Are You Ready to be a Mom?

I found this the other day on another blog. It's hilarious and sadly true. I haven't experienced some of these first hand yet, but working with preschoolers and elementary school kids has shown me a glimpse. Personally 2nd and 3rd grade seem to be the worse. I'm not looking forward to Remington being that age.
 
ARE YOU READY FOR MOTHERHOOD?

Lesson 1:
1. Go to the grocery store.
2. Arrange to have your salary paid directly to their head office.
3. Go home.
4. Pick up the newspaper.
5. Read it for the last time.

Lesson 2:
Before you finally go ahead and have children, find a couple who already are parents and berate them about their.
1. Methods of discipline.
2. Lack of patience.
3. Appallingly low tolerance levels.
4. Allowing their children to run wild.
5. Suggest ways in which they might improve their child's breast feeding, sleep habits, toilet training, table manners, and overall behavior. Enjoy it because it will be the last time in your life you will have all the answers.

Lesson 3:
A really good way to discover how the nights might feel.
1. Get home from work and immediately begin walking around the living room from 5PM to 10PM carrying a wet bag weighing approximately 8-12 pounds, with a radio turned to static (or some other obnoxious sound) playing loudly. (Eat cold food with one hand for dinner)
2. At 10PM, put the bag gently down, set the alarm for midnight, and go to sleep.
3. Get up at 12 and walk around the living room again, with the bag, until 1AM.
4. Set the alarm for 3AM.
5. As you can't get back to sleep, get up at 2AM and make a drink and watch an infomercial.
6. Go to bed at 2:45AM.
7. Get up at 3AM when the alarm goes off.
8. Sing songs quietly in the dark until 4AM.
9. Get up. Make breakfast. Get ready for work and go to work (work hard and be productive)

Repeat steps 1-9 each night. Keep this up for 3-5 years. Look cheerful and together.

Lesson 4:
Can you stand the mess children make? To find out.
1. Smear peanut butter onto the sofa and jam onto the curtains.
2. Hide a piece of raw chicken behind the stereo and leave it there all summer.
3. Stick your fingers in the flower bed.
4. Then rub them on the clean walls.
5. Take your favourite book, photo album, etc. Wreck it.
6. Spill milk on your new pillows. Cover the stains with crayons. How does that look?

Lesson 5:
Dressing small children is not as easy as it seems.
1. Buy an octopus and a small bag made out of loose mesh.
2. Attempt to put the octopus into the bag so that none of the arms hang out.

Time allowed for this - all morning.

Lesson 6:
Forget the BMW and buy a mini-van. And don't think that you can leave it out in the driveway spotless and shining. Family cars don't look like that.
1. Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment. Leave it there.
2. Get a dime. Stick it in the CD player.
3. Take a family size package of chocolate cookies. Mash them into the back seat. Sprinkle cheerios all over the floor, then smash them with your foot.
4. Run a garden rake along both sides of the car.

Lesson 7:
Go to the local grocery store. Take with you the closest thing you can find to a pre-school child. (A full-grown goat is an excellent choice). If you intend to have more than one child, then definitely take more than one goat. Buy your week's groceries without letting the goats out of your sight. Pay for everything the goat eats or destroys.

Until you can easily accomplish this, do not even contemplate having children.

Lesson 8:
1. Hollow out a melon.
2. Make a small hole in the side.
3. Suspend it from the ceiling and swing it from side to side.
4. Now get a bowl of soggy Cheerios and attempt to spoon them into the swaying melon by pretending to be an airplane.
5. Continue until half the Cheerios are gone.
6. Tip half into your lap. The other half, just throw up in the air.

You are now ready to feed a nine- month-old baby.

Lesson 9:
Learn the names of every character from Sesame Street , Barney, Disney, the Teletubbies, and Pokemon. Watch nothing else on TV but PBS, the Disney channel or Noggin for at least five years. (I know, you're thinking What's 'Noggin'?) Exactly the point.

Lesson 10:
Make a recording of Fran Drescher saying 'mommy' repeatedly. (Important: no more than a four second delay between each 'mommy'; occasional crescendo to the level of a supersonic jet is required). Play this tape in your car everywhere you go for the next four years. You are now ready to take a long trip with a toddler.

Lesson 11:
Start talking to an adult of your choice. Have someone else continually tug on your skirt hem, shirt- sleeve, or elbow while playing the 'mommy' tape made from Lesson 10 above. You are now ready to have a conversation with an adult while there is a child in the room.


