Category: Mothering without a licence

The blog post that wasn’t

I have a lot of blog posts in my head, a few in my drafts folder, and one scrawled on a receipt from the post office and stuffed into my wallet. And you won’t be treated to any of them tonight because I’ve decided that rather than stay here with my nose pressed to the monitor where I would prefer to be (it’s a hell of a lot less work to just wag my fingers over the keyboard than to actually get off the couch and take care of all the things that are demanding my attention) instead I’m going to shut it down and go take the boys for an after-dinner walk.

Before I do, though, I have a quick question about my poor Lucas. We went back to the doctor today, and despite his having a clear chest and ears on Sunday, now he has an ear infection and some kind of chest infection. I wanted to ask you guys about something: the doc (not his usual) said: he has asthma caused by an allergic reaction to a virus. WTF? Not bronchitis, which is what it sounds like to me, but asthma, even though he has never had any sort of similar thing. ??? I asked if this was now a chronic condition and she kind of shrugged and said it’s the first time, we’ll have to see if and when it shows up again.

He’s got antibiotics for the ear infection, and two different puffers. Yeesh, just when you think you’ve got it all figured it, something new to contend with.

Anyway, your puffer and asthma and “allergic reaction to a virus” stories are welcome. Thanks!

On Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

I admit, although I’d heard of Jamie Oliver before yesterday, I had only the vaguest idea who he was. A friend of mine cooked up some of his recipes for a dinner party once, and I was impressed. But I’d heard he called feeding your kids junk food child abuse, and I was not impressed. So it was simple curiousity coupled with a lack of anything more compelling to do that made me tune in to his new TV show last night.

In case you, like me, have been under a rock for the last half decade or so, here’s the backgrounder: Jamie Oliver is an admittedly fetching British chef who seems to star in most of the shows on the Food Network. He’s a one-man empire: beyond the multiple TV shows, he’s got a product line with in-home parties, books, cafes and cooking schools, and a couple of restaurants. He’s taken on the cause of leading a movement in healthy eating and wholesome cooking, especially for school children, and turned it into a six-episode TV series. In Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, he takes his message to Huntington, West Virginia — the “unhealthiest city in America” — where he helps families and a school cafeteria learn how to eschew the ubiquitous chicken nuggets and pizza for simple, unprocessed and nutritional meals made of real food.

Which brings us to last night’s show. In fact, there were two — I made it through one and a half before I ran out of steam and PVRed the rest.

I went in cynical. I’d bristled at the attribution I’d read, where he said feeding your kids junk food is equivalent to child abuse. I am very cognizant of what my kids eat, and feed them healthy, wholesome, home-cooked meals most of the time. But you know what? They also get McDonalds and pizza and (gasp!) chips, and a lot of the other crap kids love. Occasionally. And I’m fine with that.

But by half way through the first episode last night, I was hooked. This is not the “Wife Swap” brand of exploitative reality television that I was expecting. He seems genuine in his belief that by empowering one family, one school, and by extension one small city, he can sow the seeds of real change in how America eats. Not only do I think he is genuine in his belief, but I think he may just achieve what he’s set out to do.

Of course, in me he is preaching to the choir. I look back over the last ten years and am amazed at how my outlook on food has changed since we had kids. Even over the last year and a half, I’ve radically changed how I choose and prepare dinners. In fact, I’ve more or less taught myself how to cook real food from scratch, something I rarely did before we had kids. Turns out that convenience foods are neither the best nor the easiest choice — didn’t see that one coming!

For instance, I’ve gone from buying frozen chicken nuggets in a box to making my own with shake and bake to making my own with bread crumbs and buttermilk. And you know what really surprised me? It takes only a few minutes longer, but it tastes so much better! I make hamburgers from ground beef instead of buying boxes of frozen patties. I serve a fruit or a vegetable to the boys with every single meal. I found out the boys love certain types of salad, so we serve those often. Simple things that we weren’t doing just two years ago. Small things, but important things that are cutting out heaping helpings of preservatives and sodium and mystery ingredients.

