this woman’s work

I didn’t sleep well last night. My neck is hurting so I thought I’d sleep in Madison’s futon bed because it’s much more firm than our bed. Lately we’ve been starting Madison in her own bed and then she wakes up and climbs into ours, which is how Noah did it for a good long while. We readied her for this (starting in her own bed) by reading The Cuddlers and telling her how some of her friends do it that way and by telling this story that we used to tell Noah: “Mommy and Daddy are sleeping in bed and they hear pit-pat, pit-pat! Climb, climb, climb! And there’s a little Maddie in the bed!” Both kids like this story.

Anyway last night I said I would start in Madison’s bed and she could sleep in the big bed and I would be the cuddler who climbs in late, which she found amusing. So I lay down in her bed and I could feel my neck kinda spasm as it relaxed and all was good until there was a little pit-pat, pit-pat! Climb, climb, climb! And there was a little Maddie wedged into my armpit!

“You are the bestest!” she said. “So I want to sleep with you!”

Two hours later she was snoring softly (and sweating the way those preschoolers do — little furnaces that they are) so I peeled her off of me and went back to the big bed. And just as I was drifting off there, here it came again. Pit-pat, pit-pat! Climb, climb climb! And there was a little Maddie not-so-gently shoving me off the pillow because she hadn’t brought hers in with me and needed to share!

I am very tired today but my neck is a little better from the two hours in the harder bed.

I do love the co-sleeping though. And I generally don’t mind musical beds because it doesn’t happen all that often. So, you know, I ain’t dissing the family bed thing.

Anyway, I wanted to launch our new web site tomorrow but we’ll have to see if the caffeine has any impact on my sad, sorry brain and this is why I’m disgruntled. Well, that and the fact that I haven’t written anything for my own self (besides this blog, which doesn’t count) in what seems like decades and that always makes me squirrely.

Actually I should switch that title around.

Aidelmaidel is right; I did some preparation to nurse the baby that was coming to us pre-Pennie. But after our match/unmatch, I felt like preparing for it was making me too focused on the idea of the baby being mine, which felt wrong to me. After Madison arrived, it seemed like building a nursing relationship with her would come at the cost of her building a relationship with Pennie. Now I never talked to Pennie about this and I don’t know if it was true but if even talking to her about it seemed too delicate, surely actually nursing Madison would be out of line, too.

My one regret is that a friend offered to pump for me and I didn’t take her up on it because I was too overwhelmed. (Pepperpaints/Kristen did get a wee bit of breastmilk over to my house for Maddie.) My take on nursing now is that there is no substitute for breastmilk that is nearly as good but that bottlefeeding can be a pretty darn good substitute for nursing as far as attachment goes.

My feelings about adoptive breastfeeding for other people is to have no feeling whatsoever. Which is to say that I have a lot of different feelings but would prefer to keep them to myself except when I’m having a discussion with someone I know well and they ask. But sometimes not even then.

As to weaning Noah. He weaned seven years ago at around this time, which means I was blogging then but I may not have blogged it. I’d gotten him down to once a day because I was totally burned out on nursing and it was pretty easy to get him down to that (with the exception of night weaning when he was 3 1/2, which was no fun for any of us) so he must have been ready. I don’t even remember how we did it or how it went; weaning was pretty darn easy. And I wouldn’t have been sad about it at all — I was so tired of nursing a great big kid — except that I was hoping for a baby to nurse by then. I do miss nursing (and wearing a baby) but not enough to go and get another kid so I could do either again.

Lillian asked about co-sleeping/transitional objects, too. Technically the transitional object is a inanimate object that the kid attaches to in order to self-soothe while away from parents. So if you’re using the term that way, a parent can’t be a transitional object since you can’t use a parent to transition the kid away from his/her parents.

I didn’t want either of my kids to self-soothe unless they up and chose to do so. I wanted them to lean on us for comfort even if it meant that they had to be rocked down or cuddled every night (and Madison is still there) because I wanted them to save their emotional energy for other developmental leaps.

