This photo is artistically rendered to obscure both my son’s face and my husband’s thinning hair. (btw, the masthead on this blog is a similarly altered-in-Picasa chunk of a photo of my son’s mouth and nose. Can you tell from the hyperpink in this bedroom rendering?)

The heartwarming scene depicted here is of a father and son putting together the little boy’s first real bed (after his parents’ and then a futon on the floor). I think it helped that a friend gave us a subscription to Babybug magazine because it featured a story about recurring character (of questionable gender) “Kim” getting a new bed for him/her and his/her stuffed bunny, “Carrots.” It’s kind of like watching a bunch of movies with scenes of the prom gets you geeked for the real thing. But can it ever really be as good? I sure hope our little dude enjoys sleeping in his bed (yes his, though I know the curls are getting long again. I like ‘em) as much as Kim does in Kim’s. (Note for the development journal: Lately I’ve noticed E referring to Kim as a “he.” We’ll have to see if that sticks).

We’re currently lacking a mattress (see my post at Crunchy-Chewy Mama for more on that), so little E can’t exactly jump on his new bed yet. Or sleep on it. But he can jump gleefully on his parents’ bed with packages of some screws or something in his hand.

After my son’s first illness in a while, I’m so glad I’m still nursing and that we can still create a family bed.

Last night my son said he had a “stomachbake,” and he clearly had some gas, but he fell asleep fairly easily around 7:30. Then, when he woke at 9:00 p.m. crying, I was worried he’d caught the tummy virus my friend’s child had. He felt hot, and the temp read 100.2. This is the first fever he’s run in a very long time. I’ve never medicated for anything, including for a fever, believing that it really is the body’s way of healing itself (see NY Times article). I’ve given my son homeopathics and flower essences and will entertain herbs, but he’s never had any over-the-counter medicine.

This was also the first time he’s really been sick since he became verbal. It was a real throwback to deal with a child who was upset but unable to tell us what was wrong. If he smooshes his finger or scrapes his knee, he usually says either, “Aw, I just hurt myself,” or “I’m okay, Mom.” This time, it was just unhappy tears.

Thinking this was a tummy bug, I suggested, “Let’s give you some drops.” Since this is familiar to him, he sat and opened his mouth. I gave him Perelandra Microbial Balancing Program drops for the Digestive system and also for Immune and Lymphatic. Then I remembered he sounded a bit stuffy when I put him down for bed, so I threw Respiratory in there for good measure. I added celery and tomato and F-1 and F-2, which a practitioner had previously told me to use in case of a tummy bug or ingested mold or other icky stuff.

I tried to keep both a sympathetic tone so he knew I knew he understood he was not happy but also a lighthearted and reassuring approach, counting out one set of drops in English, one in French, another in Spanish. Although he’s been sleeping through the night for over six months, and we generally don’t nurse until after 5:00 a.m. at the earliest, I nursed him back to sleep.

Around midnight, he woke again and I had to use the bathroom. I can’t remember if we nursed again before I got up or not, but when I left he followed me, and then he saw my husband and said he wanted Daddy. So LJ went to sleep in the boy’s room for a while, and I went back to the much comfier bed down the hall.

It’s been a few weeks since we moved E’s double futon into his own room. The bed takes up half the floor, but we figured one thing at a time. I think we all sleep better without our son in his own room now that he’s two and a half, and it has made afternoon quiet (read: nap-resistance time!) calmer. However, I’m very glad that we can still share sleep when it’s clearly the thing our son needs. (Or any of us needs. One day I’d had to say goodnight to him early before going to a meeting, I woke at 4:30 and crawled into bed with him just to be close. I still love the snuggling, but I also know he’s ready for his own space.)

I have had my frustrations with nursing a grabby toddler, but I haven’t yet gotten the desire to wean the way I got the desire to move bedrooms. According to Mothering Magazine’s article “Extend Breastfeeding’s Benefits”by Kyla Steinkraus (September/October 2007 – Issue 144), breastfed toddlers do seem to be healthier physically, and emotionally. I figure that with a child with food sensitivities, the longer he can get nutrition from me, the better. And in a child with an intense and gregarious personality, the longer he can have quiet closeness with his mama, the better. Since he hadn’t been sick in so long, I took for granted the health benefits.

