Cognosco

When I tell people that I am a graduate student, I always dread the follow-up question. Because that question is, what program? and when I say, psychology, or even try to be more specific and say, social psychology, my answer is always misunderstood. People assume that I counsel people or want to counsel people or am learning to diagnose people. They say things like, wow, you should study my crazy family, or uh-oh, are you going to diagnose me? When I try to explain that I don’t do that kind of psychology, it usually gets me nowhere.

Even my own mother has no idea what I do. I was lamenting the fact that jobs in my field are scarce a few months ago. She said that there were lots of jobs in Kentucky (where she lives). I inquired further. She said that yes, there were lots of jobs working as a counselor for this or that and that they started at 60 thousand dollars a year, etc. I said that I don’t do that kind of psychology. She got huffy with me and said, well, I know it’s not your first choice, but I was just suggesting it as a backup plan. What she failed to understand is that I am not even remotely trained to do what most people think of when they hear "psychology". When I say "psychology" they just hear "therapy".

I just stumbled across a blog entry that I think may clear up a few things. I may just have to memorize the url or have cards printed up or something. This entry lists 10 brilliant social psychology experiments. This is the heart of what social psychology is all about. These are the experiments that lit a fire in my mind. This is what I do with my time. Or what I would be doing if I could create experiments this cool.

Truth be told, in the last year, I’ve actually been doing more research that blends social psychology with other branches of psychology, like developmental and clinical. But it’s still research oriented and I still can’t tell you what to do with your life. Well, I guess I can tell you if you ask, but I can’t get paid for it.

 

 

The lovely midwife who attended Albert’s birth wrote a really funny post over at Earth Hearth about what she carries for birth "emergencies".

The post made me laugh because number one, I remember being fanned during labor, and seriously, I don’t know if I could have held out without that relief. We had turned the heat high when I started pushing, because we all assumed the the baby would arrive soon. Sooner became later, and so I had some serious work to do while being seriously HOT. Between the fan, icy washcloths, and gatorade, I survived. I hate being hot. Hate it.

Number two, I remember asking a similar question at one of my prenatal appointments. I switched care around 32 weeks, and this was particular appointment was probably the third time I had seen M. I asked whether or not she had a "neonatal transport unit" in case of emergencies. I’m not really sure what that is, but someone had asked me that question, so I asked it of her. She didn’t know what it was either (I don’t think such a thing exists) and then said that her neonatal transport unit was *this* and formed her arms into a cradle shape as if she was holding a baby. She laughed really hard after that. She did go on to tell me about some of the equipment they carried like oxygen, a "space blanket" (which she had not had to use in a very long time), etc. But every once in awhile, she would giggle, make the cradle sign, and say "neonatal transport unit".

It cracks me up every time I think about it.

What does she really carry for emergencies? What is the most important thing a midwife has for emergencies (in my opinion)?

Her hands. It was her hands that helped me push. It was her hands that pushed hair out of my face. It was her hands that gave me strength. It was her hands that brought me gatorade. Her hands that helped me wash up afterwards when I was too weak to stand in the shower.

And what was it that she used to help free Albert from shoulder dystocia?

Not forceps. Not a vacuum. Not a caesarean section.

Her hands.

Period.

I think those hands might just rival the fan for #1. 

 

 

Dear Mr. Scientist,

You are becoming quite the little experimenter around the house. You have learned to turn toys (or whatever) in your hands so that you can inspect a given object from all angles, as well as make sure to taste all of its surfaces. You have been conducting all sorts of experiments with any object you can get your hands on.

If I bang it on this surface, will it make noise?

If I bang it together with this other thing, is the noise different?

If I drop it, what happens?

What happens if I throw it?

What happens if I smash it?

Does it roll or slide?

Will it fit through the bars of my crib?

Will it fit through the bars of the gate?

Will it fit inside this other thing?

     And most importantly…

Can I eat it?

 

On day, you were playing with your tigger, and you were particularly fascinated with his tag. This is nothing new—you’ve been fascinated with tags for about 6 weeks. You were sitting on the bed while I was getting dressed from a shower. I put the towel on the bed, and the tag happened to be near you. You picked up the towel by the tag, and holding that tag in your left hand and the tiggy tag in the right hand, you inspected an compared them simultaneously for quite some time. You seemed perplexed that the tags were the same, but what they were connected to was so different. It was a really fantastic moment for me to witness. It just highlighted how amazing the human brain really is.

It has really been a joy to watch you over the last few weeks since your last developmental leap, so accurately predicted by the Wonder Weeks. Gearing up for that leap, you were kind of a pain. You wanted to be picked up, no not picked up. Carried. No, not carried. Inside. No, outside. In short, nothing made you happy for about 10 days. You were fussy about everything and so clingy. No, not clingy.

