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This is 39 (Weeks Pregnant)

Published: . Filed Under: HerStories, Modern Parenthood.

I nearly forgot that I had my own blog.

To me, pregnancy feels like a long, solo journey to a strange, distant land. I turn inward. I slow down. I retreat. I wait. I process.

This year and last many of my writer friends and I who were turning 39 and then 40 wrote about what the end of our thirties and the beginning of our forties meant to us. (I particularly loved Alison Slater Tate’s and Lindsey Mead’s pieces on turning 40.)

As I enter the last days of my pregnancy, I know that I’m on two very different sort of journeys: one of entering a new phase of middle adulthood and my forties and another of adding a new daughter to our family.

39 weeks pregnant, 2011: Tired and just done.

Being 39 weeks pregnant feels so much like being 39 years old to me. You’re on the edge of a new path, a new direction. You feel very much like your old self, but know that new versions of yourself are about to be born.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is a time of uncertainty. Your life might change at any hour… Or it may stay the same for weeks. Both states — change and stasis — terrify you.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about managing discomfort. Even if you’ve had an easy pregnancy so far with no complications — as I have — there’s no getting around the fact that your last days of pregnancy will make you feel large and plagued with annoying physical ailments, from constant cramping to the need to pee more than five times per hour.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about knowing — and being told again and again — that you need rest to prepare yourself for what’s to come, but finding restorative, fitful rest elusive. Despite my pregnancy pillow, early bedtime, and exhaustion, the quality of my sleep has deteriorated beyond recognition. I toss. I turn. I jump up out of bed with leg cramps. I waddle to the bathroom. I throw my pillows to the floor in frustration.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about alternating bursts of energy with crushing exhaustion. An hour ago I was on my hands and knees trying to find dust bunnies in every corner of our bedroom: under the bed, in the closets, under the dressers. Then I decided to reorganize the drawers of the baby’s bureau. In the middle of that project, I was overcome with a fatigue so all-consuming that I took to the couch. (With a bag of Halloween candy.)

Being 39 weeks pregnant, with a first-born child in the house, is about looking forward to spending many weeks consumed with getting to know, learning to love, and focusing intensely on your new baby. And then feeling anticipatory guilt about neglecting and confusing your older child. You wonder if your heart is big enough, and if you will have enough energy, to love two small children completely, passionately, and patiently.

Being 39 weeks pregnant for a second time is believing that you are an expert in childbirth one minute — after all, you have done this before — and next wondering why you didn’t take a refresher course because you don’t remember a thing that matters.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about being confused by your body’s signals. You feel steady contractions and think that maybe it’s the time to start timing them. Then nothing.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about becoming a public conversation piece. Earlier in pregnancy, you may have received warm and knowing smiles, an opened door, and a pregnancy-related comment here and there from strangers. Now, you cannot leave the house without continuous commentary from nearly everyone you encounter, from the preschool parent that you’ve never spoken to before who tells you that you’ve definitely “dropped” to the elderly ladies at the coffee shop who ask to feel your baby to see if you’re having a contraction, to the librarian who asks if you’re past your due date yet because she thinks you look like you are.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about using Google more than 100 times a day. Today’s Google search terms: signs of prelabor, chance of labor at 39 weeks, average length of pregnancy, pregnancy nausea, pregnancy gas pains (Note: Be very careful when googling late pregnancy signs. I searched “mucus plug” — because I thought I had maybe lost mine — and what appeared on my computer screen traumatized me.)

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about panicked Amazon orders. Until the last few weeks, I have managed to avoid the sort of useless, anxiety-induced buying frenzies that characterized my first pregnancy — during which I bought three baby carriers, about ten types of baby bassinet sheets, five different styles of swaddle blankets, five different types of bottle systems, and assorted styles of onesies (kimono-style, snap-neck, no snap, long sleeve, short sleeve) “just in case.” But now I’m realizing that I do in fact need some things: diapers, wipes, baby soap, a rug for the baby’s room, a sound machine, etc.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about being sick of baby name lists, despite the fact that it has been your dream to name a girl since you were a small child. You wonder if there is any name that you and your husband can agree upon. And if there isn’t, you secretly think that you should get to name the baby because you are the one who is carrying around nearly 40 pounds of extra weight and hasn’t been able to see her toes since the Fourth of July.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about giving up any control over your moods. At the beginning of pregnancy, I was irritable and often downright nasty. Constant morning sickness for weeks on end will do that to a person. For the most part, during the rest of pregnancy, I didn’t feel all that much snippier or unreasonable than usual. (My husband may dispute this.) But now my moods are less stable than a toddler without an afternoon nap. Any given hour can bring giddy excitement, crushing disappointment, frantic anxiety, and unfocused annoyance.

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about saying, typing, and texting over and over, “Nope. Nothing yet.”

