The Early Bird

Keith recently found an article that said that successful people tend to get up early. But what if your goal is to sleep in?


Last time I wrote I mentioned Owen was having trouble sleeping and was being a fairly terrible two. Since then we've made a few changes, with some positive results.


We initiated a "no tv and no computer week". Owen got into the habit of wanting to watch youtube videos on our computers (mainly Winnie the Pooh or Cars). We were worried that Owen was having nightmares (I thought I heard him wake up and say "The Owl scared me!"), and computer time after dinner was delaying bed time. We made an effort to hide our laptops (which normally make a regular appearance at our house). For the first part of the week Owen kept asking to watch something, but we reminded him, "it's no TV and no computer week!". Toward the end of the week he slowed down his asking, and hasn't asked for it much since.

We have implemented more discipline and scheduling into our day. We make it a point to warn Owen what's coming next: "We'll read this book, then it's time to wash our hands for dinner". Then we have to stick to the plan; inevitably he'll try for another book/toy, and if we give in he knows he can negotiate with us all of the time. We've started giving him time outs, which I'm not convinced of the effectiveness of yet. Sometimes he'll choose the time out over the preferred action ("If you don't wash your hands, you'll get a time out." "I want a time out."). But I think it has worked some of the time.


We started letting Owen choose (for the most part) who put him to bed. For about a week he chose only me, so that's what we did. I think the consistency of having me there each night helped (plus alleviated some jealousy of my time with Sophie). We had been staying with Owen in his bed until he feel asleep. In order to try and break him of that I started sitting on a "special" pillow on the floor next to the bed. The first night Owen kept getting out of bed and wanted to sit in my lap; I kept placing him back in bed. We did that SIXTY-FIVE TIMES (!) the first night. The second night was sixteen times; the third night was once. We are still a long way from being able to leave the room before he falls asleep, but it's a start. It's still a struggle to get him to bed as early as we'd like, but at least he's more consistently falling asleep before 9pm, than after.


He doesn't wake up in the middle of the night as often, but still consistently gets up at 5:30am or 6am (when he was in his crib he would sleep until 7am). We're trying the rule "we can't go downstairs until the clock says 7am", but so far that isn't having much of an effect on his actual sleeping. My newest theories are that he wakes up having to pee or wakes up cold. He has a favorite blankie, but it's fairly light and small. If he's awake he refuses to wear any other blanket. Not sure what we'll try next. We've thought about putting a gate on his door, but we're not really convinced that would do anything. I think this may just be a phase we have to live through.


His day time attitude still has some rough patches, but he definitely has shown some improvement. It's really quite bizarre sometimes - he just gets really upset all of a sudden for no good reason (at least not apparent to us). Last night we were coloring with markers, and anything I tried to draw made him cry as if we were taking away his favorite toy. Then he calmed down and we had no more trouble the rest of the night. But these upset times seem to be diminishing from the 3-4 times daily occurence they once were.


Sophie started a new medicine for reflux, which has shown some improvement in her overall demeanor and with her nippling, albeit spotty. She is more consistently nippling 50cc's, with an occasional 90. But also an occasional zero. We will be working with a feeding specialist in the next few weeks. Her gas seems to have gotten worse, so the next grocery trip will include soy milk and yogurt for me. A non-dairy diet helped alleviate the gas for Owen as a baby, so we'll see if that helps Sophie.


I started back to work this week, part time (about 20 hours/week). On days when we have doctor appointments it's difficult to get enough work done, but on days when we have nothing and I have help from the grandmas it's nice to do something more "normal". Although it's more difficult to catch up with sleep with naps.


Postscript: Owen was asleep by 8:30pm last night, and slept until 7am this morning (except for waking up at 1am). I call that success!

I'm No Superman

First, I'm overdue in thanking everyone for your thoughts and prayers. I'm constantly hearing about new people that are reading the blog, which is humbling - nurses, co-workers, friends, relatives, friends of relatives, and even relatives of friends. Although a few of you have said that I'm a really good writer, which makes me think you're accidentally reading the wrong blog. :-)

As I mentioned before, I have turned to the tv to alleviate some of the stress (and boredom) that comes with taking care of Sophie. Right now I'm watching season 2 of Scrubs. My apologies to those of you (Hi Mom!) that hate getting the theme song stuck in your head, but that's what I've had to deal with the last couple of weeks (that and Winnie the Pooh). If you aren't familiar with it, the chorus goes "I can't do this all on my own...no I'm no...I'm no superman". This has rung especially true for me lately. The support of my friends and family has never been so important to me as it is right now. Whether it be grandparents watching Owen, lunch with a friend, or just someone holding Sophie so I can do other things, life would be so much more tough without them.

