Fear of Falling

When he was about 14 months old, Max took a big face-planting fall off the arm of the couch, headfirst into the back of a chair that was sitting nearby, onto the floor. It was truly one of the most awful moments of my entire life, that split second of stunned silence between crash and screaming. It's the first time I can remember him having really hurt himself--he'd had stomachaches and other minor ailments before, and he'd certainly been uncomfortable, I'm sure--but he'd never really been hurt before. In the second it took me to get to him on the floor and flip him over, looking for blood or broken teeth or anything visibly terribly wrong with him, I burst into tears too. Dan was in the kitchen correcting papers at the time, and I screamed for him. He came running, I sat on the floor holding Max and wailing, Max flailed wildly and cried, and once he determined that there wasn't anything really wrong with any of us, Dan sat on the floor next to us and comforted his crying wife and son.

He wasn't hurt, luckily. Max is like a cat: it seems to me like he should have gone through all of his nine lives ten or twelve times over by now. I've read more near-misses and horror stories recently: babies who've rolled off their parents' bed onto a hardwood floor, toddlers who've miraculously been caught by a passing stranger as they've fallen from a third-story window, and of course, like nearly every blogging and Twittering mother on the planet, I was shocked and horrified to read earlier this week about little Maddie Spohr.

It's gotten warm here over the last few weeks, and for several hours in the afternoons most days, we've opened the windows, and Max has taken a particular and somewhat peculiar joy in pressing his face against the window screen in his room and screaming out the window at the top of his lungs. Yes, I'm aware that my kid is a bit of a total weirdo, but at any rate, no. We live on the third floor, and there will be absolutely no pressing of our heads against a window screen. The screaming I can live without, but the real issue is the visual I have of the screen giving way and Max falling headfirst out of the window, three stories, into the parking lot below. It's one of the few infractions of the rules that has earned Max a spanking: we only spank for things that could seriously hurt him or someone else.

I can't prevent every header that Max is determined to take off the couch. I just can't. This kid is three and a half. Sometimes they have to fall down, just to check to see if gravity is working. I get that. I can (and do) keep the machetes and heroin and porn out of his grasp (yeah, the heroin and porn are all mine; hands off, kid), but I can't eliminate every sharp corner and edge and forehead-level-everything from our house. And furthermore, I don't want to. He is, after all, three and a half. At some point, you should learn not to walk headfirst into things.

When he was six months old, Max was exposed to whooping cough from a ten-month-old who had not been immunized according to the CDC's childhood vaccination schedule, or, as it turned out, according to any medically-recognized vaccination schedule at all. Max had just received his third dose of the DTaP vaccine when he was exposed, but I was concerned enough to call his pediatrician immediately. I was further concerned a few days later, when I learned that the older baby had, sadly, died. Max has a wonderful pediatrician, a brilliant clinician and an extremely capable woman who's never pooh-poohed my concerns, no matter how outrageous they may have sounded to her, and the first thing she said to me was, "You've done the right thing calling." She immediately looked at his vaccination records to see that he was fully up-to-date, saw that he was, and said, "My immediate thought is that he should be completely fine, but keep a close eye on him over the next two weeks." Done and done, I thought. I was a stay-at-home mother at that point; I had not a whole lot else to do besides keep a close eye on him.

Max never developed so much as a sniffle. In checking with the local health department, I learned that six cases of pertussus were reported in conjunction with the baby who died; all were children who were on "alternative" or "delayed" vaccination schedules. They never ascertained exactly how many people were exposed to pertussus; but no fully-vaccinated children or adults reported becoming ill.

Let me repeat that, because I think it's significant: no vaccinated children or adults reported becoming ill. There has been a lot of talk about vaccination lately; Heather Armstrong at Dooce is a lightning rod for most internet-based parenting controversy and this is no different.