This is in pretty sharp contrast with the obviously overweight family that Jamie took under his wing in last night’s episode. They had stacks of frozen pizzas in the fridge for snacks, and their deep fryer was the most-used appliance in their kitchen. When Jamie cooked up an entire week’s worth of their food — largely pizza and pogos and fries — it was alarming not only in its quantity but in its uniform golden brown colour.

Even more disturbing was the school cafeteria that served pizza for breakfast, fried food at every meal and neon-coloured milk. I have a hell of a time making sure three kids eat properly at lunch time each day, so it can’t be easy to manage 400 of them, but I’m still trying to figure out if it was the sheer wasted food or what they were eating that was more disturbing to watch. (Much was made of the six-year-olds who confused potatoes and tomatoes, but even my kids who have grown tomatoes in the garden and eat them regularly occasionally confuse the similar-sounding words.)

Overall, I think some of the conflict in the show was gently contrived, but they generally stayed away from overt exploitation or holier-than-thou mocking of the residents of Huntington. There’s little arguing with his message, far as I’m concerned, and I wish him every success in evangelizing it.

Did you watch it? What did you think? Is this just another way for Jamie Oliver to line his own pockets, or might he really achieve his noble goals? And if this isn’t the way to wean the populace from pogos and chicken nuggets — what is?

Edited to add: I should have thought when I was writing this to link to the newly launched “Know More Do More” campaign in Ottawa. Check them out for healthy active living tips for families!

Maternal ADD

I‘ve been trying to figure out if this is just one of those things you have to accept when you’re a mother of three boisterous little boys, or if it’s something I can control.

Lately, I have noticed that I am perpetually unable to complete a single task uninterrupted. I open the browser window and start writing a blog post. I get three key-strokes in when the dog starts pacing around in that definitive “let me out now” kind of way. I let the dog out, and notice that the breakfast dishes are still on the table, so I start clearing them away. I begin loading the dishwasher, and Lucas demands a drink. I leave the dishwasher open and fill a sippy cup. Before I can hand him the sippy cup when the dog wants back in. I go to let the dog in, sippy cup still in hand, but the phone rings. While talking on the phone, I pick up the clothes strewn around and when the call ends, I go stuff a load of laundry into the washer. I can’t do that until I transfer the load that’s in the washer into the dryer, and can’t empty the dryer without a basket. I go upstairs and empty the basket of folded clothes onto my bed for later sorting, pausing along the way to remove Lucas from the toilet he’s about to plunge with a plastic hammer and on my way back to the laundry room Simon calls out from the kitchen because he’s banged his leg on the open dishwasher. At the same time, Tristan is hollering from upstairs that he doesn’t have any clean pants, and Lucas is still yammering for a drink.

All. Day. Long.

The worst part is, my work life is like this, too. Every time I sit down to do a particular task, there are five other things competing for my attention — an e-mail here, a phone call there, a colleague standing in my cubicle door with a question. I leave the office at the end of the day some days feeling like I pinged through the day like a pinball on crack, wildly bouncing from one thing to another at full speed without having actually accomplished anything.

Now, I know there are some ways I can mitigate this at work. Only open and respond to e-mails during certain hours, set off blocks of time reserved for specific projects, and simply making myself unavailable at certain times. But how do you do that at home? Despite my exhortations, the two-year-old is not amenable to only standing on the kitchen table filching apples from the fruit bowl during the 10 – 11 am time period, and while the dog is genial at the best of times, she’s almost 11 years old and her bladder is not to be scheduled.

I’m starting to get a little testy about the constant interruptions, and my ongoing inability to accomplish even the simplest tasks without a hundred distractions. Forget Chinese water torture — if you really want to drive someone insane, just make sure they’re not able to complete a single task, sentence or thought for three solid years.

What say ye, bloggy peeps? Is it just me? Do I just give up and embrace the chaos, or is this a tiger I can tame?

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to go replace all the books that the toddler dumped from the bookcase in the time it took me to type this post, and to feed the children breakfast. Because it’s all about priorities, right?

Did I forget to touch wood or something?

