When thoughts attack

In my post about managing The List - where I talked about the strain of being the sole person responsible for running three lives - I mentioned that I was trying to be kinder to myself. It's a work in progress and the good news is that it is getting better. For one, having Noisy Daddy look after Stickybeak every Monday has actually forced us to share the responsibilities for his care, whether it's cooking his food or taking him to the doctor, and that is frankly AMAZING.

But most of all it has involved doing a bit of mental rewiring. A few months ago I realised I had got myself into a very negative thought pattern and ever since I have been trying to claw my way out of it. It is a daily exercise. 

My biggest problem was obsessing over decisions. I would make a decision then I would spend hours questioning it over and over and over again. I was losing sleep and seriously stressing myself out. Sending Stickybeak to childcare was a big stressor. Even though we had clearly and rationally decided that it was the best thing to do I still let the guilt and fear get the better of me. While I was beating myself up over it I realised that Noisy Daddy wasn't - in his mind we had made a decision and that was that. He mentally checked that box whereas I mentally kept erasing and rechecking. Reading this article about stress on the Sydney Morning Herald and I see that there is a name for this: thought attack, which is very appropriate. And I'm kind of relieved that I'm not the only one who suffers from this.

Here is what I am doing to counter thought attack:

*I am trusting myself ... I know that I don't make decisions lightly, especially big ones like childcare, so once I have made a decision I need to trust that it is the right one. In the childcare situation I just had to let it go - I told myself that we have made the right decision for now and if we decide at some point that it isn't working then we will revisit it. Box = checked. What a load off my mind!! It has also helped me deal with the naysayers (yes, unfortunately they exist).

*No decisions at night ...  I read a study a little while ago that said people can only make a certain amount of decisions a day and that our ability to make good decisions gets progressively worse as the hours tick by. In my case I found that I was getting the most stressed at night, especially before bed. Now if something comes up at night that we need to make a decision on I put it off until morning. It's a little thing that has made a huge difference, not the least because we can get to bed earlier now without a major discussion causing a delay.

*By the same token, there is no more rethinking or obsessing at night ... Joss Whedon was right, the demons really do come out once the sun does down. If something seems slightly concerning in the daytime it will feel positively life threatening at 3am. Now if I wake up in the middle of the night I don't let my mind wander to anything serious. I tell myself that it just seems worse than it is and force myself to go to a happy place. (It usually involves Alexander Skarsgard ... was that too much information?)

*No more going solo ... Noisy Daddy is roped in on decisions, they are no longer purely my domain. He still has a tendency to defer to me when it comes to Stickybeak's care but I am putting the onus back on him. When he asks me what we should do I first ask him for his opinion. When should we try him on peanuts? I don't know, why don't you look it up and let me know. What cream should we put on that rash? What should we give him for lunch? etc etc etc. The questions are now evolving to "I'm going to give him an avocado sandwich for lunch, what do you think?" which is fantastic - we are in it together as we should be.

*Thinking positively ...  this is basic but one so easily forgotton. Parenting involves a lot of troubleshooting of potential problems which means you can easily find yourself always thinking in the negative. Yes if we go outside he might ...get sunburnt, be frightened by a dog, fall over on the bitumen ... or he might enjoy the sunshine, laugh at a frolicking poodle and learn how to navigate uneven surfaces. Sames goes for childcare, maybe he will have a toy snatched from him or get pushed over by a bigger kid, or maybe he will learn about sharing and enjoy the company of other children. Bad stuff happens but it most likely won't, sometimes I have to remind myself of this. 

This new approach is helping all facets of my life not just parenting. At work when I was thrown in the deep end on a task, instead of obsessing about it I gave myself some positive self-talk and it worked a treat. If only I had these strategies a lot sooner, like when I was 10, ha! 

And last but not least, I am being kind to myself. Not just by using the strategies outlined above but by giving myself a break when things don't go to plan. I can't control everything and if life isn't perfect it isn't necessarily my fault. Sh*t happens and you know what, I'm doing a good job and I bet you are too.

