Christmas 2010 – Christmas 2011

I haven’t really written about my plans for next year, partly because I find it hard to carve out time to sit down and write a post (as opposed to tweeting which can be done on-the-go from my phone) and partly because I’ve been struggling with some pretty serious ambivalence about what 2012 will mean for me and my family.

In summary: a new house in a new suburb, a new job, new childcare arrangements, new study commitments… all of which leaves me feeling a like there’ll be very little left in my life from the last 14 wonderful months.

In the middle of this year I applied for a job – a very competitive and sought after training position at a hospital on the other side of town. I applied partly because I felt like I should – not a good reason, I’ll grant you (and it would take too many paragraphs to explain why I feel that way, if I even could) – but also because I do truly want to take this step in my career. This is where the ambivalence kicks in – I want the job, but I don’t want what it will mean for my life for the next five years (which is the length of the training program – at a minimum).

To be honest, I didn’t think I’d get the job. During my interview the director of training was pretty blunt about the difficulties of the role when I had a child at home (this was the first question they asked me – yes, I know they technically aren’t allowed to discriminate) and about the relative mediocrity of my previous academic record (average to above average grades, although in a very competitive field). I left the interview sure I would not gain the position.

When they called me the following day to offer me the job I was forced to abruptly face the realities of the situation: turn down the job knowing I would almost certainly never be offered the role again, or accept the job and say goodbye to so many of the things I love about my life.

I hesitated for a fraction of a second and then accepted the job.

On an intellectual level it’s a no-brainer. It’s a position on the training program that I’ve always wanted to be on; in 5 years time (if I make it!) I will leave the program with a fantastic career, one that has the potential to be both lucrative and family-friendly. This is the job that will enable me to send Will to private school, to take annual overseas trips, to provide him with opportunities he might otherwise miss out on. Out of the diverse career field I am in this is the job that I think I am best suited to and will most enjoy.

But.

This job will mean a 40 to 50 hour working week. It will mean major study commitments with some pretty serious exams – the first set in September next year. It means moving in order to be closer to my base hospital. It means overtime, nightshift, and weeks rostered to out-of-town locations.

How the hell do I do that and still manage to maintain any semblance of the close relationship I currently share with Will? Where will I find the energy to continue nurturing my marriage? When will I have time for any self-care activities like yoga? How do we care for Will when both of us have jobs that involve working odd or extended hours?

And.

How the hell are we ever going to have another kid?

That’s the big one for me. The reality that this fertility-impaired girl might have to wait until she’s 36 to try for more kids. I can’t ignore what 5 more years is going to do to my fertility. It’s that uncertainty coupled with the knowledge that I will only be able to spend a fraction of the time I currently do with my son that makes me feel almost sick every time I think about it. I haven’t even returned my contract because that would just make it seem too real, too final.

Holy crap, what have I gotten myself in for?

Here are the long-overdue photos from Will’s birthday party which we held in a local park. Luckily for us the weather was brilliant!

Be warned, there are more than 30 photos in the slideshow, so get comfortable!

A few details:

• The bunting was made by a friend when Will was born. The colours don’t work in his bedroom but I knew straight away that I wanted to use the bunting as the basis for his first birthday party decorations.
• My talented friend Emma made the cake and cupcakes. She also made our wedding cake and based Will’s cake on the same recipe because it’s our favourite – banana and white chocolate.
• I bought the blue polka dot lanterns and made the blue and white poms. I hung a ‘chandelier’ over each of the four picnic tables in the picnic shelter we reserved for the party.
• Will, the child who hates hat, loved the party hat I made him and wore it for the entire cake cutting and eating. And not surprisingly, he loved his cupcake!

Unfortunately H is working all weekend, so it will sort of be a non-day in this household. To be honest I think I’m more upset about it than he is, but I still wish we could do something special as a family. However, we will make of it what we can. H has conveniently already bought himself a (rather expensive!) present to mark the occasion, which doesn’t leave me with much to do. I’m going to make him a yummy lunch with all his favourite things and drop it off to him at work, but I also wanted him to have a little present he could open.

I was inspired by Christina‘s pin and have made a photo montage for H, but instead of framing it I had it printed on a mug for H to use at work. Conveniently, this little project can double as my entry in the Pinterest Challenge!

Step 1: Bought chunky cardboard letters to spell out D-A-D, and some spray paint.

