Ask Moxie

Q&A: apartment living with a baby

Laura writes:

"I love your site and check it daily; you are a guru to me, as you are to many!

I wonder if you have advice to offer about living in small spaces with a baby. Ours is four months old; we live in San Francisco. Our apartment is tiny, and his crib is in our room. We're about to start sleep-training,
and wonder if it's possible to do in a small apartment, with neighbors close by, but we're desperate for more sleep.

I'm also suffering a lot of guilt over not being able to provide a separate room for my child (the apartment is so small that we can't even partition a room with screens, or move our bed into a living room). We
can't afford to move, and Bay Area home prices are so high that we'll never be able to purchase a home. Yet most of my friends have nurseries for their babies, and almost every book I read assumes that the reader has a separate room for the baby. I feel very guilty as a result: will he resent us someday? will he be okay if he doesn't have his own room? Any words of wisdom?"

Thanks. I actually prefer charismatic leader, but guru will do just fine*.

First off, do not sleep train until your son is past the four-month-sleep regression. That regression sucks so much anyway that adding sleep training into it (which is going to suck 40 times more than it normally would if you do it in the middle of a sleep regression) will make you all long for the sweet release of hospitalization. So hold on 'til he's past the 19-week spurt to train, at which point you may not need to train anyway. (The irony--it's the regression that makes you want to train him, but the regression that makes training largely futile. Then once it's no longer futile, he'll sleep better on his own.)

Did we mention that four months sucks in general?

But on to the space question. I think you have two choices: Stay where you are, or move someplace where you can have more room. Either way you gain something, and either way you give something up.

Honestly, I don't think there's any way to know whether he'll resent you for it until he's grown up. I suspect that how he feels about how he grew up will have more to do with his relationship to you and your husband than to the specifics of how much space you had.

I know adults who adored growing up in NYC. (FWIW, the NYC one-bedroom long-term solution seems to be to move the kid into the bedroom and have the parents sleep on a Murphy bed or pullout in the living room.) They feel like having all the of the cool stuff in the city was the best way to grow up, and feel sorry for kids who grew up with more space but less stimulation. The two women I know who grew up in NYC and hated it also had major family issues, so it doesn't surprise me that they have bad feeling about their growing-up years.

I know adults who adored growing up in the suburbs, or small towns, and the country. Big yards and forts and running around the neighborhood. But you know what they talk about when they talk about the way they grew up? What they did with their families and friends. It's the relationships that made their childhoods happy, and those relationships made the settings good for them.

So I think your decision to stay or go is going to have to be informed by other things, like what makes you feel comfortable (Would living in a crowded space stress you out? Would living outside a city enervate you?), whether you want to live closer or farther from your families, and whether you want to have more children or not. (From my observation, being an only is much more "normal" in cities than in other areas where most families have 2+ kids.)

If you're happy with yourselves and your marriage and your family and your son, he'll be fine growing up wherever you land.

Data points, people?

* I'm kidding, obviously. I'm so boringly normal. I have the same problems you guys do, and many others I hope you never experience. At this point writing the blog is just what I do, and I wish I had time to do more for you guys.

60-Day Challenge Fourth Week in Review

Q&A: 9-month-old won't take bottle from parents anymore

So what are the odds that I'd get two eerily similar questions in one week about something I'd never heard before? I'm going to post them both together (because there are slight variations), but I'm wondering if this is something that's actually common but no one talks about.

Cybele writes:

"Moxie, I’m hoping you and your readers can weigh in and/or commiserate with my situation. I’m a full-time WOHM; my 9 month old son spends 40 – 45 hours a week with his nanny. I work partly out of financial necessity, but also because I worked hard to get where I am in my career and it means at lot to me. Despite this, I feel terribly conflicted about it, and lately even more so due to this issue with his feeding.

I went back to work at 14 weeks, and my son has always taken a bottle from the nanny with no problem. Around 8 months my supply plummeted, and I decided that I’d relieve myself of the misery of 4x/day pumping, we’d give formula during the day and I’d just breastfeed morning and night.

Problem is, the Munchkin has long refused to take a bottle from me (not unusual, I know) - or dad – or grandma - or anyone else besides his nanny. I figured this would change once I stopped pumping. Nope! Now he’s clearly hungry and thirsty on the weekends, and cries, and yet refuses the bottle no matter how many times it’s offered and no matter who is doing the offering. I’ve tried leaving the room, leaving the apartment for a couple of hours…it makes no difference. Then come Monday morning, he’ll sit on the nanny’s lap – even if I’m sitting right next to them – and happily suck down a huge bottle, while the nanny says: “See? See? No problem for me!”