And then, just like with the other leaps, it seemed like overnight, you were a whole new baby. You’ve been content to play by yourself for longer stretches of time as you try to figure out the what and how of pretty much everything. This includes playing by yourself in your crib in the middle of the night, which is a new thing completely. One day, when you didn’t know I was watching you (I was pretending to be asleep), I watched you fit every toy from your crib through the slats, wave it up and down, and pull it back through. Then you dropped every toy over the top bar and watched it fall. Of course, once they were all out, you cried. But I was proud of your experimentation and didn’t mind getting them all together for you again.

A few days ago, you were sitting on your little toilet seat naked. You discovered your penis. You had started to discover it right before the surgery, and then stopped touching it altogether afterwards. I had begun to be afraid that we had totally scarred you for life. Apparently, it doesn’t hurt at all anymore, because you discovered it for quite some time that day. We were elated.  Then you touched your bellybutton hernia, and then your penis, and then your hernia. You realized that the hernia wasn’t as entertaining fairly quickly. A very productive experiment.

You also recently disovered that you can put your foot in your mouth, and for about two days, this is all you wanted to do in your car seat. Which is quite the feat since you can’t lean forward to meet it. You would bring your foot to your mouth with two hands and put it in your mouth as if it were a footie hamburger. Your daddy and I laughed hysterically at that.

With regards to your musical and auditory world, you have been fascinated with our Tibetan singing bowls. You don’t have the dexterity to actually use them as they are intended, but enjoy banging them or hearing me bang them. The harmonics that result from just hitting the bowl are pretty cool, so I don’t mind. You are also fascinated by the sounds the wooden blocks you were recently gifted make when banged together. Or banged on the Tibetan bowl. And you will sit, riveted, through a “Wheels on the Bus” song on the Baby Einstein On the Go DVD, while it plays over and over. It’s actually quite cute, because it’s a little segment where all the puppets are grooving on a cartoon bus, and I was riveted myself. I can set the DVD on loop, and you will watch and listen to that for about 10 times before you tire of it. The rest of the DVD hasn’t particularly captured your interest (fine by me), but that particular segment has proved useful for the times that I really need to get a shower and get dressed so we can get out of the house.

Oh, and your first tooth FINALLY started to poke through on November 6. I had really started to think that you just didn’t have any teeth in there, and then pop! there it was. You have started to actually chew (or rather, gum) your food in the last few weeks rather than just swallowing it whole. I’m pretty excited about this because it opens up your food options considerably.

You got to play with your first balloon this month when Mamma came through town. We tied a helium balloon to your wrist while we were at a restaurant. That was a really awesome to watch. You also discovered bubbles, which didn’t impress you the first time, but totally captured your attention the second time.

  

You also finally met your Grandma-Great Klein at the end of last month. I forgot to mention that in your last update. You are named after her husband, Albert, who passed away a few years ago (as well as your Uncle Frank, whose middle name was Albert, because he was named after his grandpa…).

I got a little lazy about our morning walks, but then I discovered a few really great parks that have water and a lot of birds. You love birds and I love water, and so we’ve gone walking every morning 8 out of the last 10 days. It’s a really nice, calming part of our day now. 

We started sleep training a week ago, and it has really gone well. You now go to sleep within about 10 minutes with no crying. You are waking less at night, and the few times that you have been awake for long periods of time in the middle of the night, you have been reasonably content to play in your crib until you settle back down to sleep. You will occasionally fuss, and I will get up and lay you down and tell you it’s not time to get up yet, but you don’t throw a fit and it’s fun to listen to you play while I’m half asleep. You are also sleeping later. We have decided that you may not get up before 6, but we won’t let you sleep past 7. So if you wake up at 5:20, we tell you it’s time to go back to sleep. This presents a challenge, because if you are still awake at 6, and now it’s suddenly time to get up, this could be confusing. So, when that time comes, we say cheerfully “it’s time to get up” and turn on the light. The light is what’s known as a discriminative stimulus. If the light is off, you can’t get up yet. If the light is on, you can. Other people use alarm clocks for the same purpose, but I hate alarm clocks so that’s not happening. If you fall back to sleep before 6 rolls around, we let you sleep until the next time you wake, or 7 a.m. Whichever comes first. It’s a little harder to get you down for naps, but still fairly easy compared to our prior "system" (or lack thereof). In short, we have had success thus far. 

You are incredibly communicative, and play with the whole range of consonants and syllables. I expect you to just bust out with words at any time. There have been several times when you have crawled towards me and said something resembling “mama”, but I’m really not sure if it’s a coincidence. I love to hear you babble, and you still smile and laugh easily, even on your cranky days. 

You are cruising a lot now, and took one or two stumbling steps today between your Nanna and Daddy. You are now able to stand for seconds at a time before you fall over. I can’t believe it.