Step 2: Painted them! This was so much easier and less messy than I anticipated. (I also painted some other items for a different project.)

Step 3: Set up a little ‘mini-studio’ in Will’s room using a black back-drop, gave Will one letter at a time and started snapping!

Step 4: Chose the best shots (this was the hardest part because Will wasn’t having a particularly smiley day!) and used GIMP to merge the photos. (Check out the ‘A’ photo – how could I not love that cheeky little monkey?)

Step 5: Got online at harvernorman.com.au and ordered the mug! Simple!

In retrospect I would have made the photo smaller – and perhaps put one on each side of the mug – so that the entire word DAD could be read from one angle. But! I’m still happy with the outcome. I hope H will be too. It’s a little corny… but then isn’t that what Fathers’ Day is all about?

Have you seen that movies Sliding Doors? In it Gwyneth Paltrow lives out two possible lives.  We see two futures unfolding, each the consequence of just one moment.

Today I’m living my own version of Sliding Doors. I exist mostly in my true life, but my mind keeps imagining an alternate reality, one that I could be living today if yesterday’s events had been different.

~ ~ ~

Yesterday Will had not woken up by 7:20. That’s unusual but not unheard of. I went to his room to get him up – standing at the door with my hand ready to push it open I had a horrible sense that something was not right. In the past week or so we have been having issues with Will moving around the cot, occasionally getting jammed up against the sides and crying out for us, but once I found him asleep upside down. He sleeps with blankets (because it’s damn cold here at night and he’s always been a back sleeper who rarely moved around at night) and finding him with his head precariously near his blankets made me uncomfortable.

I think all mothers have had similar moments of fear; SIDS is most mothers’ worst nightmare. I’ve certainly had a sense of foreboding before but it has always been unfounded, when I push open the door I find that all right with my world and my son’s smile has swept away the fear.

Yesterday that did not happen.

I actually stood still with my hand on his door and braced myself for what I might find – it sounds morbid but my sense of disquiet was so intense that I was preparing how I would tell my husband that something terrible had happened to Will. I went into his room and walked towards his cot. In the dim light I was half-way to the cot before I could see that Will was lying upside down and on his tummy, with his face buried in the blankets. He always stirs when I enter his room but yesterday he was still. Deathly still. I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing at this point. I put my hand on his shoulder – nothing. I said his name and gave him a little shake – nothing. All sense of control shattered and I screamed his name.

And he screamed back.

My little boy was just fine, with the exception of being somewhat terrified after being woken from a deep sleep by someone screaming at him.

But in the second before he woke, I lived what felt like a lifetime of a different reality. In that second, my son was dead.

I scooped up my crying child and ran to my bedroom where my husband, startled by my scream, was halfway out of bed. He held me while I held Will, held him tighter than I ever have before, concentrating on his breaths, his warmth, his wriggling – anything that proved just how very alive he was.

And then we went on with our day.

~ ~ ~

Only, it’s not that simple.

I experienced a terror so profound that I can’t just forget that it happened.

It feels like the hangover you get after a particularly bad nightmare. I keep having flashbacks of that second. That terrible second in which my son had died. I’m going about my day but I’m also living a second reality. While I’m watching my son play I’m also on the phone, making funeral arrangements. While I’m putting him down for a nap I’m also staring blankly at an empty cot crying for the child who should be in it.

I know that my son is healthy and safe. I know that my experience yesterday was such a small, insignificant thing compared to what so many people have gone through. But I feel traumatised. I’ve cried (albeit briefly) no fewer than three times today, and last night I stood at Will’s door for a full five minutes, too scared to go into his room to give him a dreamfeed.

I will never forget how I felt, and I think I will appreciate every second of Will’s life that much more because of it. But I don’t want to feel haunted by it – and I think that’s why I’m writing this post. I’m hoping that by putting my experience down as words it will become something a little more mundane, a story rather than a nightmare.

Will is a mover and shaker. Long gone are the days when I could breast feed him while listening to his gentle snuffles and watching his little lashes fluttering against his cheeks. These days I spend our feeds trying to extricate locks of my hair from his fingers.

The dream feed is my chance to recapture Will’s babyhood. He is quiet. He is still. He is utterly content. In that moment we are everything to each other – nothing else exists.

Before I lay him back in his crib I usually spend a few minutes holding him in my arms, admiring his sleeping form and feeling the weight of him, the contours of him.