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about being asked, again and again, “Oh, how are you feeling?” and realizing that you cannot give the whole truth because no one really wants to hear: “I’m leaking pee and mucus. My back aches. I’m so constipated that I haven’t used the bathroom in over 10 days. I have varicose veins in places where no one should.”

Being 39 weeks pregnant is about knowing that you are about to meet one of the most important people in your life. She’s in many ways a stranger, but also more a part of you than anyone you know. You will be a new mother, even if you have other children at home.

You know that you will give your heart and all your love to this new person. But before you can meet, you both have the last part of this long journey to make.

What was the end of pregnancy like for you?

Of Meltdowns and Muffins: A Review of How Toddlers Thrive

Published: . Filed Under: Book Club, Modern Parenthood, Parenting, Raising Kids.

I first heard about Dr. Tovah Klein and How Toddlers Thrive: What Parents Can Do Today for Children Ages 2-5 to Plant the Seeds of Lifelong Success in a piece by science and parenting writer Melinda Wenner Moyer in Slate about clingy toddlers. The article attempts to explain the maddening and near-universal toddler phenomena of periodic bouts of extreme neediness.

At the time, my son — in the middle of the (supposed) Terrible Twos (Is there a parent still out there who still hasn’t been told that the Threes are worse?) — was just entering a long, confusing phase. It involved screaming “Mommy! Mommy! I want Mommy!” every five minutes and clinging to my leg during a good part of the day, and I loved Dr. Klein’s reassurances that, no, I should not sign my son up immediately for a children’s therapist. Instead, his neediness may be a sign that I was doing something right as a parent, that he viewed me as a “secure base” from which to which explore his world.

Within weeks, I got a review copy of How Toddlers Thrive, and I was a believer in understanding the toddler mindset as a way of handling his often exasperating and baffling behavior.

Despite how much I believed in the book’s main thesis that seeing the world through a toddler’s eyes is the key to good parenting during this tumultuous period, most days I still feel like have no idea what I’m doing.

Yesterday, as my three year old screams his trademark ear-splitting shrieks, kicks, and cries like a wild, deranged, wounded animal in his stroller, my husband and I do the Toddler Parent Walk of Shame through our busy, urban neighborhood. We walk silently, making no eye contact with our neighbors in the crowds coming to and from our local farmers’ market on this late Saturday morning. I know what I will see if I look up and meet my fellow Buffalonians’ eyes: several glances of pity, a few more looks of confusion, empathy from some, and quite a lot of annoyance.

What I keep thinking as I walk/waddle (I’m 25 weeks pregnant, after all) home is that this whole meltdown is my fault. Rookie mistake, I think. Tovah — that is, Dr. Tovah Klein aka “The Toddler Whisperer” — would not be impressed by our parenting this morning. We’ve failed our son.

My husband, in contrast, draws a very different conclusion.

“He’s got to learn that he can’t always get his way,” he says in exasperation. “There is absolutely no reason to make a scene like this.”

I start to protest that we did promise him the muffin, but my husband dismisses my defense. “He’s got to learn that sometimes you can’t always get a muffin! He’s got to grow up a little.”

So what happened? What caused this meltdown, which lasted for much of the next hour or two of this perfect summer weekend day?

It was that promised muffin. But it’s never just a muffin, is it, when you’re dealing with a toddler?

The farmers’ market is part of our Saturday morning routine. My son loves exactly two things about the farmers’ market: the Humane Society booth with kittens on display and the bakery booth, from which he always gets a muffin as his Saturday breakfast.

But this morning was different, a disruption in his weekend routine. My husband had to go into the office so he brought our son along. They also did a bunch of errands and fun stuff: the car wash, Home Depot, a hair cut at the barber’s, a stop at the Hobby Train store, the pet store. They were gone for hours, and by the time they got back, our son was a very tired boy who couldn’t stop rubbing eyes and it was just about lunchtime. But he — and I — still wanted to go to the Farmers’ Market (I love fresh corn!). Despite my hard-earned prior knowledge about what happens when we brought our tired and hungry toddler anywhere, we set off.

The Farmers’ Market was just about over, and the pickings were slim. There were no muffins, just cookies and cakes, at our usual bakery stand. My husband said matter-of-factly, “Oh, well. No muffins. It’s lunchtime anyway.”

He shrugged and got ready to move on. Did he really think we would get off that easily? The screams started several feet away as soon as my son realized that we weren’t buying a beloved muffin.

How Toddlers Thrive fresh in my mind, I tried to label his feelings and empathize. “I know. You’re so sad that there aren’t any muffins. We like our muffins, don’t we? I’m so sad too. I’m sorry that Mommy and Daddy promised you a muffin, and the muffins are gone.” I gave him a hug and held him as he first began to cry.