Now that our nursings have gotten down to just morning, before nap and night (and sometimes skipping the pre-nap if we’re out & about), I feel freer but after this illness, I also feel like my son is more vulnerable to illness with less breastmilk intake. I’m not ready to put him out into the world without that layer of protection.

He woke this morning temping in a 98.1 and was in fine spirits all day. So far he’s been sleeping soundly since a few minutes after we gave him his drops again four hours ago. If he needs to nurse tonight, I’ll turn the clock back a few months to make sure he gets well.

Isn’t he sweet? Napping in his new bed, or rather, his old double futon that takes up half of his new room? If only this shot represented reality more than cover model head shots.

We are not napping. The kid is so wound up, you would think someone else in his family teaching him that it’s not important to get good rest. Oh. Well, I’m sure my reluctantly going to bed after 1:00 a.m. has nothing to do with it. He’s gotta be his own man, ya know?

Apparently being his own man means hitting, biting and poking his mother if she tries to lie down with him. “I want to go downstairs!” he whines. Last week there were no naps even after nursing in bed, and he’s napped in the car plenty of times without having nursed, so I decided we weren’t going to do any more nurse-to-sleep (except for a little extra shut-eye in the morning).

As I kept pouring applesauce into his bowl yesterday afternoon so I could check my email, it occurred to me that I’m losing 10-15 hours a week of solo quiet time. Is it any wonder I haven’t posted anything in over a week? For at least an hour in the afternoon, I’m either in his room trying to be restful and quiet, or listening to him play on the monitor while I’m downstairs quickly eating the lunch I stupidly didn’t eat while he was eating because I thought he was so tired he’d just eat a little and then go down quickly. Or I’m putting away laundry or doing something else I could do while he was awake and happy (and I’m not modeling rest if I do that).

So Mouthy Mama is fantasizing about farming out the nap. I needed to look into new Tuesday childcare and am ready to send him somewhere for the day if he’ll have a place and opportunity to be restful more restful than he is with me. I don’t think he’ll try to wound another adult. And I’m already thinking about the extended day at his Waldorf school for next year when he’s in the three-day morning program. It’s certainly a lot calmer there than it is here! They even give kids lavender oil!

I’m hoping this is just an adjustment to the new room and to his being around his half-birthday, whichtends to throw kids into disequilibrium, according to Your Two-Year-Old: Tender or Terrible by Louise Bates Ames. We’ve had no-nap jags before, but I haven’t been as committed to offering consistency as I’m trying to be now. But I really want to bail.

Naps are hard to find around here these days. My son has just turned two and a half, and he’s not napping about 60% of the time. This might not be such a big deal if I hadn’t failed to teach him how to fall asleep on his own or to stay in one place to rest. We tried a full day at the babysitter’s recently, and he rested on the couch for an hour and 45 minutes. At home, he sleeps on a futon on the floor next to our king mattress, also on the floor. This is not a big house or a big room, so we’re bed-walking all the time, and I can’t open the bottom drawer of my dresser.

Sometimes it appears that E decides my milk is not sufficiently sleep-inducing, or that he’s going to have to poop in the next, say two hours, or that his mother missed his tired window just like she misses her own if she stays up past 10:30 p.m. and is then good to go for hours. So he gets up, pulls up the room-darkening shade and talks about the mushrooms growing in the yard. Or he turns off the white noise machine and walks out of the room, closing the door behind him, usually returning with a book. Or he playfully kicks me, gives me raspberries and tests out his teeth on my skin or hair. This isn’t exactly quiet time.

I continue to grumble about the longterm effects of lack of sleep in my childhood; I think poor sleep contributed to my health problems later in life. I remember not napping as a preschooler and and then lying in bed awake at night. It was impossible for me to recharge. E has been sleeping through the night for about six months, and so far he’s not having fits or tantrums a lot due to fatigue, but you can still see it building up under his eyes and a little in his spirit if he doesn’t get a nap, even though he seems totally peppy and happy when he ought to be sleeping.

