I always knew what I feared most about parenthood: sleep deprivation. No question. During pregnancy, when strangers and even dear friends insisted on peppering me with advice on all things baby, I always steered them to the topic that interested me most: How much were they sleeping? How much did their baby sleep? How could they LIVE like that? I was truly terrified, and it seemed like no amount of preparation could save me from the inevitable fog of exhaustion […]
Before I became a mom, I had never heard of self-soothing, much less worried about it. If you told me that I would spend hours and hours discussing it with other parents, I would have been about as credulous as if you’d told me I would someday be able to spot different baby brands on sight or that I would really, truly love making baby food.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about self-soothing over the past 19 months. I’m […]
Now that Quinn is well into toddlerhood, and the burgeoning bump of my second baby sometimes edges into my field of vision, I have both the emotional distance and the sense of urgency needed to look back critically on the newborn period. My memories are often sepia-toned, infused with the magic that tiny little being brought into our lives.
But the picture isn’t always pretty. I didn’t realize it at the time (or at least I didn’t acknowledge it to anyone, […]
I was really dreading Quinn’s move from two naps to one. So many moms of toddlers seemed to look back on the two-nap phase with rose-colored-glasses, and it was also hard for me to picture myself functioning as well without my two mini-breaks a day (not that Q was ever completely reliable in her timing or even in actually taking both naps on any given day).
Suddenly, about a month ago, the transition was upon me. I thought it might stretch […]