Tue 29 May 2007
morning has broken
Posted by bon under mama-baby stuff, milestone stuff
[30] Comments
…why doesn’t somebody fix it?
i know. i’m hilarious.
but all my life, i’ve suspected that morning was a cruel plot dreamed up by sadists in order to rob me of the pleasure of my warm, sleepy nest…no other purpose for it than that. one of the reasons i think i hesitated about parenthood until i passed thirty was that i couldn’t imagine consistently getting up before nine am…or better, noon. the fact that i worked an erratic schedule (read: slept my lazy ass in half the time) did little to assure me that i would actually survive without fairly regular morning naps.
and thus far, i have…i have! (takes bow). but i have a dirty little secret, internet. i’ve been cheating. i haven’t really been doing much of the morning parenting.
in the early days, when O had what-might-as-well-have-been-colic and alternately screamed and nursed through the nights, Dave & i settled into a routine. i got up at night, and he got up in the morning. fair trade, worked for both of us, kept me moderately sane and unembittered at three am, because i knew that come seven, no matter what, i could go back to bed until Dave went to work. praise Jeebus.
and we just kept doing that. even though Oscar has actually been sleeping through the night pretty consistently for…oh…about seven months now. i kinda thought maybe Dave hadn’t noticed. :)
apparently he had. he was just biding his time.
most mornings, if Oscar peeps at god-forsaken hours, (which is anything before six-thirty, in my current estimation of time) i’m the one who pops up and goes to him and tries to soothe him and usually fails – because my child is a Morning Person, oh cruel fates – and then eventually lifts him from the crib. but we don’t stay up. we go to the big bed, curl up against the sleeping lump that is daddy, and nurse. and snuggle a bit, and are purred on by the cat, and doze. or i doze, which is really what i’m looking for from a morning, after all. Oscar flails and sucks and plays with my bracelet and occasionally turns around and gives a squeak of delight about the fact that the cat is perched nearly atop his head, and we all get about twenty minutes of this, and i love it. love it. then if it’s seven o’clock already and a work day, daddy gets up with Oscar and mommy goes back to sleep for another forty-five minutes or an hour.
i am a spoiled, spoiled woman.
and it’s all about to change. because now that we’re back from The Big Trip and O has settled into his twice-weekly days at the sitters and daddy’s not doing anymore business trips for awhile and we’re still likely a good few weeks from me starting any kind of full-time job thingy, it seems like a reasonable time to wean, finally. no other major adjustments going on this week, and doing it now’ll give us a chance to get into a bit of a routine in terms of the New Morning Order before i actually go out to work…it makes sense. i know it makes sense.
but (cue violins)….i don’ waaaannaaaaa!!!!! (end violins).
i never really believed that O and i would make it past a few months breastfeeding, once we started juggling bottles and formula in the mix when he was eight weeks old. a few times, i was sure we were done. yet, on we’ve trucked, haphazardly. for months now, our nursing has been only a first-thing-in-the-morning and last-thing-at-night operation, a bit of a cuddle to open and close the day. it was supposed to miraculously quiet him on our flight to Europe…which definitely did NOT happen…but the prospect of The Big Trip was what kept me nursing to his one-year birthday, nonetheless. at least ostensibly. in truth, i couldn’t really figure out what we’d do in the mornings if i stopped. i mean, this child often wakes somewhere in the vicinity of six am. was i supposed to just…gasp…GET UP?!?
surely you jest.
but when i broached this conversation with the cold-hearted bastard Oscar’s patient, loving father last evening, he suggested that getting up was, indeed, what i really ought to consider doing. what we actually ought to consider doing. both of us, out of bed. on the same morning. downstairs with Oscar. drinking coffee and presumably conversing, around about the time we used to go to bed. i looked at him blankly. he apparently wasn’t kidding. he’s even looking forward to this. Dave has, it seems, been hiding a secret fondness for mornings from me, all these years, out of respect for my aversion to them. he was just waiting ’til i was ready to wean to break it to me.
now i know who to blame for Oscar’s early rising.
