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Since making the decision to stay home with the Squeaker I have had this really nagging worry.  I worry that I am not actually teaching her anything and that she would be better off at daycare or with a nanny because at least there she could be with other kids and learning from them.  Obviously I know that moms staying home with their kids is a good thing but I feel like maybe I’m not teaching her the right way or teaching her at all.  I don’t know, maybe she’s supposed to be walking and counting up to ten by now and I have failed to get her there.

In the last week she has been making amazing strides in development.  She started crawling (army crawling) at the beginning of last week.  I was getting to think this was never going to happen because she always wants to be standing and hates to be on her tummy.

For the last couple weeks I’ve been trying to teach her some baby signs.  Specifically I’ve been teaching her “more” and “all done” and “water”.  Yesterday she started doing “more”.  I don’t think she knows what it means yet but she is copying my hand motions when I do it, so it’s a start.

She has also been sleeping in her crib like a champ.  And like a champ I mean an hour at a time but this is basically as much as she was sleeping in our bed at a time so that fact that she is doing it in her crib is amazing.

While I’m sure O would have learned these things in daycare if we had her there, it just affirms that at least my mom aptitude is not stunting her learning and she is reaching the milestones that she needs to be reaching.  Thank God.

It’s just nice to feel like maybe I’m not so bad at this mom thing as I feel sometimes.

Image by genibee via Flickr

I know it seems like a common sense statement but I am continually amazed how the more big life events I experience the more I can relate to others.  Getting engaged, getting married, being a teacher, having a baby, being a mom, etc.  As these  things happen, I feel like I understand more of life.  This also means that as I learn more, the more I cringe when I think about things I’ve done that were insensitive and un-understanding.

When I worked at a women’s homeless shelter where we lived with undocumented women and children we always had a few pregnant women staying with us.  When they would go into labor we would take them to the emergency room, make sure they got checked in, then leave them with food and our phone number to call us once they were going to be discharged from the hospital or if there were any problems.  We were always super busy and short staffed so we probably couldn’t have stayed with them even if we wanted to but I can’t help but think about how alone and confused these women must have felt.  It’d be like putting me in France, pregnant, alone, homeless, no money, no insurance, language I don’t understand at all and just having to trust the medical staff during one of the most physically trying acts a woman can sustain.  Those poor women.  One woman told us how she had her baby by herself on her bed because the nurses weren’t responding to her calls.  Another young girl who was 19 told us that when she was released they told her they had given her a sterilization shot that lasted 3 months.  She had not consented. 

After going through labor, I cannot imagine what it must have been like for those women.  I really don’t think that we could have stayed with them but at least I could have been more sympathetic to what they went through.  Had I known then what I know now I would have also encouraged breastfeeding more, too.

Another thing that I am realizing now is how much I took my mom for granted.  She always worked 50-60 hour weeks and me and my dad still expected her to get all our food for us and to do all the cleaning.  Which she gladly did.  My mom loves cleaning so she always did it.  The food thing was harder.  We usually ate fast food or take out but she would cook sometimes.  Still even if it meant picking it up, we always expected my mom to bring food.  I remember how angry I would get at her if she came home without food.  Mostly because I was hungry and totally helpless.  I didn’t know how to make anything other than Ritz crackers with cream cheese and jam.

After becoming a wife and mother, I realize how hard it is to be the one that is entirely in charge of every meal and cleaning.  Kraft and I are trying to figure out how share these responsibilities more but with his schedule pretty erratic it makes sense that most of it fall to me, not to mention I don’t have a job.  I now understand this responsibility that my mom had on top of working overtime.  And she never complained.  She never told us that we should get off our duffs and learn how to help with the food.  She never told us that she was tired and needed us to help her.  She just took our complaints and our ingratitude. 

Sometimes I don’t give my mom the credit I should for being such a good mom.  Thanks mom. 

The Squeaker is doing a good job of keeping us on our toes.  I want to do a better job chronicling this crazy ride that is parenthood so I decided to work on our family blog more.  This blog will still be my primary blog but the other one will be stuff about our family and pics.

So enjoy: La Casa de Kraft

Image via Wikipedia

This is another golden tip from some book that I read about baby sleep.  Seems pretty common sense but you come to find that to a sleep deprived parent, few things are common sense.  The Squeaker has been such a bad sleeper that when I figured out I could nurse her to sleep lying in bed, I thought I had hit the jackpot.  Problem is now I can only put her to sleep like this.  So when we’re all in bed and she starts to squirm and I know she is going to wake up, yes I feed her, and yes, sometimes she is asleep.  So I do in fact feed a sleeping baby sometimes but I don’t do it as often as before.  Now I wait and see if she can put her self to sleep.  Anywho…

There are a few things that I am getting tired of:
1) People talking to me as if I’m stupid for co-sleeping with O.
2) Co-sleeping with O.

So, #1, I guess I run in some pretty hippy mom circles where co-sleeping is valued and seen as good parenting.  But recently I have had a lot of encounters with people who don’t have kids and who talked to me as if I didn’t know the first thing about being a good mom.  There is really no topic quite as controversial as how you get your baby to sleep.  Every single mom feels guilty about the way they get to their kid to sleep.  Including me.  Every time I tell someone that O sleeps in bed with us I feel like I need to explain why.  I feel like they are judging me and think that I am doing the wrong thing.

You know what?  That’s it.  I’m not going to feel bad anymore and other moms shouldn’t either.  I have talked at length to moms about how they get their kids to sleep and every single one of them does something that they feel uncomfortable telling you about and feel like they have to justify it.  Moms that have their kid sleep in their own crib in their own room and had to let their kid cry until putting themselves to sleep will say that there was no other way that worked and this was their last resort.  Moms that sleep with their baby in bed with them will say the same thing.  Moms that put their baby to sleep on their stomach will say the same thing.   We don’t need to explain why we do this to anyone.  The name of the game is survival.  You do what puts your baby to sleep so that you can get just enough sleep not to go crazy.

I do believe that there are a lot of things that moms can do that make them bad moms.  Here are some examples: put soda in your kid’s bottle, not giving your kid a chance to like veggies and always feeding them chicken nuggets and quesadillas, letting them play Halo and Grand Theft Auto, etc.  But sleeping with your baby, putting your baby in a crib, or letting them sleep on their stomach  is not one of them.

So next time I am talking to you and the topic of co-sleeping with O comes up don’t tell me that you think babies should sleep in cribs and don’t tell me that you know someone whose aunt’s hairdresser’s tax attorney’s dog groomer rolled over and smothered their baby after coming home drunk one night.  Don’t want to hear it.

#2 I have been thinking for a while that it is time to transition O into a crib.  Not because I want her out of our bed, but because she sleeps pretty well when she is asleep in our bed by herself but when I get in bed she wakes up about every hour.  I think she would sleep better in her crib.  And now that she is starting to be more mobile, I am worried about her being able to crawl off the bed.  (It is a commonly known precaution that if your baby sleeps in bed with you you should put your mattress on the floor to prevent this from happening.)  Thing is, I just have not built up the resolve that I need to fight this battle.  I am very sleep deprived at the moment and the thought of rocking O to sleep for hours and then her waking up 5 minutes after I put her in her crib makes me want to cry.  So I’m working on it.  Not to mention, we have a queen size bed which was fine until she started getting so big and likes to sleep with her arms outstretched as if she was Jesus.

Just like all families, we are a work in progress.