Anyway, on to my post... goals!
I'm not going to write any New Year's Resolutions. Although I could write an entire blog post about this... I feel it will merely be a reiteration of my friend's blog post I linked to above. She is wise.1 So yeah.
Here is my view on goals: you should make them all the time.
For instance, every night while writing in my journal, I write down one or more goals for the next day. It can be anything... like, say, "Get some rest. I'm so pooped." Or, "Go pick up my prescriptions, mail package, buy apples, deliver gift to friend, write and mail thank you note, do ALL the teeny tiny tasks!" Or, "Do something to learn Serbian." Or, "Go get a massage." Or, "Sleep in." Or, "Eat three meals." Or, "Eat a vegetable." Or, "Don't die." See? Little goals, but all things that will make me more awesome. (These are all things I have written in my journal as real goals, by the way.)
I also have more long term goals, of course. I have weekly goals, like "Floss at least once daily for a whole week!"2 Or things like that.
I also have less frequent goals, like "Do visiting teaching every month this year!"
And then there are the continuous goals. So, since my written-down goal from yesterday is "Make a gospel study plan", here goes:
My Super Awesome New and Shiny Gospel Study Plan!
- Begin and end each study session with a prayer
- Finish studying Teaching, No Greater Call as default study material, at least one lesson per day
- Next, study the Old Testament as default study material, at least one chapter per day
- When the Conference Ensign comes out, make this the default study material, at least one talk per day until all talks have been read
- On the appropriate Friday and Saturday nights, read the lesson material (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow) for the following Sunday's Relief Society lesson, at least half a chapter per day
- On Sundays, replace my normal reading material with gospel reading material (such as that month's Ensign or Jesus the Christ)
So yeah. This is open to adjustment, of course, but I'm pretty excited. This is the first time in my life that I've ever consistently read my scriptures each night, so there's actually a chance that this will be completely successful!
That's enough about goals, I suppose. Now for updates on the baby!
We have officially become "hippie parents" as the requirements had been laid out in my head. What finally made me decide James and I qualified for this title? ... We've taken up that whole elimination communication thing I mentioned in the footnotes of a few posts. You know, the thing where the baby doesn't wear diapers and you hold the baby over a potty and they go in the potty.
I had commented that I had sensed that Amelia had a secret desire to be naked. As in, no-diaper naked. Her pleased behavior when we oblige her and give her some naked time seems to confirm that she actually did want to go diaperless, and I wasn't making up that idea. She tends to cry when we decide to put the diaper back on. (We don't let her stay diaperless most of the time.)
We bought a little infant potty for her. To my immense surprise, she is quite fond of it, and likes to hang out sitting on it. Yes, she pees and poos in it. Sometimes she'll pee right after getting settled on it. In fact, James just had to go flush a pile o' poo down the toilet. It was smelly, but a lot easier to clean up than the standard poopy diaper. I was surprised to discover that we could be successful with this even if she pees in her diaper 80% of the time.
So there you have it. We are now letting Amelia tell us when she has to pee or poo. It's kind of like how she says she's hungry, only this is the other end of that tube. We figure there is no sense in making the kid pee herself if we know it's going to happen. She doesn't want to, it seems. Why train her to sit in her own waste if we're going to have to get her out of diapers someday anyway? It just makes a lot of sense to us.3
This is how we finally became official hippie parents. We are avid attachment parenting fans. We breastfeed on demand, even if there's lots of demand. Amelia is basically always in-arms. We co-sleep, and she will sleep with us as long as she likes (or possibly sooner depending on when the next baby is). We minimize separations. We respond to her cries always. I plan to exclusively breastfeed her until she grabs food and stuffs it in her mouth, and I will continue to nurse on demand until she weans herself. And now? Now we communicate with our baby, sense when she needs to pee, and then let her pee in the toilet. Yup. Hippies. Really, though, this is all because this seems the best and easiest way to parent in this family.
Amelia is still, however, mightily fussy very, very frequently. I've decided once and for all that she does not have colic and really, never had it. They say colic goes away by four months at the very latest. And well, the fussiness is still here. There are waves of relative contentment, yes, but by and large she is still much more difficult than any other baby I've met.
