Accommodatingly

So Nathan is a boy in motion now: mostly it’s assisted motion– parent or caregiver holds both hands while he walks back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth across a room. He loves it. We love it, because he’s moving and loves it, although the muscles in our backs perhaps do not love it.

Sometimes it’s semi-assisted motion: he’s not big on crawling, but while I was at the library this evening, he apparently crawled backwards across the room to our record shelving and (drum roll) selected his first-ever records!

Nathan appears to have, by and large, good indie taste. His first-ever DJ set, it seems, comprised tracks from these compilation LPs: the very good and rarely-encountered Glasgow comp Second City Statik; twp volumes of Cherry Red’s superb New Wave comp Seeds; the Sid and Nancy soundtrack, about which we plan to withhold relevant information for, oh, the next twenty years; an Iowa City punk compilation which includes my brother Dan’s Oberlin band Souse Loaf; and, best of all, the first Sarah Records collection, Shadow Factory.

Yes, the records are undamaged. No, we didn’t actually listen to them all. Yes, I sing Field Mice songs to Nathan before bed. Among other songs. (My current favorite is the Magnetic Fields’ “Strange Powers” with slightly new lyrics: “And we can’t sleep/ When you keep strange hours…”) Yes, his sleeptime habits have improved mightily in recent weeks– moving his bedtime a bit later certainly helped.

In other news, Jessie has been busy planning the Twin Cities Bookfest. If you live here you should come. If you live elsewhere you should come anyway– it’s more fun than bookfests in other cities, in my limited experience.

(More Nathan news as it happens– and, if you’re patient, some non-Nathan posts coming up. If you live in Boston or Los Angeles and you want to see Steve, get in touch: he’ll be coming to your city, quite briefly, quite soon.)

Why on earth would packing peanuts dusted with kale, broccoli, and spinach (otherwise known as “Veggie Booty”) be a baby’s favorite food ever?

The tooth that is erupting is the right lateral incisor, rather than the central incisor. This is an odd order. So, according to the Universal Numbering System, he now has teeth O, P, and D, or alternately, 15d, 16d, and 4d.

I am sure you are all fascinated.

My other interests lately include Project Runway (blame my research for this article) and the upcoming Twin Cities Book Festival, which is shaping up to be a great day. This year’s festival includes a Spelling Bee, in which Steve will be competing. Still trying to figure out our babysitting situation for that day. Hrrmmm.

The first top tooth (right incisor) has begun poking through. Strangely, he’s not inordinately fussy today, aside from a stubborn case of the no-naps.

A profile I wrote of The Design Collective for MNArtists.org is now up. It’s nice to be writing more lately.

We’re in Washington. Nathan had a good day of visiting his great-grandma and spending time with his Bubbe. He is sleeping soundly. We’re going to try putting him to sleep later at night to see if maybe he just needs less sleep than we’ve been thinking he does. Again, this is the wisdom of Ferber.

I don’t expect to be blogging much over the next couple of days as the computer setup here is really un-ergonomic. Catch up with you all later.

Avoid them like the plague unless you want to get sick. I got roped in for a makeover by the Clarins rep yesterday and now I have pink eye, a sore throat, and a developing cold sore. Fortunately, the nice folks at the HealthPartners Care Line have hooked me up with some eye drops I can go pick up in the morning.

When I am up and feeling better, I am going to Macy’s and returning the products the sales rep convinced me to buy, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them have my money after they gave me an infection.

I used to be leery of makeup counters, and now I feel justified that I wasn’t being paranoid. Most places will let you return things if you don’t like them–buy it and take it home to try it out instead of sampling items in store.

It’s times like this that it would be so easy to become a germophobe who constantly wipes oneself down with hand sanitizer and never touches anything when out in public.

I have been slacking off on our personal blog because I’m basketball blogging book reviewing academic-administrating proofreading my critical MS, due to the publisher next week enjoying Jessie’s baby blogging so much that I’m not sure I have much to add.

Right now, though, she’s asleep and I’m awake, and I’m happy to assure our faithful readers that Ferberizing works! Nathan went down quietly, with only seven minutes of fussing, tonight: it helped that he was exhausted from not having napped in a bed, only in a car. He hasn’t (knock on styrofoam) awakened yet.

When we go back to daycare (after next week) we’re gonna try keeping him awake in the car on the way there every morning, to increase the chance of his morning nap taking place there: that will get him a nap in a bed, and it will teach him that naps, like nighttime sleeps, don’t need to take place in his own bed– they can take place anywhere a bed (or a pack-n-play) happens to open up.

We spend most of next week in DC: we hope Nathan learns that lesson very soon.

The ever-controversial Linda Hirshman advises women who want both a child and a job never to be the person who knows when the household has run out of stuff (paper towels, cat food, tomato sauce), and never to be the person who knows what to do when household Things Go Wrong.

My own theory about Linda Hirshman is that her target audience is, in fact, liberal husbands, who will realize that their wives really have become the person who knows when they’re out of paper towels and how to fix the drain, and who will then feel guilty enough to do something about it. But do what? (Work less in order to learn to cook better? Maybe. I am not going to put any links in this post, because I want to fold laundry before going to bed: if you, gentle reader, find links in the grafs above, that means I folded the laundry and added them later.)

Update: I folded the laundry. Good advice for campaigning Democrats here. Katie Smith has a WNBA championship, which is cool, though I wanted Sacramento– the Shock were just too talented. My too-long game writeup either will, or will not, appear here. My love note to William Empson is now in print here. And Mrs. Coulter’s refutation of Hirshman is here.

We (well, Steve, I left the house to avoid giving in) let Nathan cry himself to sleep without nursing last night. He had eaten plenty of dinner, had nursed a bit, and nursing before bed would just be out of habit and for comfort.

Well, he didn’t explode from crying, and eventually got to sleep (after probably 30-40 minutes). Then, he slept. Brief thrashings and crying out without waking up around 10 and 11. He woke at about 2 and I went in to nurse him, then put him down awake in his crib. A token protest cry (for a couple of minutes), and then he was back to sleep. Unbelievable after the night before, where the nursing session was followed by his being fully awake, then crying and insistent upon us holding him for the next 90 minutes.

He woke up at 6 and played in his crib for a while. If we hadn’t had the monitor on, we probably wouldn’t have even known he was awake. I brought him into bed with us for his morning nurse, giving myself a little bit more time lying down. He has been cheerful and playful all morning.

I’m not saying that this is the dawn of a new era. But it sure looks promising.

We went to the pediatrician today to talk to her about Nathan’s sleep issues. For me, this was mostly to receive reassurance that it’s okay for him to cry for several hours running–he will stop crying so much eventually if we just stick to a plan and get him used to the idea that we will not be nursing nor will we be endlessly rocking nor will we be bringing him into our bed at night. So it’s on to the Ferber method for us. I found the concept of it–letting babies “cry it out”–a bit horrifying at first, but the prospect of all of us getting better sleep is too alluring to resist.

Thanks to those who made supportive comments after the last post. It’s good to know that there are many more parents out there who have gone through the same frustrating things we’re experiencing.

at about 3am, nathan wakes up. he cries. i nurse him. he won’t go back to sleep. he cries more. we try to let him cry it out. well over an hour later, he is still awake. i rock him until he seems to be asleep. he screams as soon as he’s back in his crib.

lest you suggest we bring him in bed with us, in our bed at this time of night, he pinches and kicks us, fusses, talks, pulls on my nipples, etc.

i hate 3am. i hate 4am. i feel like the worst parent alive.