My feelings about vaccination is pretty straightforward: I have and will continue to vaccinate my children on schedule against anything that they have vaccinations for, including measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, pertussus, polio, varicella, hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, Haemophilus influenzae type b, pneumococcal, influenza, meningococcal, and HPV. These are, by all reliable accounts, medically safe and proven to prevent, not cause, life-threatening and devastating diseases, anecdotal evidence notwithstanding.

I could not be more sympathetic to the parents of children who suffer from autism-spectrum disorders. I have a nephew who's suffering terrible social, developmental, and learning delays due to an autism-spectrum disorder. As a parent of an energetic and precocious pre-schooler, I am struck multiple times a day by how much of a challenge a totally normal kid is; I simply cannot fathom the depth and breadth of challenging a delayed child.

When Max fell head-first off the couch, I immediately blamed myself. I was sitting right next to him; why didn't I grab him? Why did I let him climb the arm of the couch? What was I thinking? He could have broken his skull, his neck. I could be sitting here holding his dead body right now! What is the matter with me? That's why I cried, not because of him getting hurt. I cried because it was my fault he fell.

You spend nine months, minimum, anticipating and growing this tiny little human being, and they hand them to you, and they're perfect, a total stranger to you, but still somehow exactly what you were expecting. When this perfect little person turns out not to be perfect, of course there must be a reason for it. Of course. Of course parents struggle to find some reason that the train has come off the tracks in such a thoroughly hideous way.

Vaccines are taking the heat for things that they're just not responsible for, and as a result, there are individuals out there who are making the decision not to vaccinate. As a result of that decision, diseases that should be practically extinct on this continent are making a comeback, and my kids are being exposed to things like whooping cough. Here's a news story from today, about patients who've been exposed to measles in a local hospital.

I know it's not pleasant, the idea of your baby getting a shot. But at the risk of sounding intolerant, the mothers that tell me, "I'll never vaccinate my precious children, I can't imagine making them get a shot," well, don't get pissed at me or anything, but I'm going to be forced to push you in front of a bus. That's what's known as thinning the herd where I come from.

The same goes for parents who tell me, "I won't vaccinate my children--everyone else does, and they'll never be exposed to anything for that reason." Well, your thinking is flawed, and you clearly don't have much of a grasp on, you know, science, but whatever. Do me a favor and don't let your kid come within twenty yards of my kid, okay? They probably don't wash their hands either.

And for the parents that cite the anecdotal evidence of vaccinations causing developmental delays, I don't know what to tell you, except that I'm afraid of my son falling down. I'm afraid of him falling off the couch, I'm afraid of him falling off the bed, I'm afraid of him falling out the window, I'm afraid of him falling off his bike and off the playground equipment and from the loft in our condo and down the stairs. I'm scared to death of the feeling of helplessly watching him fall, the anticipation of the sound of him colliding with a hard surface, the sight of my own hands reaching toward him just a second too late. I'm afraid of that moment of silence before he starts to cry, of that moment going on and on and on, holding my breath while I wait for him to start to cry, and what will happen if I never hear him cry again, how I'd ever be able to stand it.

But I know he will fall down. I know he will. I know he'll hurt himself, probably, at some point seriously. I did. When I was about Max's age--younger, maybe--I fell skiing and sprained my ankle badly, an ankle I've reinjured numerous times since then, probably due in part to the injury that I sustained when I was three. Kids do that. It happens. You take risks, calculated risks. You spank them for leaning on the window screen on the third floor, but you cheer when they ride away from you on their bikes. You stop them from jumping on the bed, but not from jumping down the last two stairs.

I am vaccinating my children because I feel that it's not only the responsible thing to do for them, but it's also the responsible thing to do for my community. I can't depend on other people to be responsible, so I do my part. Herd immunity is something everyone has to contribute to; I do my part by contributing, and I will continue to do so. I have no good evidence that vaccinations cause anything other than immunization.

