Journey Away From Co-sleeping

 A work in progress....

Dear Juna,

You are three years old now.  You have been sleeping with me since the day you were born.  It has been one of the sweetest experiences of my life.  I have loved feeling your warm little body next to mine, hearing you breath peacefully in the night, feeling that you are safe right next to me, being able to respond to you the moment you need me, night nursing, waking to your face on the pillow beside me and morning cuddling.  Now that you are three, your father and I have decided it is time to transition you into your own room and you own bed.  If it were just up to me, I probably would sleep with you for longer, but because there are various factors, I do think it is the best thing to do.  I do think you are ready, or will be by the time the total transition takes place.  It will be a process, as every change and development has been.  

First, we redid your room for your third birthday...

But I also think of you, my little child, in the big bed, in the big room all by yourself, all night long, while the big people, who need no care, are sleeping together in another room, and it kind of doesn't make sense to me.  I also know, this will be a transition for me as well, and that it might be difficult for me to sleep well with you so far away.  I might have to get up during the night to check on you.  This may be completely normal, but I know I also have some over-protective feeling, partly because three children have passed away in our family, and this makes me more nervous about being away from you.

Day 1 - July 28

I just left Juna in her new room, in her big girl bed, reading books to herself. The room isn't completely finishing and I wasn't planning on her transitioning for another week or so, but she said she wanted to go to bed all by herself, read books all by herself, sleep all by herself tonight and not nurse. WOW! That, of course, doesn't mean that it will happen, but it does mean she is excited about it and her new found independence in her big girl room!

Two minutes later... I didn't think to turn on her nightlight, so she read her books, then turned off her light and found herself in the dark (she is used to sleeping in the dark, but in her hew room, she is going to have a night light). So she came out to get me.  Then she wanted to try sleeping in her loft, which I did not foresee.  It has a sleeping bag but not the foam mattress yet.  She climbed in, I left her nightlight on, and two minutes later she came out to tell me she wanted to sleep in the big bed with me.

 Day 2 - July 29

Well, the bedtime routine just got a lot longer.  Juna's been having a difficult time falling sleep the last two weeks.  First it was just taking longer (usually takes 20-30 minutes but started gradually taking up to fifty minutes) and then for three days she was screaming and crying (about going to bed, then when I stopped nursing her), until last night when she went to sleep fine but still took a while.  So, not a great time to be adding to our bedtime routine.  

Our usual routine is long enough and goes like this: 

8:15 - 10 minutes of TV (8:00 if bath)

8:30 - Jammies on, potty time, brush teeth

8:45 - Read books

9:00 - 9:20 - Lights out, What we did today? (review & preview), nursing & songs

9:20 - 9:30 - Roll over and fall asleep (except this is taking until 9:50 or so these days)

Now, we are adding in:

8:45 - 9:10 - Practicing going to sleep in own bed, practicing sleeping in loft, going into big bed

So, she wanted to try again.  Own bed, loft, then big bed.  This transitioning is exhausting.

August 13

Juna and I have been sleeping in her bed for 3 nights with no trouble.  The last step was getting a new air conditioner for her room.  I still need to fix the window so it is dark in there, that has been a pain.  Of course, it is a real pain sleeping in her little twin bed with her... the first night we just had the cheap thin mattress on it and I woke felling so sore and awful, but I put a big blanket and mattress cover on it and it is a little better.  Juna loves her new room and likes sleeping in her own bed.  She had been under the impression that it meant her sleeping alone, and she was having some trouble with that, of course, she has no problem with me sleeping with her.

Holy Cow! You Are Three!

My dearest Juna Finn, today you turn three years old
and we have had three lovely, sweet, inspiring years
together, full of smiles and happiness, tears and falls,
challenges for both of us, and we have weathered them
together.  I truely can not believe that it has been three years
since the birth of you, since the first time I held
your new little body and looked into your eyes, since
my heart over-flowed for the first time of many
hundreds of times during all of the moments of
watching you grow so beautifully.

