Barren Mare

Time to make the donuts!

Having mulled over the comments on the last post, I've reached some interesting conclusions. None of these ideas are exactly new. It seems like I've been waging one form of sleep battle or another since Botany was born, so I have given this a lot of thought already. But up until now, it was more like...partly-baked notions that I haven't bothered to finish formulating.

I think commenter Monica (hi Monica!) is absolutely right in several respects; firstly, that something probably needs to change, if only because I think things could be working better than the present situation. The trouble is that any change does require a certain amount of modification on both my part and Botany's. I do find it difficult to to be consistent, persistent and diligent when it involves both getting up early and getting out of the current comfort zone. However! Assuming that the nettle can be grasped, here's the other puzzle.

Forgive me in advance if what follows is all too "Behavioural Modification 101" but I'm trying to work it through in my own mind.

The second thing on which I think Monica is spot on about is that one of the reasons Botany wakes up so early is so that I will bring her into bed with me and nurse her. It's a basic behaviour-reward pattern. I don't think Botany is necessarily a lark by nature. Sure, occasionally, she gets up at the ungodly hour of 5.30 am, ready to party and and no matter what, will not be boobed back to sleep for the day. But what I observe, both from her willingness to nurse back down and from her nap patterns is that she actually does seem to require more sleep than a 5.30 am kick off allows. So really, the main reason she wakes up and calls for me is that she wants the company of Mummy's boobs. And by now, I reckon her body clock is actually primed to go off at that point- mine certainly is.

Now, the problem is of course how to fix all of this. Botany goes to bed by 7.30pm most nights and quite often sleeps straight through til 5.30ish. That's ten hours, which seems a reasonable amount of time. Under the present circumstances, I can't really shift her bedtime any later. I reckon that until I can establish with more certainty that she can, in fact, sleep on her own for longer than she presently does, then it seems a trifle unfair to pick a time beyond 5.30am and confine her to her cot until that time is reached. So rightly or wrongly, I've chosen 5.30am as the magic hour at which she should be able to get up if she really wants to. I know. Ugh.  

I could of course implement a form of cry it out to see if it would induce later wake ups. To be honest, there are times when I do this anyway- for example, when she kicks off at 4am and I am thinking nooooo way. But my concern is this: at her age, Botany has no way of knowing what time it is. She has no means by which to realise that the magic wake-up hour is reached. So I think it gets extremely confusing for her if sometimes when she cries, Mummy comes in after, say 30 minutes and other times, it's 5 minutes. My guess is that it's created a form of unwanted intermittent reinforcement for an early morning wake up and cry. Because, hey, sometimes it might be the lucky day when all you need is a 3 minute wail!

What occurred to me is this: the problem may not be the reward. In fact, having such a reward to offer could potentially work in my favour. What I need to do is introduce an intermediate step between the current behaviour (wake up, cry like banshee) and reward (boob). In other words, I need to teach Botany that it's not her crying for a certain length of time that will make me magically appear at her cotside, but that my appearance is triggered or connected to something else. I think that "the something else" should provide a visual clue to help her learn that an appropriate wake-up time has been reached.

Commenter Kristin (hi Kristin!) had the excellent suggestion of using a digital clock- when the number reads 7, it's time to get up. However, I'd agree that even though she is a smart cookie, Botany may be too young for this just yet. I've seen these,  which might be a possibility, although wea re not quite at the recommended 2 plus age range.  Trouble is, I am not sure if Botany would really be able to see it very well from the current position of her cot, so I am not sure where I would put the damn thing (other than perhaps in the cot itself?) I might be able to re-configure things a bit in her room but I don't know how effective that would be.

What I might try (and please dear Internets, if you think this is completely dumb, tell me) is to put a timer on the small blue light on the bedside table. The little lamp casts a very low key and pleasant glow. Initially I would set it for 5am. If she wakes up before that, I could leave her to gurn until the appointed hour. Then the light would come on, followed by my immediately coming in to get her. My goal would be to keep shifting the "light-on" time later and later. My hope would be that this would teach her that Mummy only comes in when the light comes on.