Often I’ve stupidly waited to have lunch until after putting him down, so, when that fails, I end up bringing him downstairs where he plays while I eat. Other times I’m tired and try to model good resting, but it doesn’t do any good; he just literally walks all over me and the room. Some days we stay upstairs, and I put away laundry or something else not very exciting, but he manages to make up some active game with himself anyway. Lately I’ve resorted to drives again to get him to rest so that I can at least have some kind of break (now that he lets me transfer him into bed).

Well, today, during non-nap time at home on a rainy day, he looked at a photo album while I started to prep the room that is going to be his.

It’s tiny, about 8×10′, with no closet. The door needs to be planed to close well, and we need to get darkening curtains (the all-or-nothingness of the blinds bugs me. We might keep the cheapo Venetian blinds but I really ought to do something with the cords if I’m going to leave him in there alone). One of the outlets needs a safety-sliding thingy. This room is, like everything else in our house, a project of dominoes.

But today I at least got things started. I sorted books that he still likes and will like soon from older fare: children’s books I bought when I was teaching — a bunch of stories on the immigrant experience along with Heather Has Two Mommies and Jennifer Has Two Daddies. Then the 10+year old Walmart bookcase I sponge-painted when we bought the house in 2001 went out of the room, past the gate at the top of the stairs and bound for Freecycle. (That reminds me, I made my husband write the ad for that while I cleaned the basement hours later, but, alas, I didn’t have him post it because somehow it became my thing to try to find real homes for things and his to dump stuff at Goodwill and claim it on our taxes. Sue me for trying to know something actually gets used and appreciated and getting off on stranger’s emails with thanks and exclamation points.)

The plan is, I think, to move theboy’s futon into the room so one of us will still lie down with the boy for nighttime sleep, still on the floor. We’ve been telling him he’ll get his own bed for a while, but I think we should just get him into the room soon rather than wait for our procrastinating asses to settle on an off-the-ground bed for him when we don’t even have one yet for ourselves. Plus, I think a new room and new bed at the same time might be too much for the little guy, even though he’s always adapted well to new beds during travel.

Once he’s moved, I’m just going to have to insist on staying in the bed at quiet time, and I figure I’ll have to expect to just bring a book and sit next to him for a few weeks. It may be easier to keep him contained when he’s up off of the floor, but I think we’ll have to start there unless we can get to IKEA and put something together this weekend.

The way I talk about my sleep with other moms reminds me of being in 7th grade, or in college. A friend saw a message I sent late last night to a group, around 2 a.m. As we gathered for a craft day at next year’s preschool – about eight hours later – I admitted that, yes, I had gone to bed at 2:15, and my son had woken to nurse at 5:45 and then decided he was up for the day. I usually just decide to call it an early morning day, especially on a nice cool morning like this. But I had a hunch it might border on dangerous to care for my son all day on three and half hours of sleep. Two of the days this week I apparently missed his nap window, and he went from lovely and fun to a mini monster who was grabbing my hair, my cheek, my nipple, gritting his teeth and smiling with glee. He’s pretty strong for someone who weighs less than a third what I do. Hmm, now that I type it, a third doesn’t sound so scrawny considering he’s two and I’m 35.

At any rate, I was scared of him! Yesterday I got him down for a nap early, right as his flip was being switched, and things were much better. But I still didn’t manage to catch up on all the things I’d planned to do during his non-existent naps. And I drifted a little myself while putting him down, both for nap and, because my husband had the night to exercise, for bed, too. Oh, and I had a little bit of weak tea during the day.

So when my husband finally went to bed around 10:50 p.m.., I was just getting started. There was laundry, email, the kid’s blog with lots of photos to post for the relatives (and for us, since my son is now his blog’s biggest fan). Oh, and I had to mix the flour for the coconut flour pancakes for today’s gathering at the Waldorf school he’ll go to next year. The irony of telling tales of multitasking and ignoring my body’s needs while attending a school that respects rhythm and intentionality is not lost on me.

But my friend, too, was up late. Then, while picking up my farm food — grassfed beef, pastured eggs, real milk for my husband — I ran into another friend whose daughter had protested her nap earlier in the week, too. These cconversations — coupled with my having viewed some late-night emails from other moms and a recent after-midnight mama chat at weekend retreat with four other families – recalled for me days when I stayed on the phone late into the new morning, complaining the next day at school about my lack of sleep. Or, in college, after closing down the computer lab at 2 a.m. during finals week, smirking a sleepy hello in the cafeteria the next morning to the guy who’d been waiting for the printer behind me.