Then You Were Two

Two

                                                       July 2013

For the first few months of 2, I thought, mistakenly,
"Maybe we won't go through what they term the "terrible twos"?  
Ahhh, and then, there it was.  "Hello TWO."

One of the times of greatest change,
absolutely awe inspiring and
painfully challenging at the same time

However tough it is on us, we remind ourselves,
it is tougher on them, and that we should take a lesson
from how easily and quickly they CAN recover
from the immensity of the intensity
of new and confusing emotions
as they navigate this complex world
with all of the new skills they are learning
and honing every minute of every day

You are 2
and you are absolutely amazing
in all of the things that you do

                                         5 days to 3

Because You Have Emotions and They Are Real

I can not say NEVER,
because I know it is something
that I have done,
and that I will do it again,
and I apologize,
but I promise to try
to listen to, validate and respond
accordingly to your feelings,
instead of dictating what they should be.
You are a child, you are young,
you do not have all of the language yet
to identify, understand or express
all of those very strong emotions
that you have, and it is my job
to help you learn how to.
You are a child
and this does not mean
that your emotions do not count,
that they should be ignored
just because you do not have the words
to explain them, or because
they are so big, you can not contain them,
that they are not REAL
just because they seem "over-the-top"
to the adults around you who have learned
to "control" or dull their own feelings.
I do not want to teach you that
some feelings are GOOD and some are BAD
that some are RIGHT and some are WRONG,
I don't want to applaud your unbridled excitement,
your exuberant joy, your uncontainable love
and then frown upon your anger,
your frustration, your fear, your sadness,
because all feelings have a place
and all feelings are valid,
and you will feel them all in your life
and that is as it should be.

Because it is my job
to help you identify your feelings
I will try not to confuse
what you learn about the world
by telling you that what you feel
is the WRONG way to feel,
with statements like, "Oh, that doesn't hurt."
or "That's not something to cry about."
because it may hurt and if you are crying,
then for you, it IS something to cry about,
because it is not my job to TELL you HOW to feel,
it is my job to help you understand how you feel,
to process those strong emotions and
learn how to communicate them.
I do not want to confuse your learning process
by telling you that you are NOT feeling sad
when you are feeling sad.

Because I do not want to teach you
not to feel, not to express your feelings,
and not to be able to talk about them,
or that what you feel is WRONG
because someone else thinks
you should not feel the way you do,
I want you to be confident in your own feelings
and not let anyone dictate your feelings to you.
Because I do not want to teach you
to feel ashamed, embarrassed, or silly
for feeling what you feel.

I want you to have a voice.
I want you to feel powerful.
I want you to feel confident and proud.

Having A Conversation

Having a conversation often sounds like this:
"What were we talking about?  Oh yeah.  Such-and-such.  Oh wait, that's too high.  Let's be careful.  Okay, so as I was saying... oh, hold on, don't kick your friend.  We take turns on the slide.  Well, anyway, I was trying to tell you about this-and-that.  What, honey?  You need to pee pee?  Okay, let's go... Well, it's time to get going.  Nice to see you."

As a mother, I don't have conversations anymore, except for the many I have with my daughter about things like how poo poo is made in our bodies.  There are some other things I no longer do and new things: 
Clean my house in a day.
Remember all of my friends' birthdays and send them something.
Remember people's names the first or fifth time I hear it.
Think about myself most of the time.
Have small perky breasts.
Read a book.  Read a whole book.  Read a book in less then 6 months.
Always be on time, make and not break plans.
Sleep through the night and wake myself up.
Complete a blog post, and most other things.
Take a vacation.  Relax. 
Do things when I think of them.
Now I think about child related things 80% of the time, I think it was about 3% prior.
Now I talk about pee pee and poo poo many times a day.
Now I am always multi-tasking.  