It seems somehow both painfully ironic and sublimely fitting that in the days since I posted a meandering article rife with smugness about leisure time and how zen I am about the pace of my life that I have been too busy to pee, let alone consider writing another blog post.

Universe 1, DaniGirl 0.

On time

“Moms have more leisure time than they think!” reads the provocative headline on ParentDish, and you don’t even have to read the comments to imagine the divisive and ultimately completely unhelpful comments from both mothers and those who love to hate mothers. And of course, there were defensive howls of outrage across the mamasphere.

A few clicks brought me to the original article in the Washington Post. It’s quite long, but very good reading. A busy mother with a full-time career as a writer set out to find both good story fodder and a solution to a problem we all face: “Most days, I feel so overwhelmed that I barely have time to breathe” she wrote. So she kept a diary of all the time she spent on various activities and handed it over to an “expert” for analysis, who told her that she has 30 hours of leisure time each week. The kicker, of course, is in the definition of “leisure.” This particular expert defines leisure time to include, for example, visiting a sick friend, watching a movie with the kids, lying in bed listening to the news on a clock radio, and “sitting in a hot, broken-down car for two hours on a median strip and playing tic-tac-toe with my daughter while waiting for a tow truck.”

The fun times in Mommyville never end, I tell you!

Seriously, though, she raises a point that few of us would deny. We’re busy. Overwhelmingly, crazily, frustratingly busy. Ironically — or maybe not so much — I’ve been reading the source material for this blog post and pecking it out in stolen moments over the course of about four days, in an ADD-inspiring dozen or so separate sessions, because that’s how my life works these days.

I have two places I want to go with this post. The first is that I’ve been a whole lot happier in my life since I stopped feeling persecuted about the sheer amount of effort it takes to keep our family on track. Never in my life would I have imagined I’d be the kind of person who runs the swiffer at 6:30 in the morning because the best time to do something is the instant I notice it needs to be done and four other things aren’t clamouring for my attention. In the not-too-distant past, I was offended at the idea that I’d be required to do any sort of domestic work (tidying the kitchen, packing lunches, putting toys away) after putting the kids to bed because the time between 8 pm and bedtime seemed inviolably sacred “me” time. And I’ve gotten used to the fact that any given moment of doing one thing has an opportunity cost of a whole bunch of other things that will not get done. Between the time I get home from work and bedtime, I almost never sit still, occupying myself with one brain-dead and thankless domestic task after another. This is the reality of my life, this constant crazy juggling act, stealing Peter’s time to pay Paul and always on the breathless brink of having it all come crashing down on me like an ill-built house of cards.

But really, I’m okay with that.

More specifically, I become okay with that when I stopped feeling maudlinly nostalgic for the times when my life did not follow this frenetic pace and I realized that whether I pout about it or not, someone still has to fold the laundry. Again. It takes a damn lot of work to run a household and a family and a job. In fact, the straw that breaks this particular camel’s back is going to be — mark my words — managing the flow of paperwork to and from the school, in addition to managing the homework and the special PJ days and 100th day of school activities and pancake dinners and friendship parties and all the rest of what it takes to be a contributing member to our school’s community.

I’m rambling, aren’t I? Okay, maybe I’m ambivalent instead absolutely content with my particular spot on the leisure-time spectrum right now, but I have to tell you, I’m feeling a whole lot better about it now that I’ve made efforts to go with the flow instead of feeling resentful about the constant demands on my time and attention.

The second place I want to go with this post is that despite everything I said in the first point, I could easily argue that I have a good deal of “leisure” time in my life. I mean, I dedicate probably five to seven hours a week to the blog and my online empire — twitter, e-mail, surfing, etc. (Probably, ahem, a hell of a lot more than that, but I am not yet willing to stare down the reality of that particular truth just yet.)