As Dr. Klein recommends, I tried to see this incident through his point of view. In the book, she states that “empathy is what helps a child (and adult!) feel understood, which helps them settle down from the upset. At the same time, labeling their feelings is a necessary step toward helping them know over time what they are feeling.”

I repeated soothing words but the tantrum escalated. So we fled home.

And I felt like a parenting failure.

But only until I got home, settled him down, and looked again at the book. Dr. Klein tells parents that tantrums are inevitable. Literally, their brains are wired for them. They can now form their own ideas and desires (“I want my delicious muffin NOW!”; they have no sense of time (“We can get you a muffin next Saturday” is meaningless); they have begun to experience more intense and new emotions and yet their brains are not sophisticated enough to develop strategies of their own for handling these emotions.

What matters, she argues, is how parents handle the “repair”: how toddler and parent “make up” after the explosions. Overreacting, yelling, and showing frustration are inevitable sometimes; no parent is perfect. A child is more likely to settle down if you show that you’re there for them and comfort them.

And I did that!

And as I reviewed my notes, I realized that I did quite a few of the things that Dr. Klein recommends that parents do to raise resilient and happy children: I did not shame my son for having his need or desire; I stayed with him through the tantrum and comforted him; and I tried to make a “repair” after the tantrum was done.

So why is my son still such a terror so much of the time?

After reading this book, I think I know the answer, but I’m not sure that I like it: It’s because he’s a toddler. That’s the reason. According to Dr. Klein, there are no quick fixes, no magic recipe for discipline success. Toddlers thrive on routines, structure, and boundaries. Dr. Klein wants parents to trust themselves as models for how to react, how to talk about feelings, and how to deal with struggles.

Before I became a parent, I used to watch the reality show Supernanny. Doesn’t she make good parenting look like a breeze? A few times on the Naughty Chair, a reward chart, and a trip to the park as a family, and the kids were all fixed. Dr. Klein’s approach is the opposite of that.

We all want quick fixes. But for right now I’m thinking that Dr. Klein may be on to something. As my little boy learns about the world, I’m learning more about myself too.

What questions do you have about toddlers? Which parts of toddler parenting baffle or frustrate you the most?

Welcome back to the Brilliant Book Club! Join the conversation about toddlers, tantrums, and Dr. Tovah Klein’s book on our Facebook page. And be sure to check out posts about How Children Thrive from the other members of our book club:

Lauren of Omnimom: Should Young Kids Be Expected to Listen to Their Parents?

Stephanie of Mommy, For Real: Shaming of the Twos: Finding a Better Way to Parent Your Toddler

Sarah of Left Brain Buddha: The Space Between: Helping Your Toddler Thrive

Deb of Urban Moo Cow: With Toddlers, The Name of the Game is Empathy

My Hard-Earned Tips for Escaping Toddler Sleep Hell

Published: . Filed Under: home page, Modern Parenthood.

It had been three years since we had slept.

Slight exaggeration, but not by much.

Our son had held a reign of terror at night time since he was a month old. Despite my close reading of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Dr. Weissbluth (the sleep bible that everyone tells you to get if you mention your baby’s sleep issues) when my son was a newborn, his severe reflux and food allergy issues kept us from instilling those “habits” early on.

Despite later sleep training (yes, the controversial — but not really — cry it out), followed by some good weeks or months of sleep once we learned the real reason he (or any baby) wouldn’t sleep through the night. Despite help from our pediatrician and from sleep consultants. Despite my purchase of every sleep book published in the last 20 years. Despite ill-fated attempts at co-sleeping. Despite all of this, we always ended up back at square one. Constant ear infections, other viruses, travel, anything! would eliminate any progress.

And we still hadn’t met the Mother of All Toddler Sleep Destroyers: the transition from the crib to the toddler bed.

That fateful evening started out as a normal night. After a bedtime battle of average length, we thought our son was settling in to stay asleep. My husband and I were in our bedroom, discussing what we should pack for our trip to Florida in a few days.

Then we heard it. Thud. We looked at each other in horror. He had climbed out of the crib for the first time. Seconds later a very small boy dashed into our room with a huge smile on his face, delighted by what he had discovered he could do. And do again and again. That night we made a panicked crib to bed transition. My husband got out his tool box and took down the crib.

From that day on, things became unbearable. He would not stay in the crib. Eventually we took to sitting with him in a chair in his room until he fell deeply asleep. Every time he woke up — sometimes several times per night — that process would need to be repeated. My husband or I would spend long portions of the night asleep ourselves (uncomfortably) in that chair. And to top it off the misery, he was now completely refusing to nap during the day.

Eventually, I contacted Alanna McGinn, a pediatric sleep coach and owner of the Good Night Sleep Site. I had met her online, when she had given me a few helpful sleep suggestions on my Facebook page. My husband, son, and I couldn’t function like this indefinitely, particularly since I was now in my first trimester of pregnancy and desperately tired and sick from those early weeks.