so this is it, internet. my last day nursing my boy who is no longer a baby. my last day as a lie-abed slag. my last day before the New Morning Order turns me into one of those people who make snide comments about other people sleeping in. i am awash in nervousness, and a little sliver of sentimentality about all my years spent spurning the morning…this will, if it actually works, be a significant identity change for someone who’s been hibernatory all her life. it’s scary, to commit to mornings. it’s scary, to wean this little boy. i’m grateful to have been able to hold on as long as i have, to my bed, to nursing O, to the morning pile of two adults and baby and cat in a bed, all purring dozily. i’m going to miss that nest, that snuggling.
tell me there are better things to come. tell me Oscar & i will still find places in our days for cuddling, even though he’s like a bouncing ball whenever he’s not eating. tell me i can sleep in again when he’s twelve. please. Dave needs backup on this plan, methinks.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:20 am
Ah, the early waking. Bub is an early riser (like, 5:55 lately), and it really kills me. It’s the biggest adjustment – before baby I was happiest when the earliest wake-up in a given week was 8:30. The hardest part for me is just writing off the chance of a productive evening – I can’t work in the evenings anymore, I’m just too tired. But that has been freeing as well – guilt-free TV for me!
May 29th, 2007 at 12:29 am
ME TOO! God I hate getting up in the morning. But I do it, because Pynchon will let me go back to sleep for a couple of hours if I just do the very first shift of the morning on the weekend. So I do. I hate hate hate getting up. You and me and Bubandpie are all academics: the draw of that is that you can sleep in, dammit!
Sigh. I’m sorry for you, man, I really am. I’m living your life.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Oh…um…I seem to have stumbled upon a meeting of the LAA (Lazy Asses Anonymous). And I’m a morning person. I’ll just step out of the room slowly now. I jest, of course. Well, not about the morning person thing…years and years of waking at 5 am for a 6 am swim practice has ruined me for life, I’m afraid.
Joe is like you guys – he would happily stay up until 3 am and sleep in until 1 pm. His lifestyle is growing on me. I DID wake up this morning and say that I wish every day was a weekend, but that’s not quite the same thing. Then again, I need a freakishly small amount of sleep in order to be functional. But I do wonder, sometimes, what life would be like if I had more than 5-6 hours sleep a night. I might be happier…and, as science tells me, thinner.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:55 am
K gets up first in the morning. Our deal is that he will get up with the first child up and make coffee and breakfast. I have to get up with either child #2 to rise or with the readiness of breakfast – whichever comes first.
Rooster, the youngest, is almost two and this schedule is still going strong. Ssshhhhh.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:58 am
Lazy Asses unite! you, Sage, you can be an honourary member so long as you move next door and babysit from six am til about nine…how’s that for lure?
and Mimi, you know…that may be the lure to the academic life. perpetual studenthood, if you just ignore all those committees and stuff they try to get you to be all responsible and join.
B&P…i still try to work at night. but i think, if we have another, i may lose that last shard of my old normal. alas. then we’ll have to get cable.
i nursed O for the last time tonight, with tears in my eyes. he wrapped his little arm around my body…oy, i ache. i am such a sap. this is hard, this letting go, this growing up. and yeh, i mean me. :)
May 29th, 2007 at 12:59 am
ooh, Joys, maybe another wouldn’t be the end of the old normal but its resurgence, then? ooh.
excuse me. i have some condoms i need to go poke holes in.
May 29th, 2007 at 1:36 am
good news from the mom of slightly older kids! we have to WAKE JACK AND BEN UP on schooldays or they will be late for school. they wake up between 7am and 7:45am (ironically, and perhaps intentionally, 7am is their weekend wake-up time, 7:45am their weekday one).
but though 7am may sound early, they AMUSE THEMSELVES for an hour or so! I KID YOU NOT!
and from what i hear from the parents of teenagers, it’s only going to get better as they get older. apparently they sleep ALL THE TIME as teenagers. like 12-15 hours a night.
May 29th, 2007 at 2:40 am
Oh, I forgot altogether to comment on the weaning thing. Oy, it’s hard. So hard. But, yes, there are moments of joy and closeness and they mean something entirely new when your body is so much more your own.
I’m all sappy now. Perhaps I should go poke holes in condoms now, too.
May 29th, 2007 at 3:03 am
I will echo slouching mom’s comment–school age kids will actually amuse themselves in their rooms for quite awhile, allowing you to snooze for upwards of twenty or thirty more minutes.