Sure, go ahead and don't vaccinate your kid. But don't tell me I'm harming mine by vaccinating him. Don't tell me I'm putting him at risk. I'm not stupid and this is the calculated risk I'm taking: the slim possibility of vaccine reactions versus the much-less-slim possibility of devastating neurological damage or death due to a preventable illness. I get it, okay? You take risks as a parent. This is the devil I know versus the devil I don't.

And do me a favor: if you're not going vaccinate your kid, keep him away from mine. I wasn't kidding about that.

Insomniac, Again

My best friend's baby won't sleep. I feel so completely bad for Kimberly and Michael, because I remember how completely awful it was when the kid won't sleep, how it totally destroys any sense of routine or normal in your house, how thoroughly it clouds and confounds all of your other experiences.

To be totally fair, let me just say that Max was a really good sleeper, all things considered. Sure, he wanted to get up in the middle of the night some nights, and there was no convincing him that the day doesn't begin at 3:15 a.m., and there was nothing to do but sit in the living room, facing him as he bobbed cheerily in his bouncy seat, blearily staring at him and wondering how I was going to get through the next 24 hours. But I also had the reassurance that it was only going to last 24 hours, give or take, and soon, the kid would go back to sleeping four or five hours at a time at night, and an hour or two at a time, a couple of times a day.

We did go through a few phases where things that had worked before stopped working. They are panic-inducing, and you're sure your kid will never sleep again. Don't worry, he will. The single-biggest victory in the sleep war was the swing. We never had a regular-sized swing for Max, we figured with the bouncy seat and all the other stuff, we didn't really need it taking up room in the apartment. But at seven months, he gave up sleep totally over the space of about a month. It was a gradual thing--when he'd been going to bed at 8 or so, suddenly it was 9. Then it was 10. Then it was 11, and midnight...and he was still getting up at around 2 or 3 for a snack and a cuddle, and again at 7 in the morning, for good for the day.

I didn't know what else to do, so I bought a small, travel swing for him. It's just like the regular ones, only it sits closer to the ground and folds. It ran on a battery, and for a few months it was a total game-changer for us. We'd put Max in it at bedtime, tuck one of his "friends" -- a stuffed animal -- in next to him and tuck a blanket around him, turn the lights down, play some music, and lo and behold, the kid would be asleep within half an hour. From there it was just a matter of sneaking him out of the swing and into the crib, without waking him up. You had to wait just long enough for him to be really out and not get impatient with your non-sleeping, still squawking baby.

The thing that finally worked on a more permanent basis was when we examined what we were doing every night, and what time we were doing it. When they're tired, babies's brains make a substance that makes them think, I've been awake so long, now I might as well just stay up. The less sleep they get, the worse they need it and the harder it is for them to get it. It's a bad system. We realized we didn't really have a routine at all. and we were putting him down way too late--around 10. Everything we read said we should start working him into bed around 7.

By establishing a routine--bath, story, snack and cuddle, and into bed once he was asleep--we really helped the whole sleep situation a lot. He still got up in the middle of the night and wanted to eat, but we were pretty well accustomed to that by then, and one half-hour wake-up was pretty bearable. We would feed him until he was so deeply asleep that the bottle was literally falling out of his mouth. Also, we would pre-warm his bed with a heating pad--going from a warm lap to a chilly mattress was enough to wake him up again most of the time. Yes, of course we took the heating pad out of the bed when we put him in. We're, you know, not Brittney Spears or anything.

This all worked pretty well until he was about 1. That was when we transitioned from two naps a day--which he mostly took on the floor of the living room, on a blanket--to one nap a day, around noon. He just wasn't sleeping at night and we figured he was getting too much sleep during the day.

None of this addressed the fact that he just didn't fall asleep on his own. When he was about a year and a half old, we decided it was time. We did what the books recommend--put him down sleepy but awake--by altering the bedtime routine to keep him from falling asleep in our arms. When he started to look like he was having trouble keeping his eyes open, we would put him into bed and leave the room. If he cried, we would let him cry for a couple of minutes, then come back, comfort him without picking him up, and leave again. If he cried again, we would wait a little longer, comfort him without picking him up, and leave again. And so on.