I could also change the words to "I can't do this without sleep". My attitude suffers greatly when I don't get enough sleep. I get frustrated and emotional a lot easier when I'm tired. As with any new parents, getting sleep is a struggle for us. Between Sophie waking up with reflux or to poop (she gets a continuous drip feed at night so at least we don't have to worry about that) and Owen getting up in the middle of the night, we don't get a lot of continuous (or total) sleep. Owen will not go to sleep without one of us there with him, and gets up either in the middle of the night or really early the next day.

Owen is also a handful during the day. He throws a mini tantrum any time we say "no", and it takes a ton of energy to get him to do things like wash his hands, brush his teeth, take a bath, or change his clothes. As I write this he is throwing a MAJOR fit because Daddy is putting him to bed instead of me. He's been screaming for 5 minutes and is still going. [Postscript: I ended up going upstairs and putting him to sleep because he would just not calm down. Right thing to do? Maybe not, but he was going to hurt himself if he continued. Once he calmed down I explained to him that some nights Mommy is going to put him to bed, sometimes Daddy. Doesn't mean I don't love him when Daddy puts him to bed, but we like to take turns and share. He said, "oh". I told him that tonight I would put him to sleep but tomorrow night Daddy would. He said that would be ok. We'll see what he does tomorrow night.] Yesterday he wanted a lollipop, and since he had just peed on the potty I was going to give him one as a treat. But he refused to wash his hands, so I told him no lollipop unless he washed his hands. I could tell he was thinking about it, but he never did wash his hands. I never thought that he would be such a terrible two. Obviously the stress of Sophie being at home is getting to him. At least he's a good eater - along with the green beans, he continues to eat healthier than a lot of adults: pinto beans, edamame, okra, and even collard greens.

Unfortunately there has been no progress on the feeding front for Sophie. She is consistenly taking only 30-40% of her feeds from the bottle. We are hoping to work with a speech therapist that specializes in feeding issues, and are currently working with her other doctors to make sure she feels her best. This is, of course, frustrating for us, most of all because we don't know what the future holds. A trip to the P.O.P.S.I.C.L.E. website for feeding issues makes me both depressed (knowing what issues some people have) and hopeful (that Sophie is not as bad off as others).

She still cries a decent amount, but Sophie is continuing to get bigger and is starting to get out of the newborn phase. When people see her for the first time they often say, "Oh, how small!". But to me she is huge - she is now double her birth weight (10 lbs). She has more alert periods and keeps her gaze on us often. I can tell she is on the verge of smiling at us and making goo-goo noises.

Despite all of the frustrations we are slowly getting into a routine and do occasionally have some fun. This was the first Halloween that Owen went trick or treating, so we had a lot of fun this past weekend. Saturday morning was the NICU's annual reunion. It was nice to see a lot of Sophie's nurses, albeit a little weird to go back to the place that was the location of so much emotion for us. We went to Tempe's Halloween festival on Saturday night. Owen got to go in a fire truck and jump in the bouncy tent, where he had a lot of fun in his own reserved kind of way (the other kids in the tent were jumping all over the place, while Owen bounced in one spot). He was an alien at the festival since we didn't really have time to go look for a costume. He had asked to be an elephant, which I thought would be impossible to do last minute. I was hoping to get a pumpkin at the last minute, but alas, no. Imagine my surprise when we happened to see a toddler elephant costume 50% off at Albertson's the morning of Halloween! Owen himself really surprised me by absolutely loving trick or treating. After every house he would say "Let's go to another house". He even asked to go in our neighbor's haunted house! I guess the dark and/or the costume helped him overcome his shyness.

Please continue to pray for us as we learn to navigate life with two kids who demand a lot of our attention. There are times that we definitely need all the (divine and earthly) help we can get!

Here are some recent pictures. More are on our Picasa websites here and here.

From o so october 10

Halloween. Sophie had an elephant on her shirt too. You can see her feeding pump in the background.

From o so october 10

From o so november 10

You can barely see Sophie's scar from the liver surgery, but her G-tube is pretty obvious.