I know lots of folks who keep perfectly normal hours, laughing that they turn into a pumpkin after 10 p.m. especially now that they’re parents. I’ve been trying to get myself back on this kind of schedule, and I do think it’s healthier, but I sure miss my quiet solo time when I don’t get it. Even though being alone is part of the draw to see the clock past 12, it seems comforting to know that there are plenty of us mamas breathing length into the thinning hours of the morning, hoping to finally feel some sense of accomplishment to take to bed with us like the security blanket that got lost behind the couch.

It was like I’d forgotten what it meant to be sleepy.

I wrote a few weeks agoabout trying to see sleep as the gentle restorative time it’s supposed to be rather than the time I’m not getting things done – cleaning, cooking, writing, exercising. That was all a nice idea, but I was still pretty revved up and having a hard time putting my brain and my computer on standby before 1:30 a.m. Not until I had a craniosacral therapy appointment did I realize how profoundly not tired I’d been.

The therapist did not say my system seemed agitated or “upregulated” as she’s said before. In fact, she thought I was doing well; my rhythm had more “amplitude” and I seemed generally calmer than the last time I saw her. But she also said we had a “really deep session,” which I knew. I completely dropped down into another level of calm. After the session was over and she left the room with the instructions to take my time and get up gently, I fell asleep.

Later on that night, my husband I had 9:00 p.m. reservations for Restaurant Nora, the organic restaurant near Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. My mother-in-law was visiting, and she’s the only one who’s ever put our son to bed. We had a nice drive in, and I was still glad we were having date night, but I was so tired I could hardly see straight. All I kept thinking about was being home and being asleep. I remembered the same thing happening several months before — for a few weeks after a treatment I actually felt like going to bed early. This work is powerful.

The contrast between that feeling and my regular pep was profound. I’ve enjoyed having high energy, but I also know I’ve been a little snippy and impatient with my son, the kind of attitude that comes from the body not replenishing its sleep stores for several days in a row. I’m pretty sure my son was feeling that energy, too. Sleeping only from 2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. (or earlier, if my son wakes to nurse earlier) and then nursing in a half-sleep off and on until 7:30ish does not give me the space and my body the time to unwind. And clearly, I was wound up, literally and energetically. My therapist helped me through some unwinding in my neck; that was when I stopped chatting and really sunk back into a quiet dark space behind my eyelids.

I enjoyed the food at dinner but, once we got home, I could hardly get into jammies fast enough. I was in bed by 11:30 p.m. and didn’t wake until E woke at 6:00 a.m. — a good run of sleep for him and for me. Normally I get up to pee before 5:00 even if I’ve only been in bed for three hours. This time I slept for seven uninterrupted. That’s probably a 26-month record!

A week from tomorrow morning, I will be running a half-marathon at 7 a.m., so this week’s project is to commit to going to bed before midnight so I can reasonably get up at 6:00 with rested rather than revved adrenals.

A hickey, a buzz, chocolate and babysitting all in one night. Sounds like high school. But it was really my husband’s 37th birthday. And he wasn’t the one to give me the hickey.

Even though it was his special day, I decided to hand the toddler over to my husband so I could go for a run. I was shooting for 10 miles and am registered for a half-marathon in three weeks. My husband was supposed to be playing Ultimate Frisbee, but the sodden ground caused his tournament to be canceled. The following day was mother’s day, and, if history was any guide, I didn’t have much in the way of festivities (or a gift that wasn’t for the house, or probably even a card) to expect. I made my own priorities instead of waiting around to be disappointed. The incessant rain seemed to be taking a break Saturday afternoon, so I seized the opportunity for a run on the bike trail. Who wants to run 10 miles on the treadmill in the gym if there’s a spot of sun to chase?

