Lisa's Children's Corner: How Long Should You Leave Your Baby to Cry

INTRODUCTION

This site is a collection of writing and thoughts on children, being a parent, and education. Writing that has been and/or will be posted includes/will include (eventually) everything from researched articles, personal-experience pieces, and opinion. In time I plan to add links to reputable resources for information about parenting and children.

My hope is that the material here offers readers some useful information and/or food for thought.

It is my belief that sometimes parents focus so much on what child-care experts say, and on child-development books, they sometimes forget to trust their own judgment, common sense, and instincts.

GREAT RESOURCES FOR PARENTS

These are two of my favorite sites on child development and parenting. They offer sound information and reading by experts whose advice/information (in my opinion, but not just
in my opinion, of course) is reliable and trustworthy.

Zero to Three (dot org)
http://www.zerotothree.org/

Zero to Three offers booklets and information, as well as other resources. One thing that I find most worthwhile about this site is that it goes beyond the usual basics of developmental milestones and offers information about things like brain development and nurturing.

Ask Dr. Sears
http://www.askdrsears.com/

The Grocery Stores Days - My Trials and Tribulations

People often say that little boys are more active than little girls are. Well, I kind of hate to say this about my most precious, most beautiful, daughter; but she was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back when it came to grocery shopping.

Before my sweetie-girl was born I felt like the picture of organization, efficiency, and energy as I took my well spaced sons to the grocery store. My oldest son was just five when his little brother was born. My helpful and perfectly well behaved older son would walk along beside me. My littlest guy would ride in the shopping cart. Grocery shopping was as effortless as it would have been had I been shopping alone. That was the easy life I had with my two little sons. My littlest guy was going on three when his little sister was on the way. The fact my unborn daughter, unlike her biological brother (one son was adopted), moved non-stop should have been a tip-off of things to come.

Actually, all remained effortless while she was too young to stand up; but even at five months old my wiry little sweetie found ways to get out of the car-seat straps that I had thought were so secure. Even the smallest of infants gains weight, though. Even the most self-sufficient of three-year-olds still needs watching and help. Also, even the most well behaved of eight-year-old boys get more energetic. Over the months between my daughter's birth and the time she began standing up I could feel my self-image of being the picture of composure and organization at the grocery store began to erode. The month my daughter turned nine months old marked the beginning of a two-year period when grocery shopping was nothing but a horror show. My head never really exploded, but it often felt as if it would.

My nine-month-old daughter decided that since she could stand up that meant she need never, ever, sit down again. Other than the fact that she was a wiry and active little lady, I have no explanation for the fact that, no matter how hard I tried to fasten her car seat correctly, she happily "Houdini'd" her way out of it on absolutely every car ride. This meant that every car ride (and I mean EVERY car ride) involved my almost constantly looking in the rear-view mirror, trying to figure where I could stop the car, and listening to my two caring, conscientious, little sons giving me an urgent, play-by-play account of what "she's doing now". The word, "Whoa" was frequently used by my sons. "Now she's" and "Mum" were coming at me from all directions as well.

With my sons there had been the occasional backseat crisis, but those were rare enough that I can count them. There was one nosebleed and one bee sting, both of which resulted in panic from the backseat. There was the day my baby son reached into the paper grocery bags and was happily holding eight of the twelve eggs I'd just bought. (If you've ever seen one of those tv shows where someone has to carefully pull the correct wire to stop a bomb from going off, you'll get the idea of how I approached the eggs.) With my sons there had been many, many, bathroom emergencies. (One particularly urgent emergency involved a Gatorade bottle, a lot of crying by a child who didn't want to do such a thing, and an awfully good natured brother, as well as several parts of the car, being sprayed.) On the whole, throughout my 13 son-years crises in the car on the way to the store (or anywhere else for that matter) were rare. Crises and stress in the grocery store never existed for me.

First there was just me and my first son - piece of cake. He rode in the baby seat until he was too big, and then he walked. Then there were the years when it was "me and my little guys". The littlest guy rode in baby seat. The older one either walked quietly beside me or hitched a ride on the front of the carriage - still a piece of cake. When the grocery shopping trip turned into "me, two little sons, and a little daughter who, 1) never sat down and 2) needed constant guarding because of that; it started to feel as if I was shopping a lot more than I really was. Maybe it was because I always had to keep a hand on my daughter's hand, or maybe it was because one wild baby and two always-in-panic-mode, little boys in the backseat seemed like a bigger crowd than it really was. I started to see myself and them as "conjoined quadruplets". The shopping cart usually had one standing baby in the baby seat, one small boy in the main part of the cart, and (because I still wanted to keep track of my oldest son) one eight-year-old riding the front of the carriage. There was a kind of clowns-in-a-little-car kind of feel to it. That was fine, though. There was something cozy about the whole thing. The problem was that, besides my needing to always keep my hand on my standing baby, there was little room for groceries in the cart.