Hope you enjoyed! Mom's to be - if you find this scary... here's the truth of it. All of the above "challenges" and "annoyances" are wiped out within seconds by any of the following:
(1) One big smile
(2) A giggle
(3) A hug or kiss
(4) An "I love you Mommy" 
etc.

We Sleep Through The Night

For over a month now, we've been able to sleep through the night! That's right, we have an almost 4 month old who sleeps from 7-9pm to 5-7am without waking up. Want to know how we did it, well read on.

Remember this post and this post about how hard it was to get him to go to sleep. I know that many of you are amazed at how this sleeping through the night is possible, so I'll give you some hints and explain about what we did.

From the very first time we brought Remington home, we wanted him to learn to sleep in his crib. I think co-sleeping is a great idea, but I'm too freaked out about SIDS to do it. We did try it twice, in desperation, but I still didn't get any sleep because I was too worried about rolling on top of him, or him smothering in the blankets or soft bed. The first couple weeks, Remington slept a lot (as newborns often do), but I still had to make sure to wake up every 3 hours to feed him. That was such a pain. We had to do that until he got back to his birth weight (and remember how hard that was). A side note: I started reading The Happiest Baby on the Block when I was pregnant, but I never finished it.

After he was able to be allowed to sleep through the night, he still woke up about every three hours to eat. When we switched to formula supplementing, he slept better because he seemed fuller. Formula also takes longer to digest. Soon, he was sleeping for 4 or 5 hours at a time. He wasn't always in the crib at this time, though, because sometimes we had to settle with the vibrator chair out of desperation, and we had trouble getting him to fall asleep before 10 or 11pm.

We tried everything. Some of them worked a night or two, while others didn't seem to make a difference.

• Cry it out did not work for me. I couldn't let him just scream, and I wasn't going to sleep like that anyway, so I might as well hold him. 

• Swaddling worked for a little bit, but Remington is so squirmy all the time, he eventually didn't like having his arms confined. 

• Giving him a bath before bed worked a little, but I didn't notice much difference if we didn't give him a bath a night.

• Lights out and silence really didn't work. He's too much like his parents. We may only have one child, but our house is super noisy and I have to have the radio on to fall asleep. Besides, we live in an old house with creaky floors. Every time we left the room, the floor creaking woke him up.

• The mobile worked a little bit. It gave him something to listen to and look at, but he would occasionally wake up when it shut off. (We had the Baby Einstein fish mobile.) He also tended to just watch it and not go to sleep, so we stopped that and fazed it out after the batteries died. We replaced the batteries a while later, but it didn't seem to make a difference for his sleep anymore. 

• The Wubbanub helped a little bit when he would wake up because he lost the pacifier. However, he moves his arms around too much when he's fighting going to sleep and would fling the Wubbanub away, so we just use regular pacifiers now (using pacifiers to sleep is supposed to help decrease SIDS).

• We also tried making the crib mattress softer/warmer. This freaked me out because, like I've said, I constantly worry about SIDs. It irritates me to no end when I see pictures of people's babies in cribs with blankets and toys thrown everywhere! Remington's crib is just the mattress and sheet, period. He sleeps in warm pajamas, and we have the temperature set in his room. We don't even use the bumpers, since they can be a SIDs hazard. Anyway, Landon folded up a blanket and put it under the sheet. It didn't seem to make a difference (at the time, Remington still didn't want to sleep in the crib), so we stopped that.

Here's what did work. To get him to sleep, we fed him and took him up to his room to hold and rock him to sleep. He would often fall asleep in our arms, but would wake up as soon as we put him down in the crib or the vibrating seat, or as soon as he lost his pacifier. We then tried laying down on the couch in his room with him tucked in our arm with the pacifier. He would fall asleep like that, lying pretty flat, so it was easier to transfer him to the vibrator chair or the crib.

Now we have a perfect system going on.

• First, he usually gets hungry around 6 or 7pm, so we feed him and change him. 
• Then, he is awake, alert, smiling, and playing for about 30 minutes to an hour. 
• He starts getting fussy and we change his diaper, put him in his pajamas, and feed him a little more. 
• Then, we hold him in our arms with the pacifier. He likes to be facing your chest (his stomach to our stomach- like they taught me to breastfeed) so that the pacifier stays in his mouth because you're there. He also likes to be patted on the butt and bounced a bit. 
• He might cry a bit or struggle against us, but usually he's barely able to keep his eyes open. It also helps to shush him to sleep when he's struggling (hold out the sh sound). He falls asleep like that with the TV blaring (primetime shows) and the lights on. 
• He lays asleep in our arms like that until 9pm. We take him up to his crib, lay him down, and he's good for the night.

