Sleep Like a Baby? Yeah, Right.

I’ve been sleeping on the couch for almost a week. Not only that, another man has taken my spot in the bed.

I’m not in the proverbial doghouse; I haven’t done anything to make Trudy upset with me, although one of our doormen seems to think I have.¹ There’s also nothing wrong with my bed; I’m not on the couch because the mattress has a spring sticking out or anything. The couch is just where I’ve been sleeping recently. It’s actually really comfortable, but, of course, I’d rather be in my bed.

As with so many parenting situations, I have to sleep on the couch because of my children.

Shayna was terribly sick two weeks ago. She was congested, coughed up a storm and had a fever for over a week, which occasionally rose as high as 103 degrees. She saw doctors on four straight days at one point to monitor her temperature, get an x-ray to check for pneumonia and to make sure the rash that suddenly broke out all over her body wasn’t an allergic reaction. The doctors concluded, after ruling out the more serious and terrifying diseases, that she had fallen victim to approximately seventy-five viruses all at once.²

Shayna is fine now. Her fever finally broke (on day eight!) and the rash that made her look like a mutant faded after a couple of days. Her sleep schedule, though, had been thrown completely out of whack because she kept waking up from the coughing. The quickest way to get Shayna back to sleep is usually for Trudy to nurse her, which makes sense when Shayna’s sick and needs the comfort, but is sort of annoying when she’s healthy. Shayna knows how to sleep through the night, so Trudy and I would rather not wake up if we don’t have to. Sometimes Shayna’s sleep patterns get altered, though, so we need to remind her how to go back to sleep without nursing.

That’s where I come in.

I usually get up with Trudy anytime she nurses Shayna at night, in case Eitan starts stirring while we’re in the room or Shayna finishes nursing but doesn’t fall asleep right away. Whenever we’re sleep training her, though, I have to be the only person Shayna sees in the middle of the night. If I come in and close the door behind me then Shayna knows she won’t be nursing. This leads her to start protesting, usually fairly loudly. We would rather not take the chance that Eitan get woken up by her crying so he sleeps on my side of the bed for a few days and I sleep on the couch. That way, Eitan and Trudy don’t get woken up whenever Shayna’s whimpering starts coming through the baby monitor and Trudy saves up a little more energy for dealing with a sick child³ the next day.

The time it takes for Shayna to fall back to sleep varies. It helps that Shayna actually understands instructions now because I can come in to her standing in the crib, tell her to lie down and she usually does it. Or, if I’ve picked her up and she points to the door to say that she wants me to bring her to Mommy, I can say, “No, we’re not going out,” and she leans her head down on my shoulder. Sometimes she puts her head down right away and sometimes she keeps crying for a bit. I was up with Shayna for close to two hours for the first two nights but it was less time after that. She slept straight through last night so we’ll probably give her at least one more night just to make sure. My fingers are crossed.

This is one of those processes that new parents don’t find out about until they’re faced with it. Everyone knows that parents of young children are deprived of sleep, but it usually gets discussed in terms of newborns waking up three or four times each night to eat. Afterward, the discussion becomes all about training the baby to fall asleep (and stay asleep) on his or her own. Countless methods have been developed on the subject, all of which claim to be effective, even though many of them contradict each other. Even with all of that research, however, I don’t remember reading any references to the effects of baby sleep training on the trainers. It seems that the real message here, outside of describing what it’s like to have a sick child and the teamwork needed to survive it, is a tip for expecting parents:

Invest in a comfortable couch. You never know when it’s going to come in handy.

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^{1. I walked in with flowers last Friday and he gave me a wink and a smile. “Flowers for the lady, eh? What’d you do wrong?”↩}

^{2. Okay, fine, they said it was three or four viruses. But they definitely all came at once and that rash was freaking scary so, for Trudy and me, it might as well have been seventy-five.↩}

^{3. Or sick children, as things usually work out.↩}

High Stakes

Dear Eitan and Shayna,

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately.

It’s a dangerous pastime, I know,¹ but it’s one of the reasons I haven’t published a new post in around three months.