So, my little magical child, today marks 9 months since you were born. You have now been on the outside of me for as long as you were on the inside of me. This is another one of those math and time things that kind of freaks me out. You are growing so fast…

Things I have learned this month:

• Time is relentless.
• Everyone has boundaries and limits. You may not know where they are, but you will know when they have been crossed.
• Being a good mother is dependent on acknowledging these limits.
• Behaviorism principles really work. I already knew this, but it’s always nice to learn again.
• Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing. But it is still worth it.
• Any "method" used for anything with your child can (and should) be tweaked to suit your child.
• Piaget was right. Humans are driven to learn and explore.
• Sleep is a priority. Period.
• If teething drool could be harnessed as an energy source, the oil companies would be bankrupt.
• Chewing does not require teeth.
• There is a significant difference between the pain level associated with toothless gums chomping down on your nipple and a new tooth chomping down your nipple.
• Without motherhood amnesia, we would have never survived as a species.
• It’s all worth it. Really.

Love, 

Mama 

 

 

 

…or shall we say, schizophrenia?

 When I was taking prenatal yoga, I remember the instructor talked about "motherhood amnesia". You know, that thing that sets in eventually after each difficult child-related event, such as pregnancy and varicose veins, labor, birth, sleep deprivation, baby blues, endless newborn screaming, etc. The night that Albert was born, I remarked to H that at that point in time, I didn’t think I ever wanted to go through childbirth again and that one child might really be enough. I had a hard time sleeping that night because I couldn’t stop having the sensation of pushing and pushing and pushin. I thought about the amnesia thing then, and couldn’t imagine I could forget the intensity of childbirth that easily. I thought it would take months.

How long did it take for amnesia to set in?

About 24 hours.

The length of time between each difficult period and its subsequent amnesia has only decreased over time. To the point where now, I can utter a statement such as, “what was I thinking having a kid?” or “I am so tired I could die,” only to casually mention within the next 60 seconds I can’t wait to have another child and that it is so much more fun than I thought it would be.

Because when I look at him and he is smiling, it is really hard to focus on any of the negatives.

I was prepared to experience this amnesia thing. I just didn’t think that it would occur simultaneously with the challenging times. It makes me dizzy just thinking about it.

We have started sleep training.

And night weaning.

Or as I prefer to call it, “behavior shaping”.

Last Wednesday morning, I was so tired and frustrated. And I was mean to Albert. I won’t go into details, but I was snarly enough that it makes me feel ashamed. And it made me realize that something had to change because I was way too tired and the frequent waking (every 2 to 3 hours) and the early waking (sometimes earlier than 5 a.m.) had finally pushed me past a line I didn’t even know was there.

While I admire people who can just wait these things out or mold themselves to fit their baby’s tendencies, it was the choice between doing that and being too sleep deprived and mean, or finding a compromise and being an otherwise joyful mother.

Aside from my being too tired and too mentally taxed, he was also getting so. damn. tired. He kept getting up earlier, and so I kept putting him to bed earlier so he would get enough sleep, and I was starting to contemplate a 6 p.m. bedtime just for him to get enough sleep. I was getting really resentful.

Once upon a time, he slept for seven or eight hours at a stretch. Then, around five and a half months, he started working on crawling, and things changed. I couldn’t swaddle him anymore because he would get halfway unswaddled and roll over on his belly and then be all tangled up in his blanket. That wasn’t safe. So I’d lay down with him until he fell asleep and then put him in the cosleeper. He was still sleeping for at least a 6 hour stretch to start the night, and then I’d nurse him and he’d sleep a few more hours in the cosleeper. He usually spent the last hour or two in bed with me.

Then he had surgery. He was so upset after the surgery. He was so in need of comfort, and so we had to do a lot of “stuff” to get him to sleep. A lot of rocking and singing and comforting. Our own guilt probably factored into the equation as well. We also transitioned to a crib around that time because he just needed more space (we only had a mini co-sleeper). During all of this we kept getting further and further away from the baby who could be put down awake, fall asleep alone, and sleep most of the night.

After those few weeks post-surgery, I though maybe he was just still going through some kind of phase. Teething? Mobility issues? A developmental leap? But it appears that the “phase” became a “habit” and after 10 weeks of increasingly elaborate sleep rituals mainly involving carrying all 25 pounds of him around while doing some kind of funky movement, I couldn’t do it anymore.

I found my boundary.

Crying it out was not an option. I think there is something about that method that really flies in the face of everything we know about attachment theory. Even controlled crying with the frequent check-ins wasn’t something I was willing to do, given that he’s currently entered into a separation anxiety phase. It just didn’t feel right, even when I only did it in my head.