When I got home, our son hadn’t yet napped, and it didn’t look like that was going to happen. I had agreed to babysit that night for a neighbor. If we were going to get out for a birthday dinner and back home by 7:30, we’d just have to keep the boy up and put him to bed earlier than his usual 8:30 (or 9:00, or 9:30). But while I lounged on the couch in a sweatshirt nursing him post-shower, pre-restaurant, my husband opened a note from the IRS that told him he’d forgotten to pay them what he owed them once he became an independent contractor. He was being issued a penalty. Livid, he went downstairs to search his records. I turned my attention to a volume of Best American Short Stories, and before I knew it, the boy’s eyes were closed.

After he’d stopped trying to feel me up, I knew he was truly asleep. But when we tried to wake him, he clamored for more, so I switched him to the other side to even myself out. He fell back asleep, but when I delatched him, he was so disoriented, he started sucking on the bottom half of my breast. He never loses his bearings; he always finds my nipple, but this time he was really out of it. I laughed and guided him back up to the source.

After we got him to wake up in a good mood, I went upstairs to change and gasped as I caught a glimpse in the mirror. The kid had given me a hickey. His mouth was stronger than I thought.

And so was the wine at the restaurant. I hadn’t had a full glass in a long time. Once home, I got ready for my babysitting gig with the biggest buzz I’ve had since I drank a whole bottle of Kombucha with dinner at Whole Foods another Saturday night.

And though I’d quit eating chocolate back in college because I thought it gave me a headache just like my mom (who also abstains), I recently started craving it and decided I wasn’t sensitive to it anymore. But I had a funny feeling that I couldn’t confess this retreat from purity to my mom. Before I headed to my babysitting gig, I ate a few bites of a Chocolove bar I’d bought myself (along with one for my husband, you know, for his birthday). I then walked myself and my laptop over to my neighbor’s house with not only a hidden hickey and a wine buzz but having indulged in a new vice. I felt pretty young and sneaky.

Within a few hours, what I felt was a little thirsty and tired, but I was still glad my husband was awake when I returned. It was nice to get some adult action on the couch for a change.

When I decided to undertake a cleanse and make some changes in my diet, I also set out to change my sleeping habits.

My natural tendency has always been that of a night owl, even when, as now, I’ve been without caffeine. For the past several months, I had been in the habit of staying up until almost 2:00 a.m. to write, clean, cook, prepare for the next day. I loved how quiet the house was and hated to abandon my free time to head up to bed. This worked for a while because I was also spending part or most of my son’s naptime asleep and because my son would wake to nurse around 1:30 or 2:00 a.m. So I essentially stayed up until he started to fuss, and then I would charge upstairs, nurse him and get the oxytocin boost to help me fall asleep. Going to bed any earlier seemed inefficient because my mind was whirring with all the things I could be doing, and I was just waiting for him to wake up before I could really go under. It didn’t seem reasonable to try to get to bed before 10:30 p.m. since I was tutoring many nights until 10:00 p.m. and needed considerable wind-down time once I got home.

All these rationalizations aside, I know that there are many health benefits to an earlier bedtime. The adrenals need to rest and repair themselves so that the body is not constantly in high-alert, fight-or-flight mode. Cortisol spikes at the wrong time of day can negatively impact the nervous system. The liver and gallbladder supposedly flush out toxins in the late evening, and they aren’t effective at doing so if the body is in an alert state.

There was also the matter of feeling robbed if I spent all of my son’s nap sleeping next to him instead of getting some time for myself or a head-start on dinner. Being in a super-dark room during the middle of the day was disorienting. I wanted my afternoons back, but getting through the day without a nap was tough if I’d only slept 2:30-6:30 a.m.!

I had hoped to start going to bed by 11:30 (some naturopathic doctors say 9:00 is a good target, others 10:30 at the latest, and I’ve also read that sleep before midnight is significantly more restorative than sleep after midnight). However, I did not approach this goal with the same commitment as I approached my diet changes. I merely thought to myself, “It would be nice to get my bike fixed up and try to go to the gym for their 6:00 a.m. yoga class twice a week.” A month later, the bike is finally out of the shed and in the trunk of the car, but I haven’t gotten it to the shop for a much-needed professional tune-up. I could be rising early to do yoga on my own, as I did when I was a teacher (getting up at 5:00 instead of 5:30 a.m.), but I’m not.

