Taking The Kid shopping

Max has always been an anti-shopping baby. In a T.J. Maxx store, as inevitable as finding endless racks of P. Diddy hip-hop XXXXL sweatpants, we can count on Max to be sobbing in his stroller. Essentially, he's like me with a shorter fuse. Worse, he's like my dad. Clearly Max's future wife will be buying clothes for him while Max plays space golf, or whatever they do in the future.

But, like Dad, Max reacts differently in different stores. And he was a very good baby in REI. Not in his stroller, by any means, but by adopting a few simple rules we could keep him relatively happy:

(Note: These rules don’t all necessarily apply to Dad.)

1) For God's sake, don't leave him in the car seat with nothing to do.

2) Let him stroll around also.

3) Go ahead, let him eat the shoelaces. Isn’t there some sort of product safety thing that protects him?

4) Max needs to try stuff out too (by "try", I mean, grab, drool on, or eat.)

If you’re near a clothes rack, for God sake, throw some shirt sleeves into his crib. You need to see how they feel, he needs to see how they taste.

5) If the shirt’s a medium, don’t waste time trying it - just buy it already.

If you are willing to devote the 300% higher effort necessary to do these things, life is good.

Delia still longs for a more innocent time when she could just aimlessly spend hours browsing through aisle upon aisle of clothes while her husband got furious. I am actually a little grateful to have him along.

Sleep and Evil Western Parenting

So Max up until now has been a pretty good kid overall. Now that he's able to express happiness, he's much easier and more fun to deal with. Then when he's crying he almost always has a good reason - 90% of the time he's hungry or sleepy, with the other 10% consisting of boredom, overstimulation, needing to poop, teething or needing affection. But the kid's been a horrible sleeper.

Let me, if I may, impress upon the childless how much nighttime feedings suck. Here's a typical night for Delia. To convey the tension, I will use the second person, Brian Williams style:

9:30 PM: Max cries for 10 minutes and goes to sleep. You immediately race to the bathroom, brush your teeth, and jump in bed.
9:45: Umm, there are neglected chores you forgot because you were taking care of Max.
10:30 PM: Chores done. You have precious little time left. Jump into bed and force the adrenaline out of your body.
1:45 AM: You are awoken by a fire alarm-level wail which destroys your completely unrefreshing sleep. Max is hungry. Generally, you can feed him and put him back to bed after 20 minutes, but if you're lucky, he pooped all over himself and you have to turn on the lights to replace his diapers, making the kid wide awake.
1:45 -2:05 AM: Your latest attempt to feed Max lying down doesn't work - he's too fussy. You sit in some uncomfortable position and slowly feel the sleepiness drain from your body.
2:05 AM: Max is out. You are wide awake.
4:00 AM: After lying in bed for an hour attempting to get the PTSD-level screaming out of your memory, 30 minutes of Internet surfing, and another 30 minutes of forcing, in your brain, some stupid sheep to jump a fence, you drift back to sleep.
5:45 AM: The second truck-horn level sobbing kills your beautiful dream. You want very badly to ignore him or perhaps throw him out the window, but even in your semi-hallucinatory state, you remember there are laws against that. However, Max leaves no doubt that, as you deliberate in bed, you are starving a helpless baby to death.
6:00 AM: You fed Max. He gives you a big smile. He wants to play! Buh, no. He's back in the crib. Hey, guess what? By the time you get yourself back to sleep, it's time to start work.

We've adapted the best we can - I generally slept in a separate room, because it's better if only one parent can't sleep than two, and given Delia's about to quit working, it's more important I do well at my job. In return, I came home earlier, did the cooking, and took care of Max until bedtime so Delia could sleep or zombie out. It works - more for me than for Delia - but it certainly could be better. We had a plan that I'd feed Max formula once at night, but he can't stand formula now. By the time he's hungry enough to eat it, he's cried enough to wake Delia up anyway. We also tried rice cereal - again, he won't eat enough to make a difference.

