts and all.

Real Moms laugh in the face of spit up (and let their husbands take pictures.)

I guess that spit up isn’t too bad and as a real Mom I have had to clean up lots of bodily fluids. Not all of them get the same treatment; laughter isn’t my first thought with projectile vomit, but I don’t vomit myself at the sight and smell. In fact I don’t know how fast I can move until Aidan gets that look on his face and the tell-tale sound of gagging alerts me to the disaster in the making. That Aidan pukes when he is tired and we have made the mistake of feeding him too much when he is too tired means I now have lots of experience with it now. The fact that too much is really hard to gauge makes it somewhat of a crap shoot. But, now instead of being frozen to the spot while this happens, moving him over his plastic toy box full of washable toys is much preferable to cleaning the chair, crib or me and him. I do feel awfully sorry for Aidan when he throws up, and the fact that it is my fault makes it worse. Well, now we know, he needs to be in bed by 7:30 at the latest. And if he looks at all tired, a very light supper is needed.

The reason I have edited and reposted this “Real Mom Truth” is because I really want to win an iPod. In order to do that I am posting links to the contest and the prizes. Wish me luck!

Enter the Real Mom Truths contest! The winner will receive this amazing 4G iPod Nano and Chocolate gift set, plus a link to their post on True Mom Confessions on Mother’s Day

Home for a rest, not likely.

Gwen — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 03:57:00 +0000

So if you are among the few people who read my blog you may have wondered if I fell off the face of the earth. Hmm, well I didn’t exactly, but I did spend two (mostly) wonderful weeks on the other side of the country. Now you may think that I should have posted as “Right Coast Mama”, and you would be right, I should have, but I didn’t. So, what to do? Well I guess that a recap will be forthcoming, but not tonight. I still need to decompress and Aidan isn’t adapting well to being back home. I think it will take us quite a bit of time to getting him back into his routine.

The main problem is, yes you guessed it, sleep. He seems to be having separation anxiety especially in the middle of the night. He has been waking up at 3 or 4 am and then he just wants to cuddle. He isn’t ready to be awake, he doesn’t want to play, all he wants is to be as close to me as he can. The odd thing is that when this ever happened before he always wanted to nurse. Now he just wants to be close. It is harder to get him to sleep after this happens when we aren’t nursing. I guess it is me that is missing it.

It is really funny to me that I can miss something that I was sure was going to be a bit of a chore that I would do for six months or until he bit me. Eighteen months later and I am mourning that fact that he is weaning. Sigh.

Anyway, as I am falling asleep at the laptop, I should let you dear readers (my that was presumptuous of me,) go, and bid you adieu. Good night.

Tags: Sleep, Vacation, Breastfeeding, Weaning

Teething Again

Gwen — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:08:00 +0000

Aidan never does anything half assed. He is teething again. This time it is two molars and an eye-tooth. All. At. The same time! This doesn’t make for a restful weekend.

Friday night I was sure that Aidan would be asleep in no time because he was tired, a little bit frantic and he got up before 7 that morning. This usually means that he goes down really easily. Not this night. I am pretty sure that he woke himself at least three times before midnight. This was when we decided that tylenol, and some dimetap for the stuffy nose might be in order. While it may be really easy to give Aidan medicine when he is awake, when he is tired and has woken himself up a few time it is a disaster in the making. Aidan still had a hard time sleeping. It was about this time that we figured out how many teeth he was trying to get out at once. He woke another few times during the night and we were all exhausted on Saturday morning. About 10 am we refound the oragel. Aidan was quiet for a full hour. Sigh, why didn’t we remember it the night before?

Saturday we spent mostly looking for glasses for me. It is always difficult and the pair that I like best is $529 just for the frames. Most of the hip glasses are not for my face at all. They make it look rounder than it should and really much older than I want to look. I think I have a couple that might work but we couldn’t keep going with Aidan because he was very quickly becoming “Tantrum Boy.”

On Sunday we got up later than the day before and didn’t do too much. Well Anthony cleaned out the filing cabinet, shredded three garbage bags full of paper and file all the bills and other paper that was hanging around the front table and computer desk. Oh we also got our new camera. Anthony found a nice camera very much on sale and got it to replace our small digital camera that was lost/stolen from our luggage at Christmas-time. So I had a chance to play with it a little bit. I will be posting some pictures a little later. I am also planning to take some pictures of me in some frames. Maybe I can get some comments on which pair to get.

Anyway, after playing at the park, eating supper and a bath Aidan was very tired and went to sleep without a fuss. Keep you fingers crossed for a good night.

Tags: Teething, Sleep, Glasses, Camera