Kicking the 5am feed

With a little help from my friends we managed to kick the 5am breastfeed and life improved. Like a lot.

When Stickybeak was six months old this is what his night-time routine looked like:

7pm - bed
10.30pm - milk feed (bottle given by his daddy)
5am - breastfeed
7am - wake up

It looks pretty good doesn't it, well, in comparison to getting up every three hours! We did some hard yards getting to this point (by we I mainly mean me). We introduced the 10.30pm feed at around 4 months and it pushed the midnight feed back to 1.30am. Soon the 1.30 feed morphed with the 3.30am feed and then that got later and later until it got stuck at 5am. And that's where it stayed for a quite a while.

Surprisingly, it turns out that getting up at 5am is actually harder than 3am. It must have been the wrong time in my sleep cycle because once I woke up at five I couldn't get back to sleep again. Long after Stickybeak was back in the land of nod I was still tossing and turning and watching the clock count down to 7am.

I would have put up with this for a long time, because that's the kind of self-punishment we parents do, except I noticed that Stickybeak wasn't really that hungry at 5am - he would only feed on one side and even then he fell asleep in my arms almost immediately. My gut feeling was that he was just waking up out of habit and I was basically serving as a sleep aid. It started to feel very not worth it. We needed to break the habit but how?

I brought this up with my friends and they gave me some great advice:

Tip 1 - offer him water rather than milk
Tip 2 - (this is the really important one) get daddy to do it because if I get up he would expect milk
Tip 3 - be prepared for a little crying
Tip 4 - if possible, sleep somewhere else

So on the Australia Day weekend when Stickybeak was 7 months old We decided to give it a shot - I slept in the spare room and left Noisy Daddy bravely armed with a sippy cup of water. To be honest I expected it to go badly, I expected him to reject the water and to cry and cry and cry ... and I expected Stickybeak to do the same (ha!).

Seriously, I thought Noisy Daddy would have to come and wake me sometime around 5.30am. To my surprise I woke up at 8am having enjoyed my first night of sleeping through in what felt like a long long time. I felt fantastic. There was this wonderful sensation that seemed to start from my toes which spread a warm wash of contentment throughout my body. I was relaxed, limber, ready to start the day. I think I was even happy. Wow, this is what well rested feels like (oh how I had missed you!).

Then of course I remembered I had a baby, one who wasn't in the same room as me, and I panicked. Why hadn't I heard from them? What if something happened? Are they alive? Eek!! And then I heard a happy squeal coming from the kitchen. Noisy Daddy was feeding Stickybeak his weetbix and he was happy as a clam (Stickybeak that is, although ND was pretty chuffed too). It turns out that without me in the room Stickybeak slept through the night. Great ... sort of. Did he actually sleep through or did he wake up but ND didn't hear him stir? Who knows.

We tried it again the next night. Same story. And the next night. Same again. I moved back into the bedroom on the fourth night, very warily I should add. We still had the sippy cup of water and the plan was that ND would tend to him if he woke -- and can I just say, this alone made the exercise worth it. No longer being the one to get up was a big bonus for me. Like huge. Enormous. Enormously huge. I can't tell you how good that was.

Anyway ... we even switched sides in the bed so that I was further away from the cot. Amazingly he didn't wake up at 5am (I still did but that's another story). He kept it up for a week before I was willing to believe that this was now the new norm.

In the next couple of months he woke up at 5am maybe three times and two of those times he took a sip of water and a cuddle from his daddy and went back to sleep. The other time he was teething so I'm not counting that one.

We have been in this new routine for five months now. I actually wanted to write this post months ago but I too afraid that it would jinx it, like the world would smite me for getting some extra sleep. Crazy I know but that is how precious sleep is.

-- Natalie

*

ps I was reluctant at first to give up the 5am feed because it was the only time that Stickybeak fell asleep in my arms and that part was really nice. Noisy Daddy still gets that with the 10.30pm feed and I don't think he wants to give it up either.

pps thank you to Hannah, Julia and Kylie for your awesome advice x

ppps I may have slightly exaggerated that whole well-rested part but when you're in the desert water tastes pretty damn good.