Now like I said your mileage may vary about this stuff. My inlaws here believe just the opposite. Their kids self-soothe and go to bed by themselves and are sometimes left to cry. And you know what? They’re nice kids who don’t seem to be limping around with broken little spirits despite what the hard-core attachment parenting types may think (and for the start of my parneting career I proudly numbered myself among these sometimes small-minded folks). In fact, the cousins seem like healthy, confident and happy little people and their parents are getting (mostly) a lot more sleep than I did when either of my kids were this age. Still I’m glad we did it (and are doing it) this way because it’s a way that feels right to me especially for Madison who (say the good experts) may have a slightly more difficult way to go because of a different kind of start. But. Kids aren’t lab experiments so none of us really has any proof that there’s a direct route to nurturing happiness. So again — your mileage may vary.

I’ll write more about the specifics I heard in the workshops when I get home. Home!!! Yes, we leave tomorrow! Hallelujah and pass the salt!!!

I mentioned that the conference made me glad about some parenting choices we’ve made specifically in regards to parenting an adopted child. I’m going to share them here with the caveat that I don’t think that we did it “right” and anyone who does it differently is “wrong.” I’m sharing it to say that as I travel this road, it’s nice to look back at certain choices and say, “I feel good about that.” I talk a lot about the things that I don’t feel good about (when I look critically at adoption you can assume that the place I look at first and most critically is our own adoption) so I’m going to give myself a break here and talk about the things that don’t inspire even a modicum of guilt. Some of these are also choices we made for Noah and I’m glad about that, too.

• Not changing Madison’s name. I’m glad we didn’t do it even thought it meant neither of my kids was ever going to be able to take for granted that they’re the only people in a group with that particular name. (Both of them are hanging in the top ten lists for some years now.) I’m glad that she was born Madison Michael and remains Madison Michael. (And Pennie put our last name on the birth certificate so both birth certificates read the same name.)
• Carrying her everywhere until she decided to get down and move and even after although she was heavy right from the start and sometimes it wasn’t easy. I’m glad we used various slings and our beloved ellaroo wrap to keep her close. She took most of her afternoon naps tied to me even when she was a great big heavy toddler.
• Co-sleeping. I’m a huge fan of the family bed. I kinda want to write about my own memories around my transitional object (my beloved Pooh Bear) but I feel like it’d be unhelpful. Suffice to say that I wanted Brett and myself to be the main comfort to our kids until they choose otherwise and we have been. I’m glad about that.
• Feeding her every bottle while she was cradled in arms. My mom — who bottlefed the three of us but mourned that she didn’t breastfeed — told me early on that I should never let Madison hold her own bottle and that made sense to me because I figured I’d want it to be as close to nursing as possible. I took it pretty far — like I would take her hands off the bottle and put it on my hand holding the bottle because I wanted her to have skin-to-skin contact, not skin-to-plastic contact. But at the conference one of the presenters said that lactose in milk acts on the opiate center of the brain. That kind of good-feeling? I wanted Madison to get in the arms of her parents. (There was a time when I wanted to feed every bottle — and I did feed her most of them — but I lightened up and Brett did his share of feeding, too.) But we fed her cradled in our arms, cheek against our chest so she could hear our heartbeats. We both feel pretty good about that. (She still gets the occasional bottle, especially for bedtime and that’s fine by us because Noah was still nursing once a day at this age, too. Although for him his once a day was first thing in the morning.)

Like I said, I don’t think that if we’d done things differently that it would have been wrong or that Madison wouldn’t be thriving. More than a decade into this parenting gig I’m not convinced that kids are that fragile. And I also think parenting sanity is at a premium and that when we make choices we have to do that balancing our kids’ needs and our needs and our values and expectations as a family. But these are things that I feel good about and I feel met our values and expectations and that I look back on and still feel good about. Your mileage may vary.