When toddlers turn to preschoolers and first-graders turn into third-graders, more eating starts to go on. That means more food, which means more groceries. Active eight-year-olds who don't want to ride the front of the cart can have trouble not drifting off in some direction. If they don't drift off somewhere down aisle they're still little enough to be in people's way. They can read, so stopping to read cereal boxes, cat food packages, and super-hero fruit-bites boxes is common. When they do hop on the carriage they're heavier to push.

Little preschool boys start to get legs that are too long to ride in the cart. They, too, weigh more (which means the cart is more likely to tip). Women's hands aren't necessarily strong enough to prevent a cart-load of children from tipping; so the choice is either to remain nervous about it all and keep on pushing or else let the four-year-old walk. While four-year-olds don't usually read packages, they don't just drift off somewhere else in the aisle. They out-and-out stop and sit down because they're tired.

So, with my ever-standing baby daughter doing her own version of the scene from the movie, Titanic, where Jack yells out that he's kind of the world; and with my increasingly long-legged younger son and increasingly heavy elder son (and with all of them being given a piece of cheese for ride), I tossed lightweight items in on top of my precious little son, never taking my eyes or hand off his sister. I was constantly talking with my eight-year-old (who seemed to choose the grocery store to bring up important discussions).

Exhausted, I would bring home whatever I'd managed to be able to pick up. Later that evening, once they were in bed, I'd leave them with their father. By the time I got to shop alone there would be fifteen minutes left before closing - but, oh, the relaxation of sonic-speed running through the store with an unoccupied shopping cart, two free hands, and no talking.

They're all grown now, and yet I can recall that absolutely exhausted and frazzled feeling as if it were this afternoon. I've heard that the brain makes us forget how bad some things feel, so I can only assume that my recalling the exhaustion so well must mean it was "a good kind of exhaustion".

I Look Back and Laugh - Sort Of

A Funny, But Embarrassing, Parent Story

My daughter attended a preschool program that was a pilot program. The aim was to integrate children who had tested in the top 25% on developmental skills with Special Needs preschoolers to study benefits to the children.

Being a pilot program, the teachers and administrators paid close attention to what was going on.

One evening my daughter had had her bath and was ready for bed. Since she was ready for bed I didn't think anything about the fact that she was playing for a while longer. What I didn't realize is that she had made a trip downstairs to see our dog. He was a beautiful Collie, so his long hair often meant lots of yard dirt being brought into the hall downstairs. On muddy days it was, of course, worse. It had been one of those muddy days on that evening when my extremely well-cared-for four-year-old went downstairs in her bare feet to say "good night" to the dog. She then scooted up to her room and into her bed, and I went to say my usual, "good night".

The next day I laid out her clothes and socks for her, and she got dressed and went to preschool.

When she came home she told me that (for some reason) all the children had taken off their shoes and socks. Then - to my horror - she told me that the teacher saw that she had dirty feet and commented on it! I, of course, had no idea that she had dirty feet because, as far as I had known, she had had a bath and gone to bed fairly soon after.

Nobody from the school said a word to me about it, so the matter was left unexplained to the teacher who had spotted the dirty tootsies. Although if I'd had the chance to explain I would have, it happened that over the following few days there wasn't really a convenient time to catch the teacher. They were often busy with the Special Needs students and kind of left the non-Special-Needs mothers on their own. As a result, time passed and I guess I forgot to mention my horror at the dog-dirt-tootsies incident.

My daughter is 22 years old now, but somewhere out there in teacher-land is a teacher who, at least at one time, must have believed I was a negligent and horrible mother!

PL, if you're out there and reading this: I gave her a bath. Honest! I just didn't know she went near the downstairs door in her bare feet! Honest! Yes, I was going to sweep up the dried mud the dog brought in, but I always did my house chores either after the children went to bed or while they were in school. Honest! Honest!

Lisa's Children's Corner

INTRODUCTION

Friday, January 21, 2011

How Long Should You Leave Your Baby to Cry

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