Because my son was so resistant to falling asleep on his own, alone in his room, she developed a plan that involved one of us sitting in a chair in the room and gradually moving further and further away from his bed. We tried that, and we made a little progress.

Until the dreaded hand foot and mouth disease. For several nights he was up, screaming in pain from the huge sores in his mouth, dozens of times per night. After the illness was over, things were once again worse than before. Bedtime might take hours. He might spend hours of the night, wide awake with us in his room.

This time we followed Alanna’s quicker approach. We got a gate (and then a lock for his door). On that first night, we explained what was happening to our son, that the gate was there to help him to sleep better on his own. We again showed him how his new toddler sleep clock works. We went through his normal bedtime routine. And then locked him in. We established non-negotiable limits: he was staying in his room and we were not. End of story. We did gradual checks — first at three minutes, then five, and then seven and so on. He fell asleep after about an hour of intense screaming. The next night it was closer to a half an hour. The next night it was ten minutes. And then soon he wasn’t crying at all.

Now bedtime is easy. He climbs into bed by himself after his last book (always “Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site“), gets a few big kisses before we leave the room, and falls asleep in a few minutes. He doesn’t wake up during the night anymore. (Or, rather, he puts himself back to sleep on his own when he does.)

Let me tell you: It is bliss. It is life-changing. It is a miracle.

He’s still not napping. But that’s okay. We’ll take it.

My Tips

If your toddler’s sleep habits are impacting your family’s life, here are my humble tips for you:

1. Don’t put off what needs to be done. There will always be an excuse for why you should put off teaching your baby or kid better sleep habits: He’s getting over a cold. He’s had a bad week at preschool. Your mother-in-law will be visiting soon. It’s almost the holidays. In my experience, sleep problems don’t just magically disappear. Your child will keep waking up all night until you tackle the real issue that’s keeping him from sleep through the night.

2. More gradual and “gentler” approaches can be often harder on everyone. It took us a while to learn this one. For many parents (particularly moms) first facing sleep challenges, their main goal — other than to get their kid to sleep — is to prevent crying. Even though I knew the unequivocal research that a few nights of crying will do absolutely nothing to hurt a kid’s development or his attachment to his caregivers, the thought of listening to my son scream made me crazy. So I often opted first for the “gentler” and gradual approach. And when it didn’t work or it stretched out all of our misery for weeks, we always ended up using more drastic methods. In short, it’s like the difference between ripping off a bandaid or trying to pull it off slowly, gently, and progressively.

3. Establish firm limits. One would think that after more than a decade and a half of teaching students from the elementary grades to college, I would be better at recognizing how crucial limit-setting is. Not the case. My own child’s whining, pleading, screaming, tantrums drives me to distraction, and I forget everything that I know about positive discipline, routines, and boundaries. For me, I’ve learned that I need to pick my battles, work on one or two areas at a time. Right now, sleep is one of them. As Tovah Klein, my new “Toddler Whisperer” and author of How Toddlers Thrive: What Parents Can Do Today for Children Ages 2-5 to Plant the Seeds of Lifelong Success, states, “Setting limits actually builds children’s trust.” Bedtime is now a comforting, predictable, and happy time for my son.

4. Get help. Don’t let months or years go by before you reach out to someone to get a fresh perspective about what’s going on. It’s easy to start thinking that no one will understand how difficult sleep challenges are, that everyone else’s kids are better sleepers than yours. It’s tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that you know your child best and no one else can help. You might even be embarrassed about how bad the situation has become. You might be frustrated about all the contradictory information in sleep books. Trust me. You’re not alone. Talk to your pediatrician. Reach out to your friends and relatives, and listen to their own stories. Join a Facebook group, like Alanna’s, and listen to other parents’ perspectives.

This weekend my son started potty training. And now we’re onto another challenge….

What’s been your biggest toddler sleep challenge? How did you handle it? What advice would you give other parents?

For more on toddler sleep problems, read my posts “What Do You Do When Your Toddler Suddenly Stops Sleeping?” and “The Real Reason Why Your Kid Won’t Sleep Through the Night”

More recommended resources, with an emphasis on toddler sleep (books that I love and have turned to over and over)

The Happy Sleeper: The Science-Backed Guide to Helping Your Baby Get a Good Night’s Sleep-Newborn t o School Age (my new absolute favorite baby/child sleep book!)
Sleeping Through the Night, Revised Edition: How Infants, Toddlers, and Their Parents Can Get a Good Night’s Sleep (by the wonderful Jodi Mindell)
The Sleepeasy Solution: The Exhausted Parent’s Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep from Birth to Age 5

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For more on toddler sleep problems, read my posts “What Do You Do When Your Toddler Suddenly Stops Sleeping?” and “The Real Reason Why Your Kid Won’t Sleep Through the Night”

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