I can’t quite get myself to give up all my late-night solo time. I have, however, been more successful at staying awake when I put my son down or just dozing with him for part of his nap and then shooting for going to bed before midnight unless there’s a real pressing need to finish something. The one morning I woke surprisingly alert at 5:45 a.m.. The persistent rain of the previous few days had abated, and the fresh spring air and early morning glow through the window were sweet. Having run 10 miles the previous day, it was a delight to have some time on my yoga mat. When my son awoke about 6:10, I went upstairs to nurse him in bed in case he might be able to fall back asleep. But he was ready to be up for the day. Having already gotten centered, I was happy to enjoy reading books on the couch with him without rushing around in a flurry to get breakfast started. With such an early and gentle start, the day seemed much longer and less hurried, and I was ready to go to bed at 10:45, even though I tutored until 10 p.m.

I’m hopeful that if I take a gentle but consistent approach with my bedtime, I can scale it back to a more reasonable hour and eventually (depending on my son’s nursing habits) rise before anyone else is up and get in some yoga or some writing.

I started this blog with the intention of getting down all the reflections and insights I had as a mom that someday would turn into witty, poignant essays. It was supposed to keep me from feeling like my head was full of stuff I couldn’t get out, to be the in-between repository of ideas so they would not just fizzle like Fourth of July sparklers, leaving a trace for a while (“I’m sure I’ll remember that in the morning”) and then just fading, leaving a thin trail of fog that rises up to cloud amorphously around the bug lamps with the tired puffs of other faded inspirations.

So far, my ceiling is still pretty foggy and my blog doesn’t have a whole lot of sparks etched on it. Life keeps happening. Writing does not. But one thing I want to be sure to document about this life is that the little one who started this whole thing is now really finding his voice. And with it he’s finding me.

EJ took a long time to find his “M” sound. Other people had been hearing “mama” from their kids for months, but it was all D’s and B’s around here. And though EJ babbled animatedly early on and was singing on pitch to his CD’s, we didn’t really have any words to speak of until 16 months. We’d been doing baby signs with him for a long time, but the signs didn’t come until the words started forming on his lips (and thank goodness, otherwise how would we have ever known the difference between “peas,” “cheese” and “please”?)

Now, at 19 months, my son is catching up to his peers but still not going to win any verbal development records. What is the most striking to me is the shift in nighttime and post-nap awareness that has come with this new ability to communicate. I asked other moms on an email list a few months ago when he might stop crying when he wakes, and it seems like we’re moving in that direction. Now, he calls, “Mama.” This is lovely, and frightening.

When he wakes at night before I’ve come upstairs to our family bed, the tone is whining, insistent, pleading. I rush to brush my teeth or put on my pajamas (because goodness knows it’s late enough that I should just go to bed). Then we snuggle down and he asks, as though he’s just come up with a great idea for what comes next, “Nurse?”

Today he woke from a nap and called out “Mama. Mama!” more as “Hey, I’m here” notice. When I turned the doorknob, he stepped back and pulled the door open, patted the bed and said firmly, “Nurse.” We were running late for music class, but his insistent tone told me it was not going to be a fun event if I didn’t listen and execute.

Even though I mostly feel comfortable as an attachment parenting mama, I’ve still doubted myself, wondering if he really is a kid who needs to eat frequently or if I’ve helped him create a dependence on nursing to self-soothe. Same with the attachment to me – am I really what he wants or does he need something else? I struggled with leaving my son with babysitters and couldn’t imagine night-weaning without major heartache.

Now he really does seem to get it when I say that I will come back, and he’s pretty clear about what he wants. One night when we were out of town visiting family, he declared – with both clear diction and his fingers to his lips – “eat” just as I was trying to get him to bed. Not wanting to wake my sister’s kids with the crying that ensued when I said “but it’s sleepytime,” I led him into the kitchen, where he ate everything I offered him for about the next half-hour. What novelty to know I’m giving him what he wants! When he tosses in the night, sometimes he wants to nurse (and says so) and other times he just wants a warm body. (As we are officially in fall now, even November, so do I!)

I don’t know what development leap is next or what I’ll think about this all in a few months, but for now, it’s still in the category of amazing to know so clearly that my son is capable of choosing what he wants, and to get a clear message that he wants me and what I can provide.