I’ve had a couple of posts that I’ve started and then scrapped. There was the one about it taking a village to raise a child that had to do with the grandmother at the beach club who gave me a suggestion that helped Shayna stop screaming so I could get her to take a nap in her stroller. There was the one about watching Eitan grow over the course of the summer and watching the transitions he made during his first year at summer camp. There were a few about the ways you two interact together, some about our community of friends in our neighborhood and more than a few about the different events in our political sphere.

But I haven’t really finished any of them. I actually started to write a couple of times, but nothing ever felt quite right. My hesitations were due in part to my having trouble fleshing out some of my ideas into a fuller post that actually spoke to people and partially due to sheer exhaustion (it was a busy summer in a number of ways).

The biggest reason, though, was that I had been putting too much pressure on myself.

We live in interesting times.² Our President is an old man who cares more about maintaining his popularity and his coverage in the media than he does about actually helping the citizens of our country. Dictators on the other side of the planet seem bent on bringing our country to an end and, if they don’t manage to succeed, Mother Nature has gotten so angry about people not paying attention to her that she may just finish the job herself. Americans are at odds with each other about topics like healthcare, tax reform and the fate of people who kneel for the national anthem. I was listening to a podcast recently where the guest, an African-American writer who had just published a piece online about Colin Kaepernick, said that he would so much rather be writing about mundane topics than heavy think-pieces. He said that he felt like he had to write the think-pieces, however, because “the stakes are too high.” The heavy think-pieces were too important for him to pass them up.

That’s what I was doing to myself. I was telling myself that there are too many important things happening in the world today for me to write about such small issues like watching Eitan walking to school with a backpack nearly as big as he is or watching Shayna’s face light up when I open the front door when I come home from work. How could I spend my time writing about telling Eitan off-the-cuff stories about the Star Wars movies at bedtime when anti-Semitism, racism and countless other isms literally threaten people’s lives on a daily basis? I may not have the ongoing readership numbers of a major media company – my monthly views are a fraction of even most parenting blogs, for that matter – but I know that I have a solid number of regular subscribers who look forward to reading what I have to say. I have to imagine that those subscribers – including you, as you’re reading this now – are at least somewhat curious about where I stand on some of these issues which, again, are too impactful for me to just leave them to someone else.

And yet, that’s exactly what I was doing. I didn’t end up writing about Kaepernick or Russia or climate change. I wrote one post about health care reform and that was back when the bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act was still in the House of Representatives. I left the writing to the “professionals” because I felt too uninformed or inexperienced or just plan tired to work at actually figuring out my thoughts on the issues. I kept feeling like I should be writing about something, though, instead of leaving the blog to go dormant for three months.

As you can see, I finally decided to start up again by getting back to my roots. This all started as a parenting blog and evolved into, for all intents and purposes, a journal of my thoughts and experiences. It is a space for me to offer my thoughts on certain subjects, both for my peers to see today and, hopefully, for the two of you to read in the future. I’ll still end up giving my opinions about some of the heavier issues if I feel like I have something to say but I think, in general, I’m going to be working more with what I know. At some point, you may find yourselves wondering who your father was and what kinds of things affected him on a daily basis; I hope I’ve given you some material to answer some of those questions.

As far as moving forward is concerned, I would like to try to get back into the swing of things. September was a busy month, between changes at work, the start of the new school year and the High Holidays (not to mention the fact that I started the month by burning my foot by stepping on a piece of charcoal).³ That being said, the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot are designed to help us reflect on our lives and look for ways to improve ourselves. This post may be a few weeks late for a “New Years Resolution” but I guess it’s better late than never to make a decision to start writing more consistently.

There certainly is no shortage of material.

Love,

Daddy

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^{1. If you just heard Lefou and Gaston in your head, give yourself a pat on the back.↩}

^{2. Now there’s an understatement. Also, apparently that phrase being an ancient Chinese curse is actually a myth.↩}

^{3. Before you scold me for being barefoot while I was barbecuing, let me just say that I was at the beach. Everyone is barefoot at the beach.↩}

Featured image credit: CC0 Creative Commons