And there’s another two or three hours a week that I dedicate to photography — taking pictures, processing them, reading photography books, coveting other people’s camera equipment (that last one, conveniently, I can do while doing many other things.) My single hour at the gym on Saturday mornings is something akin to sacred time, as is the 30 to 45 minutes I spend with the newspaper and a coffee the three days a week I don’t have to go to the office. I watch about an hour of TV a day, usually in a bit of a slack-jawed stupor at the end of the day. I meet friends for breakfast quite regularly on a Sunday morning and feel like I’ve done the kids an injustice if I don’t spend some time on a weekend getting out of the house with them, whether playing in the driveway or going to the park or the library or the museum or any of the hundred other places we haunt on our excursions. And I manage to cram in 20 to 30 minutes with a book every night in bed before I go to sleep.

Count up all that and we’re well over 20 hours per week of built-in “leisure” time. Mind you, I paid a price to buy that extra time in my life when I took a 20 per cent pay cut to drop down to a four day week, so maybe I’m not representative of the kind of “career mom” they’re talking about. And, rare is the time that I’m dedicating myself fully to a single task. I swear, I will not be that mother who surreptitiously checks her Blackberry while pushing junior on the swings — I don’t even *have* a Blackberry and I feel quite smug about that fact — but I have been known to check the blog or Flickr for new comments in between reading Dr Seuss and Sandra Boyton.

This quote from the Post story stayed with me, though. “In the Middle Ages, the sin of sloth had two forms,” [the time management expert] said. “One was paralysis, the inability to do anything — what we would see as lazy. But the other side was running about frantically. The sense that, ‘There’s no real place to go where I’m going, but, by God, I’m making great time.’ ”

In the end, you control what you can, and one of the ways to control your own personal chaos is with choices. I choose to blog rather than clean the bathroom, and I think that’s a perfectly reasonable choice four times in five, as long as you get to the bathroom eventually.

What say ye, bloggy peeps? Are you ladies (and men!) of leisure, or on the fast track to burnout? Do you have to work to find balance and, more importantly, do you succeed? And, most important of all — has anyone seen the toilet brush?

Five ideas for Family Literacy Day

Did you know that Wednesday January 27 is Family Literacy Day in Canada? From the Web site:

Family Literacy Day takes place every year on January 27. ABC CANADA Literacy Foundation and Honda Canada created the day in 1999 to encourage families to read and learn together. […] Literacy is more than books. There are many ways to strengthen your literacy skills – all it takes is practicing for 15 minutes every day. Reading, writing, playing a game, following a recipe or even singing a song all help prepare children for challenges ahead and sharpen skills for adults.

Now, I’m guessing that I’m preaching to the choir when I tell you that literacy is one of the most important tools you can give your children, but I’m always looking for new tips and ideas for turning learning into a fun family activity.

Here’s five ideas for inspiring literacy in your family every day:

  1. Encourage your kids to tell stories. When you’re waiting in line, or in the car, or otherwise find yourself with time on your hands, create a story together based on something around you. See that man with the bright yellow t-shirt? What do you think he had for breakfast this morning? Why is he wearing that yellow shirt? Is his favourite colour yellow? Do you think he wears yellow every single day, one day wearing yellow pants and one day wearing yellow underwear? Why? You can get really silly with this, but it’s great fun and my kids love it.

  2. Did you know there’s a Sesame Street podcast? You know I love Sesame Street, and you know I’m fixated on my iPod. What could be better than the Word on the Street podcast from the creators of Sesame Street?!

  3. Sing it! I mentioned the other day how astonished I am that Lucas, not yet two, knows the melody if not all the words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and he’s been calling out the last word of each line to You are my Sunshine for months now. This year’s official theme for Family Literacy Day is “Sing for Literacy” and ABC Canada has provided access to free karaoke videos online.

  4. Wear your words. This is a neat idea for older kids from ABC Canada’s family literacy tips pdf: write a story or a poem on an old pair of jeans. Love this idea!

  5. Make yer own books. Tristan was about three when I helped him make his first book, made of pictures cut out of a Thomas the Tank Engine catalogue. He made his own first comic book around age five. All you need is a single letter-sized page cut into quarters and stapled along one edge and voilà: instant 8-page mini-book ready for words or scribbles or stickers or whatever your child can think of. If you like, get fancy and use a hole-punch and ribbon or yard to bind the side. The only problem with these is that the kids make them by the pile and I never have the heart to throw them out!

