Update on "going insane from lack of sleep"

Remember Stacy, who was going insane from lack of sleep? She wrote back in to update us:

"Reading that post now, I can hardly believe I typed that message to you.  I sounded so exhausted, so miserable! Which I was.  But the news today is much better.  My son, who is now coming up on 1 year, is sleeping through the night.  Ahhh!  I still get giddy just THINKING those words!

I took a hodgepodge of advice from you and your commenters. First, I spent a night in a hotel.  It took a long time to wind down in that hotel bed, and I almost rushed back home.  But once I fell asleep there I got 6 solid hours of blessed rest, and I felt like a million bucks the next day.  I don't know what I thought would happen in my absence, but my husband did fine with the baby.

That successful night convinced me that you were totally right about letting Daddy manage the sleep process.  I started nursing the baby before his bath, PJs, or any other element of the bedtime routine.  Then I would hand him off to Daddy and let them do their thing.  Within a week, they had a great routine down.  Removing the nursing from the bedtime routine entirely was huge, but alone it wasn't enough.

So my husband and I would set goals each night.  The first was a very modest goal - we wouldn't let the boy nurse unless two hours had passed.  Once that was accomplished, we kept inching the goalpost a little further away.  Three hour stretches, four hour stretches, and so on.  During this time, I've been sleeping in the guest bedroom with a white noise machine (finally, that thing is worth what we paid for it) and my husband has been in our bed with the boy.  I left my husband alone to do whatever he wanted when the boy woke up between allowed nursing sessions.  As part of my commitment to letting Daddy manage the process, I would not nurse the baby until my husband brought him in to me.  I had to let go and trust my husband to make the right decision, to discern when the baby truly needed to nurse.  It was hard at first, I was waking up frequently and fretting.  But nothing terrible happened, and in time I began sleeping - really, seriously sleeping - between nursing sessions.  Bliss!  We've never left him alone to cry, but he has done a lot of crying in there with Daddy during this process.  I'm not 100% thrilled about that, but he's obviously sleeping better for it, and he always wakes up sunny the next day.

A couple of weeks ago, we were able to get the boy down to one nursing at night, with 4 hours between.  Then, this week, we eliminated even that one nursing session.  We've been aiming for a 9-5 "no nursing" block. He's been giving us 9-6:30.  It's fantastic.

I know everything could change at a moment's notice, because kids will be kids.  But I'm now rested enough to deal with it.  And I now know that he CAN sleep through, so even if he regresses it won't feel like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. I also have to deal with easing myself back into our bed sometime, and I worry about that transition.  Overall, though, things are a thousand times better than they were when you answered my question.  I may not have had the gumption to go through with it without the support from you and the wonderful, sympathetic commenters who have Been There and Done That.  I look back and wonder what took me so long.

So thank you.  Thank you thank you thank you so much :)"

Hooray! You're welcome, Stacy, from me and I'm sure from all the commenters who posted on that question.

I think the moral of the story is that there is no magic cure. Nothing is going to work in three days to make your kid sleep through the night. But if you can get yourself 4-5 hours in a row, you'll have enough presence of mind to be able to formulate a plan that works for your particular family. Then just keep going. A lot of us have been there, and there's nothing sweeter than a long-sleeping baby.

Now, a question from me: My younger son is very clearly left-handed. Can anyone tell me what things a left-hander needs? All I know for sure is different scissors. He's 2 1/2, so is only starting with cutting, but really wants to do it, and our right-handed scissors just aren't doing it for him. I'd also love recommendations of where to buy things for left-handers (online would be great). Thanks!

Comments

[doris]

My four year old daughter is *profoundly* left-handed. We've known that she was left handed from a very early age... it was very clear.

Her inability to cut with regular scissors was a big deal for her and really affected her confidence. Since we've got the left-handed ones it's been great.

One thing that I've noticed with her is that she also instinctively wants to read/write from right to left, and turns things anti-clockwise. She is having trouble learning to sharpen pencils as she turns them the wrong way, and it's the same story with our hand beater. I'm going to get her a left-handed pencil sharpener this christmas... and I think she'll be chuffed.