I can’t speak for the nursing business–I still get a pain in my heart when I think about my nursing days with my daughter. She nursed until 21 months and I weaned her then and still miss the snuggles. But you know, you’ll miss those days no matter when the weaning happens–whether now, or in a few months, so you might as well do it when the time seems right. Good luck!
May 29th, 2007 at 5:13 am
I had a similar routine with my daughter (now 5): at about a year, the only time I still nursed her was in the morning after we’d been up and had breakfast, and it was because she usually fell back asleep for a while. (I would LOVE to sleep until 9:00 every day, that’s my perfect awakening time.) I admitted to myself that this was more for me than her and we stopped. It was a tearful time.
My children are still very snuggly. The problem now is that they are so BIG. It’s an on-going adjustment.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:46 am
I would comment but I am too tired, because the Baby ALWAYS, ALWAYS gets up before six and I’m so sleep deprived that I walk into walls until lunchtime.
The last day nursing? That’s a bit poignant. I was so glad to see the end of nursing and at the same time, so heart-rended.
May 29th, 2007 at 11:17 am
you should suggest “two adults and a baby and a cat in a bed” to Dr. Seuss for a title…
May 29th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
I’m a morning person, sort of… I don’t mind getting up, provided I slept ok, which we’re still working on.
I am toying with the idea of weaning… we’re also down to the bedtime and morning lie-in nurse. I just can’t seem to come up with a really good reason one way or the other… nursing is easy now, not like the intensity of providing the only nourishment for the six months of their lives, so why should I stop? On the other hand, my niece is still nursing (bedtime and morning) at three, and I think perhaps weaning will only get harder as time passes… And I think it would be nice to have my body back to myself, at least a bit.
Good luck. Both with getting up earlier and the weaning.
May 29th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Like you, I am also not a morning person. I HATE getting out of bed before 8:00 am. Except, you are extremely lucky to have such a wonderful husband. Since the day Porgie was born, I have been getting up with her.
But, I think you will find that it is not so bad. Pretty soon, you’ll be waking up at 6:30 every morning – regardless of whether Oscar is up or not. Sometimes I wake up at 5:30 and can’t go back to sleep. Its awful and horrible and frightening. I think I am becoming one of those old people who just naturally wake up at 5:00 am every morning. It is very disturbing.
The good news is that Oscar will someday be a teenager and you will have your mornings back. I often fantasize about life in 10 years.
May 29th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
I dunno. I don’t think you can really change your morning/evening preferences and fighting them tends to make everyone sleep-deprived and cranky.
Though, I suppose you may *have* to adjust to a certain degree and for a certain amount of time, in my view and experience, everyone will be much happier if you can maintain something as close as possible to the sleep schedule that comes naturally.
Of course, that’s easy for me to say, since in my ideal world (which, at least in this one minor aspect, is remarkably similar to reality) I’d wake up every morning at around 6:00 am and be in bed by 10:00 pm.
May 29th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
I used to hate mornings. Loathe them. Fear them. Ugh.
Now I’m a growed up, and I pretend to like them. Really, I endure them.
But I cherish my naps. Oh, how I love my naps.
Sorry. I really have nothing for you. I was robbed of my caffeine this morning.
May 29th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
oh i hear you. there was reprieve between 20 months or so and when stella’s little brother came along. now we never know who will get us up. neither of us are morning people- and my husband sleeps so soundly that i get up first when i can’t stand the mommy mommy anymore (and i’m awake). i have gotten to the point where if i can get past the first horrid 20 minutes, morning is ok. nursing in the am (with only one child) WAS the best. i clung to that feeding until the very end.
May 29th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Oh how I love mornings! I feel like the pain of the previous day/night can be erased and I get to start anew!
Good luck to you on facing these brutal mornings!
And thanks for the advice about the osteopath and colic…it’s nice to get advice from people who’ve actually dealt with colic!
May 29th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Eventhough I was looking forward to weaning at a year, it was really hard. It ended up being 13 months, but time is a lot freer nowadays.
I’m not exactly a morning person (I am always awake, but I’m never pleasant). I am the one that gets up, though, because Mr Earth would sleep till noon if I let him. I don’t.
I like being lazy in the mornings, though. We have a sippy cup of milk, cartoons and a pile of books, and just laze around for a bit.