Becoming a mother changed me.  Maybe this isn't true for everyone, but I am a different person.  It has been interesting and difficult to get to know myself again and figure out who I am.  I mean, when you change everything that you do, it changes you.  When you are responsible for another person, a child who is completely dependent on you, your emotional and social life completely changes.  When you go through pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding your body completely changes.  New research even shows that your brain changes when you become a mother, it actually grows in size and new areas are created.  However, sometimes it is my tight grasp on who I was before and old habits that inhibit this new transformation to take place smoothly.  It is also difficult that those who knew me before expect me to be the same person that I was.

to be continued...

International Day of the Midwife

To my midwife, my mother-in-law, my daughter's grandmother

Thank you for walking alongside me on my journey into motherhood,
for your kind listening, your calmness and confidence,
thank you for your strength, when my knees were weak,
for your quiet instruction, which was a beacon on my foggy shore,
for the hands that coaxed and caught my little one in their gentle embrace,
and handed her, healthy and full of life, into my arms,
thank you for being the convoy of so many amazing lives,
for your knowledge, your trust and belief, your love
and for being the amazing woman, person and midwife that you are.

Juna's First Beach Trip

 Part I: Travel

Packing

I have always enjoyed packing and organizing, I like to be prepared for anything and have options, but I could also just throw a couple of things in a bag and head out.  Packing is entirely different now and involves a lot of preparation, forethought, lists, stuff and double-checking.  All of our trips have also been long ones, usually two weeks, and that involves a lot of stuff.  This time it was only four days and five nights, but our first time to the beach and staying at a beach house, which meant extra stuff like Juna's bike and a little blow up pool (the first we forgot to throw in the camper and the second we never used), towels and sheets (both of which we never had enough off).  Preparations began a couple weeks before with just jotting down things on the to-do and to-bring lists as I thought of things.  The beginning of the week of I started all the laundry and putting the items we wanted to take aside as they became available.  Then I actually started packing 3 days before.  We brought so much stuff, you might have thought we were actually moving to the beach, which is basically what Juna thought.  It always takes the first trip to figure out what you need and what you don't use.  I can say I didn't forget to bring anything we needed but I did leave part of the baby monitor there.

Travel, Sleep and Routine

Travel has been difficult.  Juna was not a car baby.  She screamed and cried in the car on a regular basis... as in almost every time we got in the car.  I knew exactly how many minutes it took to get to all of the usual places we went.  Driving was the most difficult time for us until her extreme dislike started to fade and then dissolved around 16 months.  Suffice-it-to-say I wasn't too excited about traveling long distances in the car.  That kind of torture just isn't worth it to me.  I would feel so stressed leading up to it, then overwhelmed, sad, stressed, and in pain (when your child is in pain or distress, you suffer a new kind of pain you have never felt before) during most of the trip, then exhausted after the drive and then in dread of the ride back, which is always harder then the one there.  But, as I said, it did get better, thank goodness!  Although my husband would like to travel a lot more, and bought a camper for that purpose, I think every four months is good for Juna and I, it takes about that long to forget the difficult parts and only remember the fun of your last trip.  Of course, that will change as she ages.

There And Back Again

The ride to your destination is always a lot easier then the ride back, for several reasons.  Here are some of the typical reasons and those unique to this trip:

                            There                                                                 
-the camper & destination are exciting and new, you are on an adventure               
-uncle Jer rode with us (for fun and as navigator)             
-you are well-rested                                                            
-you are well prepared with healthy snacks, plus all the food you are taking with you                           
-you take your time packing, double check, and have everything you need at hand                                      

                            Back
-you have to rush to get out in the morning, so you are not well organized,
the camper is a mess and Juna doesn't get much attention, so she's already feeling upset
-the camper is old hat and just hot
-you miss a turn and add 30 minutes
-you are both exhausted & over stimulated 
-you end up eating crap all day and tummy ache ensues