So. Ixnay on the olickay. My conclusions? Amelia just has a more difficult temperament, and is what Dr. Sears and his wife call a high-need baby. I recently read The Fussy Baby Book. Oh my heck. I think they had a secret camera and spied on us in order to write the book, even though it was 1996 when they wrote it. Their fourth baby, Hayden, was almost identical to Amelia in mannerism. Amelia, like Hayden was, is intense, draining, demanding, often unsatisfied, unpredictable, super sensitive in some ways, not a self-soother, and very separation sensitive. We can't put her down (EVER). She feeds and awakens frequently. If you read that page about high-need babies I linked to, you'd have a fairly broad and accurate idea of what Amelia is like. The only bits that aren't really true are the hyperactivity and the not sleeping much. She sleeps lots, but she doesn't stay asleep for too long and we have to be with her the entire time she sleeps.
Oh my heck, it was so nice to read that someone else had a baby like Amelia. And instead of an endless list of "try this"es, there was an acknowledgement that maybe nothing was "wrong" with her and I didn't have to keep searching for a need that I wasn't fulfilling, because I was already doing everything, and I've been doing it dang well. My intuition has been telling me that Amelia is the picture of physical health, but it was hard to listen to it sometimes.
AND THEN. An acknowledgement that no one really understands what it's like to have a high-need baby until they've had one themselves... so refreshing! It got a little tiring when I'd write a blog post about Amelia's demanding behavior and then I'd receive a barrage of "Have you tried this?". Regarding their high-need baby, the Sears' wrote: "Our job was to accept Hayden's unique personality, appreciate her special traits and channel them into behavior that would work for her, and for the family. It was not to change her for our own convenience. Hayden was not the standard baby, and standard baby advice wouldn't work. Once we regarded her not as a behavior problem to be fixed but a personality to be nurtured, living with her became easier." And you know what? They gave me permission to view Amelia in a more positive light. Yes, she's loud and demanding, but she knows what she needs and is persistent. That's a good thing, in a lot of ways. I don't think I would have learned nearly as much about parenting with an easier baby.
Phew. It feels so good. I don't even mind so much when Amelia is crying. I can stay calmer and respond to her needs better. Yay!
The other book I'm glad to have found recently is The Wonder Weeks by Hetty van de Rijt and Frans Plooij. This has helped me come to terms with Amelia's even-fussier-than-normal phases. The theory is that there are specific ages when all babies get fussy because their brain just did some majorly fast and overwhelming development. Essentially, they wake up and the world seems completely different than it was before they fell asleep. Scary!
...Amelia is currently in one of these evil fussy phases. But, you know, it helps to know the increased fussiness is for a good reason. And that she will get a whole bunch of new skills after this. The bad news is, the researchers think this is a particularly long fussy phase, and will likely last anywhere from one to six weeks, but probably around five weeks. ... Holy trash, I'm not sure I can handle five weeks of this, but... one day at a time.
I should give James a break from baby. He's saying, "Ugh, two hours with baby is AWFUL." And I glare at him and remind him what I have to do when he's on campus for twelve hours. Oh, and now he's yelling that peek-a-boo is a stupid game and there's no reason Amelia should demand MORE peek-a-boo after fifty peek-a-boos. Heh. He's a wimp sometimes, but I love him. :)
Love and ear-splitting shrieks,
Jenna and Amelia
1 Speaking of this friend, I have a message for her: I think I should warn you that, in the hypothetical scenario that I die before James does and you are still single when this happens (I figure this is all highly unlikely), I have ordered James to court you. Yup. I figured if I have to die and I want some lady to help my man finish raising my offspring, I should have a say in who this woman should be. Well, dear lady, it's you. Heeheehee! Hope I haven't disturbed you too much. :)↩
2 I intensely dislike flossing. I think, perhaps, this is related to the fact that my teeth are a little too close together, so I struggle to slip that thin piece of floss between each tooth... and then, once I get past the tight spot, my floss comes down into the gums super swiftly and painfully. Grrr. If I had an extra $4000, I'd invest in some orthodontic work. I also have a major overbite which is a bit annoying. Sometimes my bottom front teeth hurt the roof of my mouth.↩
3 I saw the book Diaper-Free Baby by Christine Gross-Loh in the library. I checked it out because, honestly, both James and I were intrigued and surprised and really, really curious. After reading half of the book, James was convinced and decided to try it out right then. He kept checking every thirty seconds to see if she had peed. It was kind of cute.↩
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