I can't see a problem with buying left-handed items. And my daughter loves it... it makes her feel like her left-handedness makes her special :)

[sue]

Shoe-tying! It all makes sense now! I'm a leftie and have NEVER been able to properly tie my shoes. I still, as an adult, use the bunny ears method, and have taken to buying non-tying shoes for myself (though that's probably just mommyhood talking - I used to have tie shoes). I vividly remember my parents spending HOURS with me trying to teach me to tie them at all, and then to tie them properly, to no avail. I had no idea I wasn't the only one!

This is pretty exciting, for me (sadly, but I have a 9mo and hubby is out of town, so my brain is somewhat, er, addled)

That said, bunny ears is perfectly functional if your leftie can't figure out the "proper" way.

Now how am I going to teach my 3yo rightie to tie *her* shoes if I can't tie my own. I feel like I'm insituting a generational disability here. hmmmm....

[amy]

@hedra - thank you for giving me the word "mixed dominant." i think this is my daughter. either that or ambie.

@kathy - thank you for the preemie-lefty connection.

my daughter is a 3.5 yo 32-weeker, and she is a both-handed child. when she colors/paints, she holds a crayon/paint brush in each hand. if she wants fine motor control, it's her left hand. if she wants gross strength (like coloring in a large area dark), it's her right. when she brushes her teeth, she holds a toothbrush in each hand and can brush both sides simultaneously. when prompted, she can cross the midline; she just chooses not to most times because she has a dominant hand there already. they are equally dominant.

congrats to everyone getting sleep. this same 3.5 yo has cold virus-related insomnia, and it's killing me right now. i can't even bear to remember how hard it was when she was little.

[PBfish]

First, I'm so happy for Stacy. Whenever I hear of a baby sleeping through the night without cry-it-out it gives me hope. Of course, I'm so tired from my 1 year old's lack of sleep that I almost called the letter writer Stephanie...sigh.
About being left-handed, I'm a lefty and I would say that your lefty needs understanding. It may be different for a boy because they are given a little more lattitude than girls to be "messy", but I got a lot of flack in elementary school because I couldn't write neatly. Also, expect to see an almost permanent ring of ink or pencil on the side of his left hand. Even as an adult, I still get that on my hand. Thank god for computers!!!

[Jenny]

I agree with Cecily--I adore mousing right-handed as a lefty because I can write simultaneously. It probably would be a problem if I were trying to draw on the computer, though.

I quilt, and my cloth scissors are left-handed but my paper scissors are right-handed. There's a subtle but powerful difference between the two (hand the left-handed ones to a righty and see how they react!), and I recommend the lefty scissors if you need to cut precisely and/or often. Some things you can't get left-handed (like drills, as someone said above), but I'd say go for the things you can, especially the cheap ones.

Oh, and fencing left-handed is great fun when facing a right-handed opponent, once you've had a little practice. You both have the same advantages and disadvantages, but your opponent generally won't be able to recognize them because he/she's hardly ever been in the situation, whereas you as the lefty know exactly what to do. :)

[Lisa]

Charisse, the Goo Gone package (I had one on my desk; weird, no?) says:

"CLOTHING: Do not treat clothing while wearing. Apply directly to article with small repeated applications. Avoid over-wetting. Allow sufficient time for stain to begin breaking up. Blot with clean white cloth. Wash each treated garment separately. Launder using extra detergent."

Hope that helps.

[Lisa]

aha!

I'm mostly rightie but kick/ski/balance left. DH is truly mixed-dominant (writes right, hockey stick left, watch right, shoes bunny-ears, etc.). T. shows signs of the same... and now that I think about it, there were family stories about my mom being ambi for much of childhood until being "encouraged" out of it in school. So interesting to think about those threads...

[Sarah]

Congrats on the sleeping through the night! I don't know if I will get there myself. My daughter is now almost 9 months old, and not even close to sleeping through. She was getting up every three hours, for the longest time. Then when we transitioned her to her crib, she slowly went down to only 1 or 2 nightwakings. That lasted only a couple weeks...now she is back to getting up about 3 times a night...most nights. I wonder if this is the infamous 9 month regression, and if she will start sleeping better again in a few weeks?

