a while, then falls back to sleep. In three-hour intervals.
At night she’s the same—wakes up to nurse and falls right back asleep.
Now this is the way parenting should be.
We started to relax. Jacob had suffered the full first-child treatment, constant vigilance, mirror to his sleeping mouth to make sure it showed a little puff of air and he was still breathing. Jacob’s artsy baby book, from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, contains a remnant of his belly button cord, long gone to dust. Only two pages of this book are empty: Baby’s Christening and Baby Eats at the Table. Elsewhere, Ned wrote that taking Jacob to a restaurant was like eating with Helen Keller (as played unsentimentally by Patty Duke in the 1962 movie The Miracle Worker , young Helen was a dinnertime terrorist, grabbing food off her parents’ plates).
At birth, our children were the same length and differed by only four ounces in weight. At age nine, when we cut the cord on growth charts, Lisa was half an inch shorter than Jacob had been, but she weighed more than seventeen pounds more.
We neglected to record our second child’s statistics for a couple of years. But, sheesh, there was no need. Lisa was doing fine.
How much of Jacob’s pickiness did we cause by being so frantic, and how much was just him? Maybe he would have been a connoisseur in any case. When given a tangelo at age three, our serious son said, “If you took the seeds out, it would make me much happier.” I remember telling his pediatrician that Jacob liked his apples to be peeled, otherwise he wouldn’t eat them. The beleaguered doctor looked at me, sighed, and said, “Don’t peel apples for him, or you’ll always be peeling apples.” Still, I peeled.
With Lisa, meals were so much easier. She ate joyfully. Even when she was in a rejectionist phase, the introduction of new foods went like this:
“Want some of this (food)?”
“No. What is it?”
And then, more often than not, she would try it.
Lisa’s never-say-never approach to dining became a stream of inputs on her Out of the Mouths of Babes pages of her baby book, such as, at four and a half, when she said, “I feel like I’m going to throw up—after dessert.”
Most likely she didn’t. Throwing up scared her. Even when Lisa was sick with the flu, she would do anything to avoid vomiting, right up until the time she became bulimic.
However, sleep was a big issue for Lisa. While we rejoiced at how easy she was to feed, she rarely went to bed without a fight and often woke up screaming. As with body type, and the need for orthodontics and optometry, Lisa took after Ned’s insomniac side of the family. Later, Lisa’s trouble with sleeping would factor into her worst bout of anorexia.
lisa: I have never been a good sleeper, which I can thank Dad’s genes for. I was also blessed with bad allergies, flat feet, and extreme motion sickness. My brother got Mom’s solid sleeping abilities as well as her lean figure, arched feet, and ability to endure long, bumpy car rides.
Even as a young kid I don’t recall sleeping in late or falling asleep easily. I was especially antsy at slumber parties. If I slept at all, I was the last to fall asleep and the first to wake up. I’ve also never been good at taking naps. My parents claim that as a toddler through about age five, I would rise from naps in a sweat, screaming, crying, and being downright uncomfortable. I suppose that put me off naps.
sheila: Lisa’s right, I am a world-class sleeper. If I get less than eight hours, I have to take a nap. For maximum performance, both are nice. At work, some afternoons I go out to my car, put my feet up on the dashboard, and take a twenty-minute snooze. Put me on a train, a ferry boat, or a long drive, and I will sleep. Ned may be talking in the car and notice that I haven’t said anything in a while, because I’ve fallen asleep. On an old comedy album I had as a child, Bill Cosby riffed on the beauties
At night she’s the same—wakes up to nurse and falls right back asleep.
Now this is the way parenting should be.
We started to relax. Jacob had suffered the full first-child treatment, constant vigilance, mirror to his sleeping mouth to make sure it showed a little puff of air and he was still breathing. Jacob’s artsy baby book, from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, contains a remnant of his belly button cord, long gone to dust. Only two pages of this book are empty: Baby’s Christening and Baby Eats at the Table. Elsewhere, Ned wrote that taking Jacob to a restaurant was like eating with Helen Keller (as played unsentimentally by Patty Duke in the 1962 movie The Miracle Worker , young Helen was a dinnertime terrorist, grabbing food off her parents’ plates).
At birth, our children were the same length and differed by only four ounces in weight. At age nine, when we cut the cord on growth charts, Lisa was half an inch shorter than Jacob had been, but she weighed more than seventeen pounds more.
We neglected to record our second child’s statistics for a couple of years. But, sheesh, there was no need. Lisa was doing fine.
How much of Jacob’s pickiness did we cause by being so frantic, and how much was just him? Maybe he would have been a connoisseur in any case. When given a tangelo at age three, our serious son said, “If you took the seeds out, it would make me much happier.” I remember telling his pediatrician that Jacob liked his apples to be peeled, otherwise he wouldn’t eat them. The beleaguered doctor looked at me, sighed, and said, “Don’t peel apples for him, or you’ll always be peeling apples.” Still, I peeled.
With Lisa, meals were so much easier. She ate joyfully. Even when she was in a rejectionist phase, the introduction of new foods went like this:
“Want some of this (food)?”
“No. What is it?”
And then, more often than not, she would try it.
Lisa’s never-say-never approach to dining became a stream of inputs on her Out of the Mouths of Babes pages of her baby book, such as, at four and a half, when she said, “I feel like I’m going to throw up—after dessert.”
Most likely she didn’t. Throwing up scared her. Even when Lisa was sick with the flu, she would do anything to avoid vomiting, right up until the time she became bulimic.
However, sleep was a big issue for Lisa. While we rejoiced at how easy she was to feed, she rarely went to bed without a fight and often woke up screaming. As with body type, and the need for orthodontics and optometry, Lisa took after Ned’s insomniac side of the family. Later, Lisa’s trouble with sleeping would factor into her worst bout of anorexia.
lisa: I have never been a good sleeper, which I can thank Dad’s genes for. I was also blessed with bad allergies, flat feet, and extreme motion sickness. My brother got Mom’s solid sleeping abilities as well as her lean figure, arched feet, and ability to endure long, bumpy car rides.
Even as a young kid I don’t recall sleeping in late or falling asleep easily. I was especially antsy at slumber parties. If I slept at all, I was the last to fall asleep and the first to wake up. I’ve also never been good at taking naps. My parents claim that as a toddler through about age five, I would rise from naps in a sweat, screaming, crying, and being downright uncomfortable. I suppose that put me off naps.
sheila: Lisa’s right, I am a world-class sleeper. If I get less than eight hours, I have to take a nap. For maximum performance, both are nice. At work, some afternoons I go out to my car, put my feet up on the dashboard, and take a twenty-minute snooze. Put me on a train, a ferry boat, or a long drive, and I will sleep. Ned may be talking in the car and notice that I haven’t said anything in a while, because I’ve fallen asleep. On an old comedy album I had as a child, Bill Cosby riffed on the beauties
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