Care to share? Add your thoughts for making literacy fun in the comment section!

The most patronizing thing you can say to me

As you might have guessed from the longevity of this blog, I like to discuss parenting issues. I’ll compare notes with any parent, any time. I often find it’s the first area of common ground I establish with someone — do you have kids? If not, there’s always the default – do you have parents? It’s failsafe!

I remember one day in the waiting room of the pediatrician’s office, a mom and I compared our babies. Lucas was maybe six months old, Simon just turned four and a half, and we spent quite a while swapping anecdotes of the baby years. The funny thing was, her son was sitting beside her drowning her out with his iPod as he flipped through the latest Macleans. He must have been at the very top end of the age group for a pediatrician, maybe 15 or 16 — old enough to wear a trench coat and have stubble, anyway. But she blithely went on describing his various toddler exploits as if he were still in preschool. It was utterly charming, and only the tiniest bit creepy.

You know what really drives me bananas, though? I really hate it when parents of teens or adult children haul out that hoary old nugget: “Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.” I find that the most dismissive, patronizing, and downright annoying thing one parent can say to another. It’s even more annoying than the hyper-competitive mom who wants to make sure her baby is hitting all its milestones before yours, or the whole slacker-mom movement. (Really? Don’t get me started.)

I get what they’re saying, these condescending parents who diminish the daily struggles of life with little kids by insinuating that life with teenagers is so much more complex and fraught with peril. Now I’ll give you that toddlers rarely come home with random body piercings, preschool is virtually flunk-out-proof, and the only substance I worry about my seven-year-old abusing is his brother. I’ll admit that when things do go wrong in the teen years, there is always the potential for things to go catastrophically wrong in a life-altering sort of way. But I still don’t think that the actual parenting of a teen is so much harder than parenting a preschooler.

In fact, I’ll put it right out there and argue that parenting a child is WAY more labour-intensive than parenting a teen. I think the parents of older children have more freedom than do parents of schoolage kids, and I’m willing to gamble they get more sleep. When kids gain independence, so do their parents. Of course, the emotional investment is the same and I’m in no way saying that you somehow disengage from your children as they get older (hell, I’ve shown no signs of disengaging from my mom and I passed 40 this summer!) but I think the bulk of the parenting “effort” if I can call it that, is expended in the first 15 years or so.

The crux of it is that I truly cannot accept that any stage of parenting will be as traumatic, as transformative, as hard as parenting that squalling newborn. And anyone who has rose-coloured memories of the sweetness that is the toddler years is welcome to come to my house tonight between 4 and 6 pm and witness the debacle that is a our feisty, moody and endlessly adorable not-quite-two-year-old during the arsenic hours. Bonus points if you can entertain him (because he missed you all day while you were at work), supervise the homework, get dinner on the table, ask the middle child about his day, make the lunches, clean the kitchen, and sort the paperwork from the school without wanting to curl up in a ball and rock yourself to sleep on the dining room floor. Surely this is not simply a function of the quantity of kids in my house — it has everything to do, I think, with the fact that there is just more of me required in every hour of their lives than will happen when they’re 16 and trying to have the absolute minimum amount of contact with me.

Of course, I have only sang the first couple of verses of this particular song. My oldest will turn eight in March, so I can really only comment on the first half of the equation. So I bring it to you, bloggy peeps. What say ye? Is there merit to that hoary old nugget, or am I right to bristle when I hear it? Is it really any harder to parent older kids and teens?

(Although if it is, I’m not sure I want to know about it!)

On daycare, yet again

It’s been a good long time since I’ve bitched about child care, hasn’t it? I think we’re loooong overdue!

The reason it’s been a good long time since I’ve bitched about child care is because I’ve been so happy with the young nanny who has been coming to the house since I went back to work after my maternity leave ended last January. After a horrendous search, we found a gem and we’ve been thrilled with her care. And we will be thrilled with her care, right up until she leaves on March 1 to start her own maternity leave. Sigh.

