See the box in the sidebar under “Guest Blog”? Go click there to visit my latest guest, Sparks & Butterflies.

She works for a movie studio in California and has lots of run-ins with celebrities. She’s also very good at articulating the recent weight of emotion she’s been going through with the passing of her somewhat estranged birth mother. Her experiences in life that have led her to the present have been very different from mine, and probably different from yours.

Click over, give her a read and send some good wishes. You’ll be glad you did!

I’m probably jinxing the situation right now, but the CIO method over the past couple of days has worked like a charm. In fact, I’m hesitant to even call it Cry It Out because Button does very little crying. I listen to her to be sure she’s not working herself into hysterics, because that would be counter-productive, but she hasn’t even come close so far.

Once I leave the room, she’ll fuss for a minute or two - pretty half-heartedly. Then she goes to sleep. And she’s been sleeping very well. She still wakes up once in the middle of the night for a bottle, but she’s been waking up later than usual, which is nice. And in the morning, she wakes up happy and rested.

I think it has a lot to do with her age. She’s old enough now to feel secure that we’re going to be there for her, so the prior hysterical panic attacks don’t come. If we had tried this when she was an infant, it would have been a disaster and probably a scarring experience for all three of us.

We’ll see how tonight goes, but I’m very encouraged that we’re doing the right thing.

And in other news, I totally forgot that I put my blog up for rent and let a few offers expire.  Doh.

PatientKitty

There are times when I think that the single purpose of parenting is to destroy preconceived notions.

Yesterday I reached an all-time low in masochistic self-humiliation. I entertained my daughter by jiggling the fat on my belly. My belly has never recovered from pregnancy, and makes a very good “bowl full of jelly” illustration. Apparently this is quite entertaining. For some.

Yesterday I committed another act that, prior to this week, I would have told anyone would never take place in my house.

I let my child cry herself to sleep.

I have always been anti-Ferber. Not to the point of raining judgement down on other people’s parenting choices, I am well aware that I am not in a position to decide what’s best for someone whose circumstances are not my own. But for MY house, for MY CHILD, I knew that Ferber was not the answer.

Button has never been particularly difficult to put to bed. We rock her, give her a bottle, turn on the music and put her down. Usually when supplied with her music and her love monkey, she’ll go to sleep without too much resistance.

She has, however, always been one of those babies who increases tension through crying (as opposed to releasing it). That’s the main reason we knew we could never do the Cry It Out method, because she has never been able to cry it out. She works herself up into hysterics to the point where she’s gasping, panicked, and physically can’t calm down. We have never let her get to the point of throwing up, but have no doubt that if we left her long enough, that would be the next step, followed shortly by permanent emotional damage.

So once we put her down, if she was unable to get to sleep on her own and started crying, I* returned to her and held her, rocked her etc. until she was sleepy enough to put down without realizing that we were putting her down and leaving.

For some reason, everything has changed in the last week. No matter how tired, she refuses to go to sleep. Instead, the minute she senses me moving out of the room, she stands up and starts crying. So I would go back in, calm her down, lay her on her back and stay there until she commenced with the finger-twirling-her-hair-routine that precedes sleep. I’d sneak out of the room and make it half way down the stairs before the screaming began.

After several nights of repeated rounds of this, it became quite clear to me that something wasn’t working. So I put my best 11-Month Old Thinking Cap on to try to figure out what it was, and I saw the following issue: She relaxes, I leave. She cries, I return. And suddenly, it became quite clear that I was unwittingly encouraging the behavior that I find so frustrating.

So I made a new executive decision. At night, I will read her a story, rock her for a few minutes and put her down. I will tell her I love her and kiss her good night. And then I will leave, shut the door, and not return.

I am theorizing that this will help solve the problem because:

• She will have a predictable bedtime routine
• She will know that I’m leaving the room, so she won’t suddenly realize that she’s alone and think she’s been abandoned.
• She will have to un-learn the idea that crying brings Mommy back and delays bedtime
• She will have to learn how to put herself to sleep

At least, that’s what I’m hoping for. I listened to her cry last night for probably 5-10 minutes before she quieted down. I only got through that because by the time I came up with this plan, I had already been back to her room 12 times and was too damn frustrated to get all soft about the crying.

Tonight I tried it again from the start. I put her down, said good night and walked away. She cried for under a minute, and it never reached the level of distress that indicates the point of no return (where she is unable to calm herself down without help/comfort). That gives me hope.

It’s a very strange feeling when you begin to realize that you have to move toward the more structured phase of parenting. Where you have to do more than just love the child…you have to train, discipline, teach. There’s a lot more pressure there. And it seems to be mostly trial and error.

I’m hoping for less error.

* For some reason, the bedtime routine has become MY duty. J says she won’t sleep for him, that she only goes to sleep when I put her down. That might change with the new routine.

I have a mole on my stomach that looks like this:

Actually, I guess you could call it 5 moles. But it used to be one. And even though I could be considered young for this sort of thing, I’m fairly certain that isn’t normal behavior for your every day joe schmoe mole…so I’m thinking I should have it checked out. Along with another one on my leg. Both of which have appeared/changed since college.

So I spent the morning talking with insurance brokers and trying to figure out what my best options are, considering the following:

1. I’m not currently insured.
2. For the most part, it’s cheaper for me to remain uninsured and pay full price for my prescriptions and doctor visits, than to pay the monthly premium for insurance (which for some reason is unusually high in Texas).
3. If the moles are a problem and need to be removed, it will cost me a bunch of money…but will it cost more than I would be paying in insurance premiums?
4. If I have the moles diagnosed and they ARE problematic, I will get labeled with a “preexisting condition” if I’m not insured beforehand.
5. Preexisting conditions are bad when trying to obtain insurance later.

So I don’t really know what to do. I have no idea if these moles are going to be a problem or not. I did get sun exposure during my childhood and teenage years. But how much is too much? I’m fair skinned but tan easily. I’m adopted, so I have no information on my family history. I have a mole on my nose that I’ve had since birth. If they want to remove the others, they’ll probably want that one to go as well.

I do know which insurance broker I’m NOT going to give business to:

“So, now that I’ve given you all the information, can I get your information to start filling out this application?”

“Well, I’ll need to wait on that. I need to do some comparisons and talk with my husband about it first.”

“So…what, you can’t make a decision on your own?”

I pointedly informed him that I had enough respect for the person I share a household and bank account with to discuss this kind of thing before “making a decision.”

* * *

After dealing with insurance brokers, I went to court to make some headway in clearing up the big fat mess. The judge moved my pretrial for the deferrment violation case to be the same day as the pretrial for the ticket that caused the mess, since, in theory, if I can get that stupid ticket dismissed, the deferment violation will be a nonissue. In theory.

He did make a point of telling me, however, that just getting the other dismissed did not guarantee that I would not be held accountable for the deferrment violation, since the verbage in my probation agreement states “must not receive” another ticket during probation period.

Great. They’re holding me accountable for something out of my control. It doesn’t matter whether or not I was actually DOING anything illegal. All that matters is that a cop issued me a ticket for something. Some justice system we have.

* * *

This evening we were making dinner when J says, “What did I do with that Pepsi I just opened?”

We both look up, just in time to see Button in the living room, pouring the last remaining drops of the can into a 3-foot puddle on the carpet.

Just in case you were wondering, there is a deceptively large amount of cola in a can of Pepsi.

* * *

She’s teething again. The first tooth finally broke in today and hasn’t seemed to bother her at all. But tonight she is unable to sleep for a period of more than 10 minutes unless she’s doped up on formula and tylenol. Unfortunately, the doping effect wears off long before we can give her another dose. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night.