Dad and I have somewhat better luck with solids (especially plain yogurt, his favorite food), but again, he sometimes refuses to eat, or to eat enough. Never a problem for the nanny.

I’m not worried that he’ll starve on the weekends (he’s a healthy 21 lbs), but I do worry that he gets dehydrated. He can’t manage a sippy cup very well yet; he thinks it’s fun to play with but can only manage to get down a sip or two. Plus he’s so miserable all weekend long, my precious time with my darling baby. But mostly I just feel like a big failure as a mother. It’s created a bad dynamic with my nanny, who kind of lords it over me. And I find myself asking her to stay late even on days when I get home early to give him a feeding or a bottle, which feels so humiliating (I can’t even feed my own kid!).

So the question is: what do I do? I don’t think there’s enough fenugreek in the world to resurrect my breastmilk supply at this point. Should I stop nursing altogether and see if that helps? Or should I take, say, a week of vacation sans nanny and let him cry for as many days as it takes to convince him that he has to take food from mom or dad? Or fire my nanny? Quit my job?

Has anyone else had a problem like this? My ped just said “gee, most breastfed babies are willing to take bottles from their father.”

Thanks. I know this too shall pass, but it’s driving me a little nuts right now."

How helpful of your pediatrician. Wanker.

This is a strange little ball of suck, isn't it? It's managed to hit almost every single issue that can make a mother feel like utter crap: feeding problems, baby showing more affection for someone else, nanny vs. mommy stuff, guilt about having a nanny/working in the first place, milk supply issues, and the baby being 9 months old. The only things that could make this worse are if you had mastitis, were about to defend your dissertation, and/or just discovered that your husband was addicted to either porn or online gambling.

Before I print the other post and get to the actual feeding issue, let's talk about the emotional component with the babysitter. I think I hate your nanny for lording it over you. I wonder what kind of validation she gets from that. She has to know how much it hurts you that he spends more time with her than with you already, so why would she be purposely making you feel worse about the dynamic? I think you need to have a talk with her and try to figure out what her problem with you is. (I hate to say it, but I've heard enough babysitters talking at the playground about how the mothers they work for "don't care" and are "always at work," and how they love the kids more than the mothers do. Why do women hurt each other so much???) I'm not going to say that you should fire her over this, but she's a big part of the problem at this point, and it's worth reevaluating the relationship once the dust settles on this bottle problem.

Now here's the email from Jenny, and then let's see if we can figure out what's up:

"My 10 ½ month old son has a drinking problem… According to the pediatrician, he should still be getting about 20-24 ounces of formula a day. This is not a problem on the days he goes to the sitter’s house (Tues-Thurs). For her, he’ll drink whatever she offers him. However, on days he’s with me, he acts like he’d rather do anything else in the world besides drink a bottle (or sippy cup, but more on that in a second). He doesn’t cry, he just refuses to drink more than an ounce or two. He’ll push the bottle away, bite on the nipple or just turn his head. He’d much rather be on the floor playing or reading a book with me or anything else. I’ve found that the only time I can get him to drink 5 or 6 ounces at once is to do it as he’s going down for his naps or at bedtime. So, we end up winding down for each nap with a bottle, just to make sure he gets enough to drink. I’m wondering if he’s associating the bottle with sleepy time, and if I try to give it to him when he’s awake, he thinks I’m trying to get him to take a nap and he doesn’t want to…?

I’ve tried to start getting him used to the sippy cup as well, but that’s not working so well either. He’s been chewing on and playing with the cup for a couple months, and I’ve put mostly water with a splash of juice, in case he decides to actually drink some. Last week, I decided to put formula in it, hold him like it was time for a bottle, and see what he did. He drank a couple ounces; I was excited and thought we were on our way to transitioning to the cup (in time for the milk transition in a few weeks). However, the next time (and each time thereafter), he started doing the same thing as he did with the bottle. If I was holding him and trying to get him to drink from the cup, he wasn’t interested at all. I asked the sitter to see if she could get him to try and drink from the cup, and of course she had total success. He’ll drink whatever she offers him in his sippy.

People say “he’ll drink when he’s thirsty and eat when he’s hungry,” but I’m not so sure. (These are the same people that say he’ll sleep when he’s tired, which we all know doesn’t happen with feisty babies.) I don’t understand why he acts so different for me than he does for the sitter. In the future, I’m worried that once we’re off the bottle, he won’t drink much of anything all day. For now, though, I’m just concerned that he’s not getting enough to drink if he’s home with me. Any suggestions??"

