Detachment Parenting

I don't follow any textbook parenting style. This might be due to my dislike of strict textbook music education methods...I always preferred to borrow good songs and activities from every method, and leave everything I didn't like. Likewise, with parenting, I prefer to watch other parents and see what seems to work. Since we'd seen my sister-in-law's children go to bed happily and sleep well when we visited, we talked to her when it was time to sleep train Sir Toddler. We established a consistent bedtime routine, used a few soothing techniques, and let him fuss (but never scream) for a few minutes at a time to see if he would drop off on his own. He was a pretty horrible sleeper from birth, but we managed to at least have a few hours in the evening while he slept by the time he was three months old. We had this sleep training thing down!

Enter our "easy sleeper" second born.

The struggle is real.

Lady Infant was a really sleepy newborn--so much so that we had to use an alarm clock to wake her up to eat at night until she was a month old. With all the hubbub of putting two children down for the night, we never established an elaborate bedtime routine like we did with Sir Toddler...and we didn't feel like we needed to. She seemed to accept that we'd eventually change her into a clean diaper and pajamas, feed her, and put her in the Pack'n'Play wrapped in a swaddle. Maybe she'd catch some of her brother's prayers and story, but our "divide and conquer" approach to bedtime didn't make it a guarantee.

She decided to change things up a bit when I started a string of back-to-back late nights playing rehearsals and performances of "Titanic." She started figuring out how to roll onto her tummy  at the tender age of 3.5 months. That life-saving swaddle? Gone-zo, and in its place we had a baby that refused to be soothed by any amount of rocking, binkies, patting, shushing, or holding-arms-at-the-sides...basically any technique that worked with her older brother. It was hard to cope when I was coming home at almost midnight and then catching less than two hours of sleep between wakings. After one weekend of constant night nursing and Lady Infant spending much of the night sleeping on my chest, I was a zombie.

The following Monday, I put Lady Infant down in her Pack'n'Play so I could take a shower. I just blared the white noise, shut the curtains, and hoped for the best. In the time it took for me to turn on the shower and come back to our room...

Out like a light with her thumb in her mouth.

We learned that week that, by all appearances, she just wants to be left alone when it's time to sleep. I'm not trying to be heartless--if we try to soothe her when she fusses, she gets unbelievably angry. Even though I hate to just put her down (on her back, I swear) in the crib and walk away, she'll usually take less than three minutes to fuss, roll over, find her thumb, and conk out.

She's taught us "detachment parenting."

From dawn to dusk

Weekends with Mr. Husband are heavenly. We're together all day (or most of it) and I usually take a hiatus from all non-urgent chores so we can enjoy time outside of the house.

This weekend it was finally warm enough to take the kids to the beautiful coastal town where Mr. Husband and I were married.

Lately, though, I've felt like I've been going nonstop from dawn to dusk during the week. Get up! Feed the baby! Change both kids! Feed the toddler! Eat breakfast and gulp down coffee with Queen Baby in one arm! Change both kids again! Feed the baby! Put the baby down for a nap!...And then climb into the shower and try not to think about the damp clean diapers in the washing machine, the sink full of dirty dishes, the dishwasher full of clean dishes, the trash spilling out of every receptacle in the house, and the three thousand other household things that probably will remain undone until naptime.

Some people prop their kitchen tables with pillar candles and runners. I prefer to use unfolded laundry.

A few weeks ago, I came to the realization that I can either leave the house with both kids, or keep up with housework each day. That hasn't stopped me from trying to cram both in, and then add a few longer-term projects. Last night's conversation with Mr. Husband included a tearful confession that I was just overwhelmed. The kids had been difficult every time I tried to take them out, I felt like I was doing chores nonstop, I couldn't get the practice time I felt I needed for my upcoming gig, and my body still felt wrecked three months after childbirth. I wanted today to be better, but any hope at catching up around the house was obliterated by our extremely empty refrigerator.