Tonight while doing this I offered him little good night kisses. First his fingers, then his cheek, and finally his sweet little pouting lips. Desperate for one last moment of togetherness I leaned down and buried my nose in his neck to inhale that wonderful clean-baby smell.

What I inhaled instead was the little patch of vomit he had deposited onto his pyjamas right before bed.

Such are the joys of parenthood.

May 2011

June 2011

July 2011

He seems to have fallen asleep after 25 minutes of angry, angry yelling. The real hard part will be over night when he realises that he’s not going to get milk when he wakes up!

We’re in the midst of a sleep crisis and I would truly appreciate your input. (Perhaps crisis is too strong a word, but as a household we’re certainly not sleeping as well as we would like. Sleep deprivation tends to cause me to exaggerate.)

Will has never been easy to settle to sleep, but once asleep he has historically been a pretty good sleeper. He started sleeping through the night at 11 weeks of age. At a little older than 4 months of age he stopped cat napping during the day and started having decent day time sleeps. For more than two months life was blissful. Our family consisted of a well-rested mother, a well-rested father, and a happy, perky little monkey. Perhaps two or three times a month Will would have a night-time waking. I would give him a breast feed and he would be back in bed within 10 to 15 minutes. I never stopped using a feed to resettle him at night because he woke so rarely that it just didn’t seem important.

At 6.5 months this all changed. It may be a coincidence but the day that Will received his 6 month vaccinations he stopped sleeping at night. My usually voracious eater also refused all solid food for 3 days so I assumed that he was unwell as a result of the vaccinations and the change would be short-lived. He started eating again but shortly afterwards he caught his second cold which understandably affected his sleep tremendously – we had to resort to holding him while he slept or sleeping him upright in his pram. I thought that once he recovered his sleep would return to normal, but it hasn’t. I don’t know whether his routine was disrupted for long enough that he developed new sleep habits or whether it is simply a developmental stage but at almost 8 months Will is still waking frequently at night and is much more difficult to both settle and re-settle.

We are all exhausted.

The time has come for sleep training.

We have a very strong bed-time routine in place and Will knows what to expect at bed time. So do we, which is crying, and plenty of it, as soon as we leave his room. Currently we allow him to cry for a while (perhaps 5 minutes although we break a cardinal rule of parenting and are not consistent) and then go back in to help soothe him to sleep – either through patting and shushing (which is slow and doesn’t reliably result in Will falling asleep), or by giving him a dummy (which is faster but also doesn’t reliably result in sleep). Three months ago Will would always be asleep within 5 minutes; now it’s more like 15 or 20 minutes and we may need to repeat the process more than once over the course of the evening. Sigh.

At night – I breast feed him if he hasn’t eaten within about 3 hours. I know, I know, I was simply begging for trouble by establishing this habit but at the time I thought this sleep disruption would be a very temporary phase and, hell, I wanted to be back in bed as quickly as possible. Predictably Will is now breast feeding more at night than he does during the day.

I am sure of few things as a parent, but these are the things that I have eliminated as causing Will’s wakings.

1) Cold. (He’s not. Trust me.)

2) Light. (It’s not. Trust me.)

3) Noise. (He sleeps with white noise. I don’t know if it makes one iota of difference but he has it every time he sleeps. On the odd occasion that I have forgotten it, he sleeps just the same)

4) Not enough wine in his breast milk. (Whiskey doesn’t work either)*

5) Too much caffeine in his breast milk. (If anything the two or so serves of caffeine I have allowed myself per week since this whole sleepless business started have improved his sleep. Go figure.)

We have tried all the easy solutions and quick-fixes, including closing our eyes and hoping the problem will magically disappear. Since Will invariably cries at bed time there is no point trying a no-cry sleep solution… such a solution simply doesn’t exist for my noisy little night-owl.

At the moment I am considering the Verbal Reassurance Technique, but to be honest the idea of any sleep training scares me. I just don’t know if I have the will power. I also don’t quite know how to approach it – should I ease into it by continuing with our settling routine but refusing him feeds at night, or just go whole-hog and cut out feeds, the dummy, and resettling all at once. Gulp.

What I would like to know from you is what method, if any, you use to settle your baby, and your experience, if any, of sleep training. Please, please share your wisdom – or your folly!  Both may be equally useful to me.

*I’m joking, of course. Will only drinks beer.