So I'm baffled by this, and don't have any solid solutions, so let me just say what comes to mind and see if that helps anyone else figure out what's going on.

This kind of reminds me of a nursing strike, which also can happen around the ages of 9-12 months, when a kid just refuses to nurse for days. Obviously the details are different, but the idea that the child just suddenly stops wanting to take milk from the mother seems like some kind of similar emotional process.

This is also a time when kids are about to head into separation anxiety, so I'm wondering if this is some kind of separation before the separation anxiety hits?

I've got nothing else right now, because a big part of me suspects that I'm going to post this and get a bunch of "me, too!" comments and we'll have discovered some unspoken phenomenon.

Int he meantime, though, we have to figure out how to get some liquids into Cybele's son, for sure, and help solve Jenny's drinking problem.

What do you have for Cybele and Jenny?

One Year to an Organized Life

Has anyone used the book One Year To a Organized Life by Regina Leeds? It sound like it could work, under the "only bite off a little at a time" principle. But I hate to get sucked in if it's just the same stuff everyone already knows. ("Put all your bills in one central place...")

60-Day Challenge Check-In Day 28

Sleep posts

You know what I think is funny about the comments on sleep posts here?

That different posts totally bring out commenters with different situations. Some posts draw tons of "try co-sleeping!" comments. Some draw "read Pantley!" comments. Some draw "read Ferber!" comments. Some draw "do CIO!" comments.

Which just goes to show you (or me, at least), that there is no one right answer for everyone. I've been fumbling toward trying to find some classification system so that we could make some kind of checklist and you could observe different aspects of your kid and then know which "method" (can you really call anything that makes you cry at 3 am a method?). Wouldn't that be awesome? Observe and answer these 50 questions about your kid, and then you'll know exactly how to proceed. (The "tension increaser" vs. "tension decreaser" observation was the first step in my plan for a taxonomy of sleep personalities and issues.)

Unfortunately, all we have to go on now is trying to figure out exactly what the problem is (going to sleep initially? staying asleep? nursing at night? waking early? all of the above?) and then trying different things to fix it until you either find something that works or pack the kid off to boarding school.

Remember that there are tons of things to try before you resort to doing something that isn't in your comfort zone (I'd put co-sleeping and true CIO--letting the child cry alone until s/he falls asleep no matter how long it takes--in those category of things that people might not be comfortable with). The Ferber method (not that he made it up, of course, but no one's great-great-great-great-great-great grandma wrote a book about it) of allowing the baby to cry for short chunks of time and then going in to check and make contact is one of them. In fact, the surefire way to tell if your baby is a tension decreaser who needs to cry some to fall asleep is to walk out and let the baby cry for 5-10 minutes and see what happens. That sounds a lot like Ferber to me. (If the baby starts to lose steam and quiet down, you've got a tension decreaser.)

If you've got the baby in the same room with one of you, try switching who the baby's with. A baby who nurses all night on mom might sleep the whole night through with dad. If the baby's in the same room, try switching the baby to a different room. Or vice versa.

In other words, if the pattern is bad, figure out exactly what part is bad, and try changing the structure of it. Sometimes just small changes will break the pattern.

The other thing that's really important to know is that no matter what you do, it's not going to stick. If you sleep train, you'll have to do it again, after sleep regressions and big teething spurts. If you co-sleep, you'll have to re-evaluate every time your kid goes through some developmental spurt and starts kicking you in the kidneys all night. So don't feel too smug or too desperate, because there's always someone better off and worse off than you are right now.

Anyone want to post something that either helped or hurt your kid's sleep that surprised you?

I'll go first.

Son #1: Went through a phase around the age of 2 in which he'd go to sleep just fine, but would then wake up screaming an hour later. It took a few weeks, but eventually we figured out that he was having heartburn/indigestion from eating tomato products at dinner! We put the kibosh on all tomatoes after 3 pm, and he stopped waking that first night.

Son #2: Wanted to nurse all night long with me. I went to sleep out on the couch and left him sleeping with his dad and he slept the whole night through. Occam's Razor in action: if I was there, he'd nurse; if I was gone, he wouldn't.

Now you go.

60-Day Challenge Check-In Day 27

60-Day Challenge Check-In Day 26

He is risen!

Archivist Alison on Jumping Monkeys

And we knew her way back when...

Archivist Alison talks about archiving family memories with Megan Morrone on Episode 38 of the Jumping Monkeys podcast. Her part starts at 22:50 and ends at 47:00.

She sounds to me exactly the way she writes--smart, funny, and engaged!

60-Day Challenge Check-In Day 25