Or would this simply result in her crying on and on in hopes that this somehow turns on the light?  In which case, I am no further forward. I have this theory that it would take awhile but presumably there may be times when the light comes on even when she is not in cry mode. That may eventually clue in her that the light is not necessarily related to her wailing.  

The other alternative is, of course, to do nothing other than what I am already doing, knowing that eventually she will grow out of it and that one day it will take my running a jackhammer by the side of her bed to rouse her. Ah, what a blissful notion.

From sleeps to sleep

In case you are wondering, I haven't fallen down a groundhog hole or any similar fate. It's simply the perennial, unsolvable problem of not enough hours in the day. Add to that the drudgery of the long Scottish winter, and it's enough to knock the blogging motivation out of the best of us. I want to hibernate, under a pile of the warmest blankets, and sleep until spring. That said, it does seem like we are beginning the slow tipping toward the longer days, with the first signs of snowdrops making an appearance. And that does lift the spirits considerably.

Speaking of low slow changes and bed covers, Botany is presently working on the awkward transition from two naps a day to one. It's a complete pain in the ass. At eighteen months, most of the children in her peer group have long since bid farewell to the morning nap; but then again, most of those kids also allegedly sleep happily in their cots until 6.30 or 7 am. With Botany, the formula seems to run something like this. She wakes up at 5.30 and I fetch her into bed with me. If she goes back to sleep, as she frequently does, until 7-7.30 am, then she is pretty much able to make it through to lunchtime without a morning nap (although it gets a bit dicey sometimes around about 11.30 or so). If she wakes up before 7 am, as she also frequently does, then she seems to really struggle to get to the midday sleep.

The problem is, if she has a morning nap any later than, say, 8am, it does seem to really screw up the afternoon nap. Plus she tends to sleep for too long in the morning slot, and then the afternoon nap lasts approximately 14 minutes and 46 seconds, thus rendering the rest of the day a bit of minefield as to mood swings, tantrums and wanting to doze off at 5pm. Misery.  

I'm probably not helping matters in that I usually acquiesce to her morning requests to climb back into bed with mummy for boob, as long as this is before 9am. It's hard to say no, given that on these occasions, I've been up with her since as early as 5am and the lure of the pillows and a warm baby is sooo hard to resist. The alternative is to try to keep a grumpy fractious toddler amused until at least noon. I tend not to take her out on those mornings, since she'll almost certainly fall asleep in the stroller or car way too early and then the whole afternoon sleep schedule is buggered.  But it does make me want to climb the walls, trying to keep her up all morning while stuck in the house.

I think the nursery are also complicit in the problem since she invariably has a morning nap on the days she is with them. Again, it's hard to criticise since we get up about 6.15 am on work days and I gather she gets so weary that she actually asks to be put down for a sleep there, too. In a few months from now, she'll be transferred into the next room up in terms of age, as she is now one of the oldest kids in the baby room. I can just imagine that the staff are quite keen to get all the little 'uns stashed away for a morning sleep too, and not have Botany tearing around on the room on her own, gurning and grizzling and practicing her favourite word "no, no, no".

I reckon we'll get there eventually but like most things in parenting.idently it's going to take more fine-tuning and patience than I had originally anticipated. Ultimately, the issue of naps at nursery will be decided for her since once she moves up to the next room, it's a one nap schedule there and I expect she'll adapt. Maybe by that point she'll be hardy enough to withstand the slog of a long morning without a retreat back to bed.

I, other hand, am wondering how I'll survive it; I'll miss the morning nap terribly. It was always a bright spot of consolation to me on the days I hauled my weary ass out of bed at 5.30 am. I suppose will be nice to have a clear chunk of hours in the morning to go out and do things without building a nap into the equation, and I suspect it will also mean her afternoon nap is a little longer and easier to attain. What I am coming to learn, slowly, is that in order to function at the optimum level with these catch up sleep opportunities, I really need to make an effort to get to bed myself earlier, ideally by at least 10pm. But that equates to even less hours in the day...and so it goes.

