(no subject)
Apr. 9th, 2007 09:54 pmEaster went very well this year. I grew up in a family that always was pretty low-key when it came to the secular aspects of Easter. We dyed eggs, and then my brother and I would go hide them for each other to find (one year I was particularly smug about the great hiding place I had found: in the dryer. And it was. Nobody found the egg, which was rather unfortunate when my mother came along with a load of laundry). We would get a basket on Easter morning with jelly beans, and occasionally a little bit of chocolate. I vividly remember the year we got robin's eggs (the chocolate malt balls).
For K's first Easter where she was old enough to enjoy it, I decided no one could pay me enough to let a 21-month-old anywhere near dye, so we didn't dye eggs. If she were older, I would have made an effort to provide some variety in the candy in her Easter basket, since I always felt that the ones we got were just a tad Spartan. But she can't have chocolate because of the milk, and I didn't want her to have much candy anyway. So I bought some plastic eggs and put one jelly bean in each of them. It had two beneficial effects. 1, she had a great time opening eggs, which I knew she would because I bought her some a few weeks ago as a good-behavior bribe at the fabric store. I'm not normally in the habit of buying her everything she takes a shine to in the store, since that's a great way to empty my wallet on things that she will happily throw away when the next shiny thing comes along, but these cost 99 cents, and she's been taking them apart and putting them back together for weeks now, which has given us far more than 99 cents worth of entertainment. 2, it prevented her from grabbing all of the candy in the basket and cramming it in her mouth at once. Instead, it took her nearly all of yesterday to find and eat all 10 or so jelly beans, which prevented any manic sugar-high episodes.
And then we went to church, where the service had all of the appropriate pomp and circumstance even if the weather hadn't gotten the message that it's spring now (apparently it was snowing at the sunrise service). There was an easter egg hunt after the service, so K got the opportunity to collect more candy-filled plastic eggs, and I got the opportunity to open them all up behind her back and confiscate the chocolate. Ah well. Hopefully she'll have outgrown her dairy allergy by next year and we can let her have some chocolate. And meanwhile,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
longstrider and I find the chocolate delicious.
*****
I am extraordinarily tired today. K has a cold and didn't eat enough dinner last night, so between the congestion and wanting more food, she had me up until 4am last night. To make life even more pleasant, I'm getting the cold too. This is what I get for taking her out in public to mix with all of those little plague rats at story time. That train table is probably a festering cesspool of germs hiding behind Thomas the Tank Engine's rather suspicious smile.
There are several reasons I don't consider our method of putting K to sleep - take her through a bedtime ritual of books and cuddling, then put her in her crib and leave her to fuss herself to sleep for about five minutes, going back in if she sounds distressed or goes on too long (twenty minutes) - to be crying it out. For one thing, the idea that we're letting her cry implies that we have any control over it. She cries herself to sleep no matter what we might do. Removing ourselves from the room so we don't distract her is in fact the method of putting her to sleep that produces the least amount of crying. Crying it out is meant to be a method of teaching a baby/toddler to go to sleep on their own, whereas what we're doing is responding to our child's needs. We're following her cues, not trying to impose our will on her.
But mostly, I don't think we're crying it out because if it's supposed to get your baby to sleep through the night, we're clearly doing it wrong. Do you know when K started reliably sleeping through the night without needing a middle of the night feeding? Last month. Before then, she had gone through spurts of sleeping through, but never more than three or four days. But about a month ago, she started sleeping through pretty much every night (occasionally she would wake up hungry at about 6 and would go back to sleep if we gave her milk, but that's sleeping long enough that it's pretty much sleeping through), and it's continued until the past two nights, when she once again woke up and needed food in the middle of the night. I'm fervently hoping that once her cold is better, she'll start eating better during the day and not get hungry at night. Because really, nearly two is old enough to be able to go through the night without eating and I'm afraid having to get up again regularly might kill me (and yes, we give her a snack right before bed. I think this is another reflux thing, where she wants to eat in small amounts frequently so her stomach is never empty but never too full). Only a month of getting to sleep all night, and I've already gone soft.
For K's first Easter where she was old enough to enjoy it, I decided no one could pay me enough to let a 21-month-old anywhere near dye, so we didn't dye eggs. If she were older, I would have made an effort to provide some variety in the candy in her Easter basket, since I always felt that the ones we got were just a tad Spartan. But she can't have chocolate because of the milk, and I didn't want her to have much candy anyway. So I bought some plastic eggs and put one jelly bean in each of them. It had two beneficial effects. 1, she had a great time opening eggs, which I knew she would because I bought her some a few weeks ago as a good-behavior bribe at the fabric store. I'm not normally in the habit of buying her everything she takes a shine to in the store, since that's a great way to empty my wallet on things that she will happily throw away when the next shiny thing comes along, but these cost 99 cents, and she's been taking them apart and putting them back together for weeks now, which has given us far more than 99 cents worth of entertainment. 2, it prevented her from grabbing all of the candy in the basket and cramming it in her mouth at once. Instead, it took her nearly all of yesterday to find and eat all 10 or so jelly beans, which prevented any manic sugar-high episodes.
And then we went to church, where the service had all of the appropriate pomp and circumstance even if the weather hadn't gotten the message that it's spring now (apparently it was snowing at the sunrise service). There was an easter egg hunt after the service, so K got the opportunity to collect more candy-filled plastic eggs, and I got the opportunity to open them all up behind her back and confiscate the chocolate. Ah well. Hopefully she'll have outgrown her dairy allergy by next year and we can let her have some chocolate. And meanwhile,
longstrider and I find the chocolate delicious.*****
I am extraordinarily tired today. K has a cold and didn't eat enough dinner last night, so between the congestion and wanting more food, she had me up until 4am last night. To make life even more pleasant, I'm getting the cold too. This is what I get for taking her out in public to mix with all of those little plague rats at story time. That train table is probably a festering cesspool of germs hiding behind Thomas the Tank Engine's rather suspicious smile.
There are several reasons I don't consider our method of putting K to sleep - take her through a bedtime ritual of books and cuddling, then put her in her crib and leave her to fuss herself to sleep for about five minutes, going back in if she sounds distressed or goes on too long (twenty minutes) - to be crying it out. For one thing, the idea that we're letting her cry implies that we have any control over it. She cries herself to sleep no matter what we might do. Removing ourselves from the room so we don't distract her is in fact the method of putting her to sleep that produces the least amount of crying. Crying it out is meant to be a method of teaching a baby/toddler to go to sleep on their own, whereas what we're doing is responding to our child's needs. We're following her cues, not trying to impose our will on her.
But mostly, I don't think we're crying it out because if it's supposed to get your baby to sleep through the night, we're clearly doing it wrong. Do you know when K started reliably sleeping through the night without needing a middle of the night feeding? Last month. Before then, she had gone through spurts of sleeping through, but never more than three or four days. But about a month ago, she started sleeping through pretty much every night (occasionally she would wake up hungry at about 6 and would go back to sleep if we gave her milk, but that's sleeping long enough that it's pretty much sleeping through), and it's continued until the past two nights, when she once again woke up and needed food in the middle of the night. I'm fervently hoping that once her cold is better, she'll start eating better during the day and not get hungry at night. Because really, nearly two is old enough to be able to go through the night without eating and I'm afraid having to get up again regularly might kill me (and yes, we give her a snack right before bed. I think this is another reflux thing, where she wants to eat in small amounts frequently so her stomach is never empty but never too full). Only a month of getting to sleep all night, and I've already gone soft.