When she came back after the summer off, she told us she was pregnant and I steeled myself for another demoralizing foray into the search for affordable, accessible, quality child care. In late September, I started haunting the online child care ads, and whimpered in dismay. And then, early in October I think it was, I mentioned our situation to one of the other moms from Simon’s kindergarten class that I’d befriended. I told her about the nanny’s (relatively) imminent departure, and asked her to keep her ears open for me. To my surprise and delight, she called me up the next week and wondered if I’d be interested in having *her* take care of the boys, and I couldn’t say yes fast enough. She has three kids, too, almost the same ages as my boys at the same school, and all the kids are friends. It’s perfect! I swear, it’s like karmic payback for all the daycare shit I’ve had to wade through over the years. Not only the easiest daycare search ever, but with optimal results. I couldn’t be more happy. It’s only an interim solution, as she doesn’t want to keep doing daycare beyond this spring, but it gives us a perfect bridge over the gap in care this year.

So she can bridge the period between the nanny’s maternity leave and the end of Beloved’s semester, and Beloved will be off from May through August with the boys. In September, Simon will be in Grade 1 (!!!!) and Tristan will be in Grade 3, which leaves me finding full-time care for Lucas and before and after school care for the big boys. Should be easy-peasy, right? Not so much.

A part of me is dismayed to be looking in January for care that isn’t required until September, but I’ve been at this game long enough to know there is no such thing as too soon. I’ve been tossing around different options. I could put Lucas into the day care centre near our house for $40 a day, assuming we creep to the top of that waiting list — I’ve been told it’s even odds since he’s been registered since 2007. Yes, he was born in 2008. Hell, they just called me this year to tell me that Tristan has not yet made it to the top of their waiting list — that he’s been on since 2004 — but since he turns eight in March, he’s no longer eligible for their centre.

If I get a spot for Lucas at the daycare centre — and a big “if” it is — I’d still have to arrange for before and after school care for the big boys. I’ve had them registered on the wait list for their school’s before and after care program since 2006. I just checked yesterday and while the coordinator won’t know for sure until March, she said it doesn’t look good for this year but we’re likely to get a spot for September 2011. Can you believe it? I registered when Tristan was in JK, and we’ll likely get a spot as he goes into Grade 4. And I’m not sure, but I think he’s ineligible after Grade 5.

And setting aside the whole wait list thing, there’s the cost issue to consider. The daycare centre is $40 a day, and the school’s before and after program is $19 per day per child. That’s $80 per day for “institutional” care. If I go private, in-home daycare, rates are similar. On the other hand, I can get a live-out nanny for $80 – 100 per day plus payroll taxes. This is good in that I am the boss and therefore in control of the conditions of employment — the reason I was drawn to nanny care in the first place. Currently, I’m only paying for 4 days per week of care because I’m off on Wednesdays, and we lay the nanny off each summer so she can collect EI and we don’t have to pay a fee to “save” a spot or coordinate holidays with the daycare provider and potentially all the other families for which she provides care. On the other hand, Lucas is painfully shy and I’m thinking it might be good for him to get out of the house for care, and it would be really nice to have everyone out of my house during the day. But finding a daycare provider that has space for all three boy who is in our school cachement area — let alone who is a good person and someone worthy of caring for my boys! — is a Herculean task that I am dreading to my bones. And the idea of going through the nanny interview process all over again gives me a stomach ache.

Sigh.

It’s kind of disappointing to see that even though two of the three boys will be in school full time in September, we stand to gain absolutely no financial break on daycare fees, and will be spared exactly none of the headaches of finding and managing child care. But, of course, we lose the $100-a-month child care payment from the government for Simon when he turns six next month.

Seriously, how the hell do people with less resources than our privileged family make this work?

Editorial Aside: Every link in this post is a link back to a different spot in the ongoing saga of one family’s search for affordable, quality, accessible day care. If you want to read more, you can peruse my “working and mothering” category. I’m sure my experience is just about average to what any Canadian family must endure, and I’m horrified by that. The system is broken, and we MUST fix it.

On crib recalls and baby sleep

Did you see these news items from yesterday? Over one million cribs recalled, and a world-wide ban on drop-sided cribs. Wowza!