There's a moose loose aboot this hoose

Or, to translate the title from Scots to English, "there's a mouse loose in the house." Or possibly mice, plural- likely a whole family.

I do my very best under the circumstances to try to maintain at least a basic level of hygiene around this place. True, the area around and under the highchair often teeters on the brink of becoming a biohazard zone. But for the most part, toys get tidied away, the dishes get washed, the laundry gets hung up, the carpet is hoovered once a week and the bathroom wiped down with all manner of aggressive cleaning agents on a regular basis. I thought I was keeping on top of things.

So it was with some dismay that just before Christmas, when in a burst of festive scrubbing, I found myself making a grim discovery in the less frequented areas of the flat (i.e. behind the fridge and the toolbox). The telltale signs of mouse visitation, namely, dried mouse poo and mouse wee. Lots of it- and it stank.

"Oh my god," I said to Knox, "we've descended to a state of vermin infestation. What kind of mother am I? " 

It's hardly surprising, he said, noting that on any given day, Botany drops enough food on the floor to fatten a mouse colony. It's impossible to keep up with sweeping up every scrap.  And it's pretty common for both new and old tenements in this city to be overrun with mice; the little bastards burrow into the walls and run up and down between the floors as they please.

We poked around the droppings site and found a large hole in the wall behind the fridge which is clearly serving as a mouse portal to the delights of Botany's discarded blueberries, cheerios and smoked bavarian cheese. That night as we sat on the sofa, we heard (or imagined we heard) the sound of tiny rodent feet scuttling under the floorboard. When Knox went to the kitchen later on to get a drink of water, he surprised a mouse making its way to the buffet table under the highchair; both of them leapt about 10 feet in the air.

"Right," I said, "we're getting some traps." He looked horrified, even as I explained that having had a go-round with a mouse problem in a previous flat, experience had shown me that the humane kind of trap is pretty much useless and that accordingly we would proceed straight to the draconian death method. Please understand, it's not that I am keen to be cruel to little animals, but in terms of housekeeping standards, I pretty much draw the line at sharing living space with rodents. 

"But it's Christmas," Knox said. "What happens when Father Mouse doesn't come home on Christmas morning to open the presents? Think of his little stocking hanging by the mouse tree, all forlorn. The mouse children crying. His mouse widow, alone over the holidays!"

This argument was just Brambly Hedge enough for me to relent, so I agreed to stay of execution until the New Year. Whereupon we procured a trap, baited it and stuck in behind the refrigerator by the mouse hole. By this point, of course, Knox had proceeded to name the various members of the mouse family. All the more distressing therefore that after a couple of days of trying tempting lures of peanut butter and Belgian chocolate, we did succeed in bringing about the demise of one "Graham Mouse". The head of the mouse household. Still, I felt less sorry about it when last night, I found his widow, "Sarah Mouse", making a mad dash to safety under the cabinets when I came into the kitchen at midnight to adjust the central heating. Sarah Mouse does seem to be a rather less prolific pooper, though, since there is considerably less evidence of her continued presence. I'd like to think perhaps she has taken the hint and decamped, along with any of her attendant mouse brood, but that seems somewhat naively optimistic.

In other news, Botany has discovered the moon. We drove home late one night from a visit to Knox's mother; despite having gotten Botany into her jammies so she could sleep on the ride back, she stayed awake the entire trip staring in rapt fascination at the glowing orb in the sky. Since then she has become completely moonstruck; even more so when she found it was sometimes actually visible during the day. All she wants to do is to be lifted up at the living room window and to stand, for what seems like hours, shouting "Moon! Moon!", interspersed with sightings of Cat! Cat! and Woof!Woof! and Car!Car!  It's really extremely charming, although she's no longer a lightweight and my arms are starting to feel the strain. Such is her current moon obsession I may actually have to bend to convention and get that book.