So, good luck to all of you new parents. I hope you find a good system like we did, and I hope our systems lasts (I'm not looking forward to the growth spurts or teething).

Tips for Expectant Moms

Before going to the hospital, I had read a few lists about what you need to bring with you. Here's my list of what you need:

Pajamas- Hospital robes work for a while, but do you really want to wear those the whole time?
Loose shirts for breastfeeding- A must.
Toiletries- A must. The hospital might supply, but I brought shower items, toothbrush, contact solution, etc.
Camera- Duh.
Cell Phone- Another Duh.
Money for vending machine- Definitely good for dad.
Socks/Sandals- I never left the room, but still liked to have.
Sanitary/ Maternity pads- The hospital supplied for use, but I still brought and used my own. No one wants to feel like they're wearing a diaper along with their baby. Also bring some "period" panties. The hospital provided these mesh maternity things, but after a while it's better to have your own.
Going Home Outfit- Good for pictures.
Baby socks- The hospital provided little gowns for him to wear, but I also liked to make sure his feet were warm.
Things for Dad and Mom to do- It gets boring in the hospital, have something for you to do.

Landon went home for a bit every morning to shower, etc. so we didn't bring anything for him. If you live farther from the hospital, or the husband isn't going to leave at all, you should bring stuff for him too.

Almost everything else on those hospital bag lists would've been a waste to bring. Our hospital room ended up having a ton of stuff in it, especially with gifts coming in everyday. I'm glad we took half of it home a day before we were discharged.

I'm losing my mind!

1:00am- Conversation between Landon and me after the alarm goes off to feed Remington:
Me: Landon, could you go get the nipple shield so I can just feed him here?
Landon: Do you want me to bring him to you?
Me: No, I have him.
Landon: ---

I didn't have Remington, I hadn't moved from bed since the alarm. Landon- he's been amazing!- went and brought Remington to me and I feed him in bed for that feeding.

Being a mom is so exhausting. I'm a basket case that cries at everything. Breastfeeding was not going well. I would struggle for an hour to try and get him to latch on and suck. He just wasn't having it so I was supplementing with formula. I couldn't handle it. I would wake up, struggle and cry with him for an hour, then try to go back to bed only to get up in 2 hours to feed him again. Feeding every 3 hours is exhausting!!! I can't wait until he's back up to his birth weight so I can feed him when he's hungry instead of having to wake him up. I bet he would sleep through the night if I let him.

I feel incredibly overwhelmed with everything. Feeding every 3 hours. I'm not getting any sleep. The whole sleep when they sleep doesn't work either. When he's asleep I just think about everything that needs to be done. Clean the house, eat, stuff to do for work, etc. We really need to go to the store and buy food and stuff, and we need to take down the Halloween decorations, we just have no time!

I couldn't take the breastfeeding problems stress, so I called the nurses at Labor and Delivery for help. I totally recommend this to new moms. Ask for help when you need it, it's worth it. I went into the hospital and they watched me try to feed Remington and I told them what the problems were. I'm crying and I just couldn't deal. I was trying so hard and nothing was working. The nurses had me stay and relax in a room and try to feed him. They told me to stop supplementing (nobody told me to do that anyway- I was just feeding him the formula because I thought he wasn't eating enough). Then one amazing nurse gave me a nipple shield to try. I had tried this earlier when I was still in the hospital and it didn't work very well. This nurse showed me exactly how to use it. It worked instantly. I went home with instructions to use the shield, don't supplement anything, and to call and let them know how it went. Let me just say, I'm sooo happy! It's working like a dream. All of the feedings last night went flawlessly and he ate for 30 minutes each time.
When Landon got home from work last night, I let him know that the shield was working, but I still cried on him for awhile because I still feel overwhelmed and emotional. He has been amazing. He said he didn't feel like he's doing anything, but he totally is. The emotional support he's giving me is so needed. I love him so much! (I'm even getting teary writing this.) Landon took Remington for awhile and let me shower and eat. It sucks that he can't take over a feeding, and he'd be more than willing too. In fact, he would even like to be able to give Remington a bottle at night and let me rest.

Everyone is telling me that it gets better, and I hope they're right. Since the breastfeeding thing is going well now, it's already a huge relief.