We don’t have a Stork Craft crib, but we do have a drop-side one that has served us well through three boys. It was made by a little mom and pop outfit in Quebec, as I recall from one desperate scramble to find a missing part after we moved in 2003. I won’t be scrambling to get a replacement crib, nor will I be moving Lucas to a bed any sooner than I’m he is ready. I figure we got about another year, if we’re lucky.

In fact, just this morning I had to explain to Tristan that though I greatly appreciated his fraternal assistance, could he please *not* lift the baby out of the crib by himself in the future? I see a lot more risk in the 60 lbs not-quite-eight-year-old hauling the 35 lbs not-quite-two-year-old over the raised side of the crib than I do any inherent risk in the construction of the crib itself! I might find a way to weld or otherwise permanently attach the drop side, though. We don’t use it and haven’t really used it at all for Lucas. In fact, I’m not even sure we raised the mattress from the lower level when he was born — I think we just left it the way Simon had it when he made his way to a big-boy bed in 2006. (Oh my, I really have been blogging for a long time — and I really do love that I can poke back into the archives and find these gems that might have been otherwise lost!)

Ahem, anyway, all this prattling on about cribs has given me the opportunity to brazenly brag about mention the fact that after almost a year of hand-wringing and angst about sleep training, it’s been about a month since the day that Lucas sleep-trained himself completely without any intervention from me. Huh. Didn’t see that one coming!

As you might remember if you’re as long in the tooth around here as me, I am not opposed to letting a baby cry himself to sleep, within reason. The parameters of reason including being close to one year old or older, knowing your baby’s temperament well enough to know he can handle it, knowing you and your spouse and other family members can handle it, and never letting a baby cry longer than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Those were my personal yardsticks. Sleep training Tristan took about a week; Simon a little longer. Both were between 10 months and a year old.

Lucas’s first birthday came and went, and he was still falling asleep the way he had since birth — in my arms, usually while I sat in the living room far from the going-to-bed chaos of the big boys upstairs. It would take between 20 and 45 minutes for him to drift off, considerably less at nap time. And no matter how much I favoured the idea of sleep training in principle, no matter how much I yearned for the freedom of simply being able to put the baby in the crib and kiss his fuzzy head and walk away — I just couldn’t do it with Lucas.

And then one day last month, I thought he was asleep when I ported him upstairs but I realized as I lay him into his crib that he was watching me. So I did exactly that — kissed his fuzzy head, said goodnight, closed the door and walked away. I went in to kiss the big boys goodnight, gave them a little cuddle and paused outside Lucas’s door. Silence. Hmmm, how curious. So I shrugged my shoulders and walked downstairs, waiting for him to bellow.

Silence.

About half an hour later, I couldn’t resist any longer, so I went upstairs and peeked into his room. He was, to my everlasting astonishment, sleeping. Imagine that! So the next night, just like I have done every other night (because I know from reading every baby sleep book ever written the importance of routine) I told him the story of his day, gave him a little cuddle with his precious “blanky and soo”, and when he was calm but still awake I brought him upstairs and put him in his crib. By the time I had said goodnight to the big boys, he was standing in his crib hollering for me — I tell you, I was almost relieved! — and so I walked back in, tucked him back under the covers, told him I loved him and it was time to go to sleep and walked out again. And — he did!

Giddy with success, three days later we started putting him in his crib awake at nap time too — and do you know what? That worked too. Right from the start. I swear, nobody was more shocked than me.

Now, one of my favourite parts of the day is bedtime, when I put Lucas in his crib, tuck his blankets around him, and sing a couple of verses of my perennial bedtime favourite, You are My Sunshine. I can’t quite keep from laughing as he calls out the last word in every line to “sing” along with me: sunshine, happy, grey, dear, you. Really, it’s way too cute.

Anyway, that’s how we sleep trained Lucas. Or he sleep trained us. I have a suspicion he’s wanted us to just put him in his crib and leave him in peace for months, but he just didn’t have the words to tell us! One of these days he’s going to tell me how he really feels about my singing, but that’s a post for another day.