[Kristin]

Hi there,

Here are my 2 or 3 cents as a lefty: He MIGHT want different scissors...or he might not. I actually found that the lefty scissors in school annoyed me - they were dull, for some reason - and to this day, I use regular right-handed scissors. Lefty notebooks were a nice novelty (spiral bound books are a bit of a pain - but no harder for a lefty than for a righty who flips hers over to use th other side of the page), but didn't really stick for me. I sometimes prefer to just use looseleaf and then keep things in a binder, but that gets bulky.

Computer mouse on the left? Nope. Can't do it: so many mice in the world are on the right side that that's just the way I've become comfortable. When I got my own computer for the first time, I set up the mouse on the left, in pure glee, only to rip the thing out in frustration about five minutes later, and put it back ont he right.

What might be tricky: learning to hold a pencil correctly, with the right fingers on tip and the right fingers beneath. Likewise, tying a bow. (I hate crochet books that say, "And if you're lefthanded, just reverse everything." Easier said than done: pictures really help.) Buttoning a button-down shirt might be tricky, I suppose. I had trouble learning to drive a standard shift car, and my mother wondered whether it had anything to do with my handedness, but I think it's just me. =/ I'm guessing that tying a tie might be a challenge, but I've seen enough righties have to look at a mirror and then turn around and stand facing the same way as the person demo-ing, that he might be on even territory.

I tend to put things away opposite from my family, which isn't really a problem unless it's the short paring knife in the little drawer, which I tend to put in with the handle facing the "wrong" way, so that the blade is not where the righties in the house expect it to be. And I do things backwards in other small, quirky areas - most people I know pick up a back pack in one hand, and swing it up to the opposite shoulder; I swing it onto the same shoulder. I prefer to have an outside corner at a restaurant table. I hook my hand more, and hunch down over my paper more, when I'm writing fast, or under stress (tests in college, for instance). Otherwise, I think I'm a paper-tilter.

The only time I really cared about having a "lefty desk" was in grad school, when I was a TA in a large lecture. The TAs sat in the back of the large auditorium, and the "desks" were really only these tiny little flip-up squares, attached to the right arm of the chair. So when they flipped up, they were too far away and too small for my left hand/arm, unless I turned halfway around in my seat. There WERE lefty ones, ont eh ends of rows, but not many, and not where the TAs sat. (Most regular lefty desks - and right desks - in elementary school were large enough that it didn't really matter much; in college, I preferred a lefty one beecause they'd gotten a bit smaller, but it still wasn't too bad.) I used to actually flip up the desk that belonged to the chair next to me, on my left, and just use that one; my fellow TAs would leave a space for what they good-naturedly dubbed "my condition."

What annoys me? The cord on my electric hand mixer. The cord on my iron. Those things take a little extra care, so I make sure I don't slice up the cord with the mixer when it flops onto the bowl....

In my experience, I've found that lefties often have a mix of habits and capabilities. Whether that's in the nature of being lefthanded (how the brain is wired) or a function of adaptation, I'm not sure. My dad is right handed, but bats lefty when he plays baseball. My doctor friend is lefthanded (he gets that very absorbed lefty look on his face when he writes), but holds a scalpel in his right hand, and does much of his fine motor work with his right hand. So, your little guy will probably develop his own set of preferences...but you can probably help by modelling things for him (tying the shoes, holding the pencil) when these things are hard for him to see and flip in his own mind's eye. Beyond that...it's kind of fun. =)

[marci]

just some data points - going back through archives the last few days!

i'm a lefty for writing, use a fork in the left and knife in the right (so no switching which might slow me down!), and righty for scissors. the things that are annoying are, strangely, small things like those little bread twist ties. they are always backwards for me when done by a righty, and backwards for a righty when i do them. oh, and those little makeup boxes, like eye shadow. you know, the ones you sort of 'twist' on tabs on the front to open them? yeah, i'll work like hell to try to open them then look closely and realize i'm twisting them shut. grump.

[New Balance Shoes]

The baby sucked at the bottle.

http://www.yaahshoes.com/

[new jordan]

I found that you look great today,Well done,I will support you still.