The title of this post may seem like a no brainer, but it’s good to state the obvious once in a while. Many people that know us are under the impression that we have a super awesome baby. While that may be true 95% of the time, they generally aren’t around for that 5% where she is a hellion child. We try to plan it that way. It is by no mean feat that we are able to pull this off. There is a ton of timing involved because all it takes is one missed nap to turn our awesome baby into a demonchilde. So when we are sitting around the table late at night planning out the nitty gritty details of the Great Baby Con, we have to factor in every nuance of her schedule.
One example of this is my Fridays. Since I work from home I come in once a week on Friday to participate in our weekly artist meeting. It gives me a chance to get some office time in as well as pawn Amelia off on Dustin for a few hours. Not to mention hang out with my coworkers whom I do miss on occasion. Now with this in mind I make sure that Amelia takes her morning nap and gets at least 3-4 hours sleep. She’s generally up by 11:30am -12pm. We go through the same routine of a diaper change, putting on her clothes for the day while chasing her around her crib to the sound of many delightful giggles and squeals, and finally sitting in the kitchen and eating lunch together. All of these things serve as an important routine building block for her. It’s familiar and she knows what to expect. So while she’s eating her lunch I’m making sure to make extra bottles of milk for the day and am picking out the toys she’s been playing with the most lately. I’ve also got a stash of Ritz crackers and Animal Crackers in the diaper bag now that she has teeth. We complete the bag with a blanket or her snuggie for taking her naps with and she’s pretty much set to go anywhere.
This is the easy part when a schedule has already been put into place and followed. It helps with making her an easy going child. Either that or we are one hell of a set of awesome parents. But that’s not to say that the road to figuring out Amelia’s routine or even setting it up has been easy. For example, trying to get her to sleep in her crib for her daytime naps was a nightmare. For many months we had her take her morning nap out in the living room in her swing chair. She loved it and I dare say it was easy for me to put her in it and set the swing in motion and let her fall asleep. But we had begun to notice a pattern. While this would work perfectly during the week as I would be in the computer room working and there would be no noise in the living room to wake her up, it wasn’t the same on the weekends. Dustin and I like to get our gaming on, so playing video games in the living room while Amelia took her nap seemed like a good idea at the time. But because the living room was neither quiet nor unoccupied she’d only take an hour nap and would be up the rest of the day. It was frustrating because I knew she needed more than what she was getting, but try as we might we couldn’t get her to go back to sleep. She was just so enamored that her father was home that she didn’t want to miss a thing. We had tried a couple of times to put her in her crib to sleep, but she was so used to the swing chair that she just cried for ever. So being the tougher one, I told Dustin that was I going to try and do it during the week too so that she would get used to sleeping in her crib whenever it was nap time. It took me about a week and a half, but she now sleeps in her crib for her morning naps. Sometimes even for her afternoon naps as well. Was it easy? Heck no! She cried as soon as I would put her down instantly waking up no matter how passed out she was. So I would have to sooth her and try to get her to go back to sleep then sneakily put her back in the crib. Some days I just let her cry. It made me feel bad, but I also had a work load to balance out. Luckily for us she’s a quick learner and gave in to the new nap atmosphere. The benefits we get out of having a few hours to ourselves in the morning, priceless.
It’s the small victories like that, that enable other people to enjoy a happy interactive kid that doesn’t scream all the time. She hasn’t been perfect all the time, however, and being a parent you can only do so much. Case in point we had gone to a surprise birthday party and yelled out surprise right as our friend came into the room. It was all fun and games until we realized we’d startled the crap out of our daughter as she broke out into tears. But we were prepared! We had her favorite snuggie with us and a bottle and lots of comforting words. Within 5 minutes she was back on track and climbing the couch like the spider monkey she is. It makes me wonder though. You see those children in the grocery store throwing crazy tantrums while their parents just ignore them or try to soothe them by giving in to whatever whim has possessed them. How do you get to that stage? I know Amelia’s still young, but we have already experienced her mini tantrums at home. Whether it’s a sudden melt down because we aren’t picking her up or because she’s fighting sleep, it still doesn’t change the fact that we are the parents. We are responsible for what our daughter interprets as right and wrong, what’s acceptable and what’s not. When she’s screaming about not being picked up, we tell her she’s being silly and then start playing with her toys to get her interested in them. Most of the time it’ll work and she’ll stop crying. Fighting sleep is the easy one, the snuggie is our secret weapon and even though she’s just about outgrown the need to be swaddled we do find that sometimes we have to hold her still to make her go to sleep. In both cases we don’t give in to the tantrums.
I know this is all well and good for now and that as she grows her attitude will change as well. But isn’t that our job as parents to adapt and continually figure out what methods work without compromising your own sanity? 9 month olds aren’t very complex in their needs and I’m sure that when the teenage years roll around it’ll be terrifyingly hard to figure out if she’s tired from school work, stressed out over friends, or a plethora of other factors. But I’d like to think that we’re on the right track as parents. Firm yet still there for her. If we build on that now, shouldn’t that help mold how she’ll develop over the course of her lifetime? I hope so.