Parenting

I was just pondering the difference in parenting style this time around as opposed to with my first two children (obviously I've been parenting the whole time, but I'm talking about the baby stage).

J-bird was born when I was 20 and I soooo wanted to be a mum. I remember being very frustrated at his crying though and just leaving him in the cot and walking off to compose myself. Sometimes I yelled in frustration and I'm not proud of it. :-( This was usually when I would put him down for a nap during the day and we wasn't willing. Hindsight tells me that I was so desperate to have him nap because I needed the rest. I would get so stressed until one day it clicked that it was doing me more harm than good to make it a stressful situation. So I followed his lead and became a more relaxed parent.

I just want to add that all my kids have been wonderful children...easy natured...etc. If there ever is a stressful situation it is usually more the result of the parent's actions than the child's.

Sparkle came along when J-bird was 2 1/2 years old. It was lovely watching these two little beings develop a relationship as they grew (and it gave mummy a break from being sole entertainer). However, I can't really compare parenting of my daughter as I started my 4-year education degree when she was about 14 months old (in 1999) and for those four years DH was the stay-at-home-parent. DH was not only a great SAHD who loved the opportunity to spend his days with the children, he actually got the housework done efficiently and still had time to play. I hate housework! :-)

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I'm about to fill in all the gaps along the way so if you just want the parenting bits, scroll down to the next section! :-)
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Anyway, a few years go by and in early 2000 we decide to adopt a child from China (long story so I won't share it now). We enter the process and are extremely involved with support groups, legislation forums, etc. We looked forward to the experience of having another child 10 years after our first. We expected to have a much more mature parenting perspective at 30 (China requires a minimum age of 30 to adopt - I just turned 30 on xmas eve 2004) than at 20.

However, our life took a few unexpected turns when I finished Uni and didn't get a placement, we discovered home education by accident on the net and decided to follow that path, and we were given the opportunity to buy our first home. All in mid 2003!

Changing our path meant that we had a mortgage, would remain on one income, and would be home educating our children. All of these not good for the prospect of adopting a child. I was not prepared to give up the idea of home educating my children as my whole perspective had changed with this notion and I was drawn to putting family over career and felt I had spent enough time withdrawn from my family while doing my degree. So, we sadly gave up our dream of adopting but were still drawn to have a child.

We fell pregnant straight away but it wasn't meant to be. We fell pregnant again a couple of months later and this is where Little Chicken comes in - born late Oct 2004. (Sorry, I know this has turned out to be a really long post - you've probably guessed that I can't keep messages short!)

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Ok, parenting topic continues....
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This time around we had watched Dr Phil and seen the wrapping, shhhing, etc. technique. I bought Dr Harvey's book and it was amazing to be able to settle our baby like flicking a switch! We wished we knew these techniques with our first two so they wouldn't have been put to bed crying so often. Little Chicken is 7 months old today and still sleeps with her 'noise' (the baby monitor ended up being used as a static noise machine instead of a monitor!) and needs to suck on her dummy. A few weeks ago I went back to wrapping her (had to use a cot sheet!) at bedtime when she was overstimulated and couldn't settle. I would wrap the first arm and she would get this serene smile on her face which wouldn't go away until I put her into her cot....amazing.

She has however turned into one of 'those babies' that wakes when she wants the dummy (pacifier for U.S. readers) back in during the night but I find that I would rather have to get up 3 or 4 times a night than to cry herself back to sleep. I couldn't stand doing that to her! How different that is from my first child. We have learned that she never cries for no reason. Occasionally it takes us a while to figure out why she is unsettled but it usually ends in a poop or we discover a nappy has leaked and her clothes are wet. What would have had our other two crying endlessly (with no apparent cause that we knew at the time) could have been fixed using the calming technique that we now swear by. I do feel very bad that we put our first two through so much crying when we didn't know what they needed. Knowing now about babies still needing an environment like in utero for the first three months has been eye-opening. Even our family sung the praises of our techniques when they saw how well it worked.

I'm at a stage where I'm not quite sure whether to help bub learn to self-settle in the night or to keep jumping up to pop the dummy back in. She spits it out when she falls asleep so it is when she half wakes that she wants it again to re-settle. FYI, I am not an attachment parent because I just can't sleep with a baby in the room and while I bought a carrier to 'wear' our bub, DH has worn it twice and I haven't at all. I am just a mum who is trying to be conscious of my child's needs and not cause any unnecessary stress due to my own actions. As I stated earlier, I now realise that most conflict or stress relating to children generally stems from the adult's actions and could be changed by the adult changing rather than trying to change the child. Does that make sense?

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Well, I've breastfed my baby, she's gone back down for a nap, and is now awake again...all while writing this. Time to go wake daddy up!