A pilgrimage to New England's amusement park usually entails a 20 minute drive to spend at least an hour battling through aisles crowded with both shoppers and unshelved stock with an arching and displeased infant strapped to my torso while Sir Toddler tries to mash the tortilla chips, squish the bread, and rip open bags of shredded cheese, wait in a long checkout line, stuff all the groceries around the double jogger that occupies most of our trunk, drive 20 minutes home, gate the now starving and tired toddler in the living room so he stays out of his sister's grill, leave the equally hungry and cranky infant in her car seat, and run in the house with 6 bags at a time from the parking lot through the backyard mined with dog messes from notourdog and back before the frozen veggies thaw and the dairy and meat spoil. The epilogue to all this is usually a quick lunch for all and naps so that I can have at least 15 minutes of staring at the wall.

Not so today. I found myself sitting in bed with a half-asleep Lady Infant alternating between napping and nursing in my lap listening to Sir Toddler whine-cry in his crib (as he had been doing so for the last hour) wanting nothing more than to whine-cry myself to sleep, because I had just remembered that Mr. Husband (with my goodwill) was going to come home from work, eat dinner, and head straight back out again.

Looking something like this, I imagine.

Then I got a call from my mother.

"Would Sir Toddler like to see Grandma?"

"Sure." He loves him some FaceTime.

"I can be there in about 30 minutes."

Today was the day of your flight? Add that to my long list of things I've forgotten lately.

And somehow we made it to bedtime after that, and the damp laundry made it to the dryer. And I found myself with the energy to practice some Titanic, which wasn't so hard after all, and even play a little Mendelssohn and Bach and Barber.

I may fall exhausted into bed every night, but it at least means that my day is full of things to do. Some of those things are very hard, but some of those things are very, very good.

(mis)adventures in housekeeping

When I was young, I always assumed that once I became a grown-up, I would automatically acquire all of the necessary domestic skills that many adults have. I'm not sure why this is, since my own mother (though possessing many domestic talents in the cooking and cleaning areas) struggled with crafts like sewing and knitting. But now I know better.

Oh, how I know.

Tonight, Mr. Husband had a post-work social event, so I took advantage of my post-bedtime solitude to pull out the sewing machine. (Lady Infant's need to be. held. every. minute. of. wakefulness, and Sir Toddler's fascination with the plug and the foot pedal make sewing a rare event around here.) My plan was to start three projects and hopefully finish two of them. I started with a binky leash, since some of the ones I used with Sir Toddler magically disappeared.

If you know how to put pictures side by side, post a comment on this webzone.

It came out ok from this distance, but if you look closely the thread tension is hoooorribly off. And the bobbin jammed about 1076 times before I realized I had threaded the top thread incorrectly. On a Brother machine, which is 9846 times more user-friendly than the 1970 Sears Kenmore I was rocking (not rocking at all) for a few years.

The fact that this project took almost an hour didn't discourage me from moving on to my next project...

Converting a pair of hand-me-down flares to skinny jeans.

This may have partly been a move of desperation since I recently evaluated my closet and realized that I have ONE pair of skinny jeans that fit my postpartum body and doesn't have holes in the knees. However, in my eagerness to have TWO pairs of skinny jeans that (sort of) fit my postpartum body and don't have holes in the knees, I completely bungled the measuring and marking step, so I made them way too narrow, even for skinny jeans. So we're back to the drawing board, fig and lit.

My plans to make a nursing cover should go swimmingly.

My sewing skills may not have progressed from my fifth-grade introduction-to-sewing pillow project, but I do pride myself in my cooking skills (even if I mostly just follow instructions from my mother, my grandmother, or Christopher Kimball). However, I struggled for years to master pancakes...

This is considered a successful attempt. And in case you're pinning me as a domestic breakfast diva, this was dinner.

yes, pancakes.

I also love having a systematic approach to storing and preparing ingredients. I occasionally buy whole chickens on sale, butcher them at home, freeze the parts, make stock from the carcass, and then make a meal from the carcass meat...and so on. Since I usually drive 20 minutes over two town lines to shop at the most magical place on earth every other week, the freezer figures heavily into my system. So you'd think that I would know better than to thoughtlessly shove a 3-lb package of ground beef into the freezer without first portioning it.

Apparently not. Again, in case you were pinning me a domestic diva from my chicken story...

However, there is a happy ending to this story.

I got a fever. And the only cure is more meatballs.

Maybe I'll have all this down by the time my children are old enough to remember their childhood?