So both our parents are telling us Max should be sleeping through the night. Old-school parenting has a pretty clear solution: Don't let him sleep too much in the day, so he'll be good and tired at bedtime. Put the kid in a separate room, let him cry if he wakes up in the middle of the night, and in a couple days he'll pick up the habit of sleeping through the night. In fact, old-school parents would say, Max might be waking up because the parents are snoring. But new-school parenting rejects this idea. Basically, babies need to be around their parents. They have their own sleep cycle, and some babies won't sleep through the night until they are 1 year old. Any attempts to manipulate this cycle can harm the babies' health and/or psyche. Attachment parenting goes further and says many kids can't sleep on their own or self-soothe until they are several years old, and attempting to push this cycle releases the stress hormone cortisol, interfering with babies' brain development.

@#$@ it. We're tired.

We really don't care anymore if the ancient Ulowangi tribe made sure at least two people were simultaneously hugging a baby at all times until the kid was sixteen. We have jobs. And, really, we noticed that Max's cuteness is directly proportional to how much he let us sleep. If Max could adapt, self-soothe, and sleep through the night, he'll be treated better when he's awake.

Our first step was to move Max to a separate room.

Max's new digs.

I assembled the crib in the new room while Max watched, undoubtedly wondering, "Gosh, I know I sleep in the crib, but how's Mommy going to fit in there with me?" Max got agitated. Then we put him to sleep.

It was probably the worst night Max ever had.

It wasn't too easy on us either. Starting at 2:00 AM, Max started sobbing, only to stop and fall asleep when one of us held him. After waiting about 20 minutes, one of us would lay him gently in the crib, only to watch him struggle and begin sobbing again. It was absolutely heartbreaking. Max was probably frightened out of his mind - no parents to soothe him, strange noises at night, wondering if he'll ever be held again - I'm sure Max felt horrible and so did we.

The next day, we didn't know what to do. Max has been a good kid, and we want to keep him that way. But we have heard and read that Max will only get more resistant to a separate room as he gets older. We decided to try it one more night - Max would probably forget the whole thing (Mom - please don't save this blog! Mom???). Delia would soothe him until 3:00 AM and I would take over after that.

So here's how it went:
9:30 PM: We put Max to bed. He cried for about 10 minutes and passed out. This is roughly normal for him.
2:30 AM: Max wakes up and cries. Delia feeds him. Max goes right back to sleep.
6:00 AM: Max wakes up again.

Pretty anticlimatic, and for us, utterly amazing. We checked up on him several times and just saw peaceful sleeping. Where was the cortisol? This kid adapted incredibly fast.

Unfortunately, he was still waking up every 4 hours, hence putting us back at Square 1. Actually, for me, it was worse - he cried loud enough now to wake me up, and I discovered I can't get myself to sleep again. I'm not too hot at self-soothing, apparently. Again, old-school parenting has an answer: Withhold the nighttime feeding, deal with a nightmarish couple of nights, and watch the kid magically adapt. Could we actually do this?

Could we really withhold food from this kid?

Neither one of us were emotionally prepared to try. But I noticed Max was curled up and struggling at 2:00 am, making me wonder if he was too cold. Delia noted Max fed really well at 2:00 am also, which made me think about how to get him to feed well at 10:00 pm. So we tried a couple ideas out: We put Max in slightly warmer clothing so he doesn't get too cold, and have his last feeding in his bedroom in the dark so he can prepare for the night (hopefully leading to a bigger feeding). We couldn't bring ourselves to skip a feeding, but we decided to at least wait for nighttime crying to last 10 minutes, in the hope he can calm himself to sleep. Here's how Max reacted:

10:15: Max went to sleep.
1:00 AM: No peep from Max. Delia checks to see if he's still alive. She was greeted with light snoring.
4:30 AM: I check up on him. The kid's still asleep.
6:00 AM: Max woke up and greeted me with a smile.

Oh. My. God. What just happened?

I hope we don't jinx this whole thing, but Max followed this up with an 8-hour sleep and a 6.5-hour sleep (I heard him make some noise about 2:00 am, but he went back to sleep without crying.) I actually can't believe I'm typing this. There is hope!

(Update, about a week later - he's still sleeping through the night. Delia's functional the whole day, so we can actually spend some time together. Now that she has energy, I've noticed I have much more free time. I've even been able to watch the Denver Nuggets. Unbelievable.)

30 minutes ago: Max's vacation crib in San Jose (where Delia's parents live).