I happened to have checked out “The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems” a few weeks ago, but hadn’t really looked at it. I read it voraciously that day. I don’t agree with everything she says, but the “Pick Up-Put Down” method for older babies resonated with me.  Basically, you’re there to calm him (pick up) but as soon as he’s calm he has to get to sleep on his own (put down). You stay there the whole time; you offer an occasional hand on the back, words of encouragement, etc. I spent a lot of time lying on my bed (his crib is in our room) just waiting for him to wind down. At his age, it’s really alot more laying him down when he stands up rather than picking him all the way up. I liked this method because it makes so much sense from both an Attachment theory perspective and a Behaviorism perspective. This message board is very helpful for anyone else who wants or needs to give it a try. I don’t agree with everything about the method–every mother has to figure out what works for her baby. But it is a really useful starting point, and the general idea of being there for comfort but allowing the baby to find his or her own way to soothe to sleep makes sense to me.

So I decided that we were starting this thing right then. That day. With his morning nap. So I tried it.

It took an hour, but he fell asleep laying by himself in the crib with my hand on his stomach. He only really cried (as opposed to a goofy bitching babbling thing he does) once or twice. The thoughts that kept me going were (1) that he would sleep eventually, and (2) that if I gave in, I would have wasted his and my time and put him through angst for nothing.

I won’t go into the gory details of the next few days, but the maximum time to get him down was two hours for one nap. But on that particular occasion, he was just playing in his crib for the first hour, so he wasn’t upset the whole time. I just had to wait it out. I did all of the “training” the first few days, and H took the next two days. Surprisingly, Albie went down sooooo easy for him. Less than 10 minutes every time with no crying. It just goes to show that dads can be better at some things. And last night he slept for 4 and a half hours at one stretch. And he’s waking closer to 6 now instead of prior to 5. We’re still doing a dream feed at 10 and I’m fine with that. Even if he could go 10 hours without eating, he’s so distractible right now that the dream feed is the best nursing session he gets all day.

I realize now that when he was really little, he had reflux issues, so I had to keep him up for a half an hour after feeds. So I couldn’t nurse him lying down or just pull him into bed to nurse and cosleep. Once the reflux got better around five months, it was really nice to just nurse him in bed and I especially loved cuddling those last few hours in the early morning. Then, the nursing sessions started moving earlier and earlier in the night until he wanted to nurse every two to three hours starting about two hours after he went to bed. And he got smart about me trying to nurse him back to sleep in the early morning and would jerk himself awake if he got drowsy at the breast. His waking time went from 8 to 7 to 6 to 5 and then earlier than 5. I am only willing to accommodate his whims so much…I could have dealt with either frequent waking or early waking, but not both. If he were a better cosleeper, I would have just toughed everything out that way—you don’t have to wake up much to just pop a boob in the mouth. But he is like me and wants his space and when we cosleep he sleeps fitfully and wakes even more frequently. So I would have to go get him out of the crib, bring him to the bed, feed him, debate whether or not I should just let him sleep with me and then end up getting up in a half an hour to put him back in the crib anyway, and take him back to the crib. By this time, I was completely awake and unable to get back to sleep for a half an hour. So each nightwaking with him was an hour of sleep lost for me. I was starting to come undone.

So this method seems to be working and he doesn’t seem distressed or anything. He actually seems happier because he and I are both better rested already. But with this decision has come so much sadness on my part because when you commit to something like this, it’s pretty much an all or nothing thing. That means I won’t likely be napping with him any more. I won’t be watching him slowly fall asleep at the breast anymore. I won’t get to savor the middle of the night nursing sessions. When I’m not busy resenting them.

He is growing up. Every day. Every hour. And it’s happening so fast. And although he is still a baby, this whole decision to teach him to fall asleep and stay asleep on his own has brought me to the verge of tears several times in the last few days. Not because it feels wrong. Don’t misunderstand me. If it felt wrong, I wouldn’t do it. I know it’s the right thing. I’m also not weepy because it’s been really hard or stressful. Surprisingly, it hasn’t. It makes me weepy because it takes him one step further away from total dependence on me. Perhaps the biggest barrier to him sleeping well in the last few months has been me, and my desire to protect him and shield him and keep him as close as I can. 

I know that this is neither the first, nor far from the last, painful decision I will make to encourage his independence or save my sanity. I don’t know what it is about this particular decision that makes me get all choked up and sentimental, but for me it just really highlights how quickly he is growing and becoming his own little dudeself. And while I am so fascinated by these changes and so proud of the magical child that he is and is becoming every day, I want to scream at the world to STOP or slow down and just let me catch my breath and savor these stages.

Goddess help me when he decides to wean.

 

I am in love with the Feministing blog. This weekly summary of stories is just a cornucopia of interesting tidbits…

Feministing.com