May 29th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
My little man is 3-1/2 and I still enjoy lazy mornings with him in bed. He wakes at about 6:30am, comes in to bed with me, and we snuggle back to sleep for about 1/2 hour to 45 minutes. Then we slowly wake each other up and talk and play. And snuggle some more. I wouldn’t trade if for the world – and I don’t want it ever to end.
May 29th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
oh honey. i’d love to say something other than you are screwed, but sister, you are screwed.
i found it best to forget those days ever existed, and turn instead to the breaking dawn, grinning at the dew.
otherwise, i’d lose my freaking mind over here.
love you.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:29 am
Ieee… *is one of the original lazy asses* I hate mornings, and the kiddos know it. I’ve actually heard the heathens have conversations of “Not Mom, wake Dad up! Gaw your dumb!” between the two oldest.
But then, I am also way more patient with sick snotty children at 4 am then he is. So in essence, we are even.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:10 am
I am the default morning parent. I hate them slightly less and my husband draws at night after work. Still nursing, my last baby, so I am indulging in a no need to wean mode at the moment, but sometimes I wonder how will I know it’s time to stop….as for cuddles,preschoolers are expert cuddlers, storytime is big for that! Mornings, it’s my time for negligence. Tea for me and music, checking blogs or email while small people crawl, march around with cheerios and drink out of sipppy cups. I shower when my 8 year old is up and he “babysits.” 0therwise I’d have to get up before the little ones to shower and it’s just not happening. Somewhere around 9 I am ready to bring my conscious self to parenting, before that, it’s just survival mode around here.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:37 am
I get an extra hour of sleep most mornings because my son is still happily nursing. There are times that I wish he would wean and we would move to the next phase of our relationship, but I don’t want to push him. This time is so short and I know that he won’t always want to nurse when he wakes up so I am trying to enjoy this stage for now. I know that he, like my daughter, will stop when he is ready (with maybe just a gentle push).
Good luck. If you change your mind at any point (or if Oscar has different ideas) you might want to look for a book called “Mothering Your Nursing Toddler”. I remember it being helpful when I was nursing my daughter past the age of one.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:51 am
Good luck with weaning. We didn’t find it much of a big whoop, but I had my tears, for sure. I love your nest analogy.
Move ahead, cuddle hunter.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Except for the days when I was nursing, Mr. Half always arose before me. He still does. I just can’t quite take on the day as early as he can. And I certainly can’t do it with a smile.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I’ve been waiting to comment lest I get strung up by the heels. You see, I have a dirty secret. My husband in NOT a morning person (he sleeps 3-10). I am NOT a morning person. We have definitely paid our dues with Miss M but get this. Lean in so I can whisper. In the last two weeks she has stopped napping altogether. The upshot has been that she’s started going to bed and 9pm and getting up at . . . 9:30 AM. Sometimes, I’m late for work b/c my daughter hasn’t done her duty by waking me up. Oh and, of course, I’ve started drinking more b/c now I can get away with it.
So yes, Bon, it does get better. Waaaay better.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
since he knows you maybe he won’t be all that surprised when you just show up at the table & grunt?! :) I am actually a mid-day person (primetime 11-5 or 6), but have gotten used to my strange hours now. You will figure it out.
on the weaning front, I feel your pain. just a week or two ago after having nursed my last the boy asked for momma’s milk. very strange. you will find other things to take the place of it. morning cuddles, shared teethbrushing time, making sure everything is put right before bed time, rocking in the chair & reading yet again Goodnight Moon. it will happen. it just takes time.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
just an update…the first day of no nursing was weirdly heartbreaking and we didn’t really organize the morning very well so O was confused and upset and i was upset and cranky – his lasted minutes, mine all day – but now on day 2 we’re all doing quite well. and there has been much guerrilla snuggling, where i swoop in and grab child and smother him with kisses for all of two seconds. it’s helping.
thanks so much to all of you for the responses…glad to know there are still cuddles to be had in future, and…ooh! Mad!! more drinking? wheee!!
May 31st, 2007 at 2:05 am
At some point Monkey decided that a morning isn’t a morning without getting a banana and coming to snuggle in our bed. Banana is now optional. The snuggle isn’t. Works for me :).
Good luck with the morning thing and the weaning thing. That’s a lot.