Improper raising of children

Max shopping in Sacramento.

Max playing poker with Great Uncle Peter.

OK, we're back. Delia's almost healed and is exercising again, we're getting breaks thanks to both sets of grandparents, and Max has received several upgrades. Pretend Max is a month younger for this update and you'll be on top of things.

A couple videos: First, here's a video documenting Max's roll to his side.

Max demonstrating side roll.

And here's a video of Max walking.

Max walking.

You may think the above pictures and video are cute, but we are doing irreparable damage. First, Kaiser nurses told us that assisted walking is bad for Max. As we later learned, everything else we currently do for Max will make him a disease-ridden, deformed sociopath. Sit him up on our lap? It will deform his spine. Hold him upright? It will stop him from developing core muscles. Lie him on his back? He'll develop a flat head and not develop normally. Show him lots of love? He'll become overly dependent and whiney. As we learned, his only hope in a normal life relies on us putting him on his tummy until he screams. (On what might be a possibly related note, my parents recently told us we need to relax more. So, basically, you're saying we're not being ideal parents? That stresses us out! How will Max react to the stress? He's going to be anxiety-ridden!)

Some people we know have been inspirational to me. One of them told me to just put spit on a kid's wound to make him think it's better. So, I asked him, won't he'll lose all trust in you? He replied, "By the time he's old enough to know, he's lost all trust in you anyway." I asked, "But what if he still trusts you? He'll keep putting spit on his wound forever!" He replied, "Builds up his immune system." I will be seeking more advice from him.

By contrast, the nurses at Kaiser are slowly losing their grip on us. When Max went back to breastfeeding, he woke up every 2 hours to feed. This drove Delia insane.

Max at 5:00 am. He was fed and diapered. He was also very awake.

Delia's mom told her she was working when Dan was a baby and was also sleep deprived, so eventually she tried to put Dan on a feeding schedule at night - 4 hours between feedings. Dan was horrible for 2 nights and then, like magic, took to the feeding schedule. This story is very similar to the another dad, who had 6 kids, all of whom were put on a schedule, and all of whom adapted fine after a couple days. But when I asked a Kaiser nurse if Max was old enough for a schedule, she responded, very scared, "But he's hungry!!! How would you like someone to take away your food when you're hungry?" Soon, I heard her speed-dial Child Protective Services. I got a similar reaction from the nurse to another time-tested method to get a baby to sleep longer - dissolve cereal in some milk. Max completely lost his taste in formula, which rendered the idea moot anyway. In any case, we are getting a very strong suspicion that these nurses are not following their advice with their own kids.

First attempt at feeding Max rice cereal mixed with formula. He liked it less with each passing day. We didn't know why until we tried it. Our suprising conclusion: Formula tastes nasty - sort of like a Tang version of milk.

Finally, we came up with a solution. We already knew that Max went to bed far easier on his tummy. We put him on his tummy, he cried and flailed around, which just tired him out, and then he finally passed out after around 5-10 minutes - after which we flipped him on his back. But we soon noticed he slept longer on his tummy. Apparently this is very common with babies, so my generation was put to bed on our stomach. So, we kept Max on his tummy through the night. Yes, this increases the risk of SIDS, but really, given his current sleeping pattern, it might be his only path to survival. And it worked - he slept for progressively longer times for 2 weeks.

Max on tummy.

Then disaster struck.

We should have seen it coming earlier. But only now are we beginning to understand what happened. First, we placed Max in the center of the crib (see above photo), but we later picked him up, crying, with his head against a crib corner or his arm sticking through the rails. We never saw it happen in real time. The crib didn't seem to be tilted.

A day later, Max's back was wedged against the crib rails. He was on his side.

"Did you put him there?" I asked.
"Nope." Delia replied.

Then we found him on his back.

Now we realize he was moving around the crib like an inchworm. Unfortunately, he has no reverse gear, but when he hits a barrier, he simply cries. To flip over, he tucked his legs under his tummy and fell over. Soon, he was doing it quickly. And hence, the tragedy. No longer does he flail around anymore - just a neat flip to the side, and he has plenty left in the tank for hours of wailing. Gone are our carefree days when we could guarantee Max could go to sleep whenever he was cranky.