It honestly wasn't that bad. There were two really bad nights, a couple of medium-bad ones, and a couple of not-so-terrible nights, and after that he didn't need us at all. Let me qualify that by saying that Max has always been extraordinarily independent, which we've encouraged by not always jumping in to help him when we thought he could work something out for himself. It hasn't always been easy, but the payoff has been enormous, especially as he's gotten older.

At one point, we started letting him go to bed with a bottle of water to drink--never milk or juice, but the water helped him settle down. We had to eliminate that when he was around two and a half, because he was drinking sixteen ounces, and then filling his diaper so full overnight that he woke up in a giant puddle every night. Breaking the bottle habit wasn't too bad--a couple nights of asking for it, but that was it.

I don't know a ton about getting babies to sleep. Mine slept mostly on his own. But some of the things that helped was keeping Max physically and mentally active during the day--just walking around the house or the neighborhood, pointing things out, imitating the car noises or the dogs barking or the birds, flipping through books, or sitting in front of the sliding glass door watching the birds. I would put him in the bouncy seat, which encouraged him to be physical without requiring a lot of effort on my part. I tried not to hold him too much--I felt like it discouraged him from being very independent and the more I held him, the more he wanted to be held and the less he would tolerate not being held. I didn't let him fall asleep in my arms--that became a total recipe for disaster, since he wouldn't sleep anywhere else.

Parenting doesn't get a whole lot easier, but it gets more rewarding, and the challenges come in forms other than sleep-depravation. We are struggling with potty-training, with defiance, with getting him to eat. The things that are hard about parenting change shape, usually without warning. But don't beat yourself up. There aren't really right or wrong answers, just things you've tried already, things that have stopped working, things you're not willing to try, and things you just haven't thought of yet. The right thing for your little person is out there.

Oh, and I should add--I was a stay-at-home mother until Max was 14 months old. One thing that really helped me was to hand Max over to Dan when he got home from work and lay down for a nap for a couple hours in the evening. I knew I'd be up at night, and the change of parenting scenery helped Max, and that couple of hours made life manageable. We decided it made more sense for me to get the couple of hours than to have a sit-down dinner all together as a family while I drooled into my food and fell asleep with my chin in my hand.

Those are my suggestions. If you have other suggestions for a desperate set of parents and their wide-awake Sprout, leave them in the comments.

So Much More Than A White Dress

Dear Gerry and Trina,

Dan and I have been trying to think of something to say about marriage to the two of you. Basically, you couldn't find two bigger proponants of the institution than us. We have been married for four years, which isn't that long, but four years is as long as you spend in high school, or getting a college degree (or a third of a college degree, in some cases.) It's not an insignificant amount of time. In that four years, we've moved halfway across the country, we've gotten new jobs, we've lost family members, made new friends, rediscovered old ones, encountered crushing disappointment, had a baby, watched him start to grow up. And we've done it side by side, which is what marriage is about. We haven't always seen things eye-to-eye, but the point is that you will continue to have moments of significance throughout your life, and this other person will be there to bear witness.

In four years of marriage, we've learned some things. In lieu of our wedding present, which still isn't finished (but to be fair I'm making significant headway), we have the following pieces of marriage related advice for you. Like all advice, it is at least 38% bullshit and possibly not at all applicable to your marriage, but it's what we've learned.

One is to never go grocery shopping when you're hungry. You'll blow your budget completely. This is actually a good lesson for anybody. A corollary of this rule is that, although you're newlyweds and perpetually on your honeymoon and you can barely go to the bathroom without each other at this point, it is really best to grocery shop alone. I spend so much less money when I grocery shop alone, it's ridiculous. I don't know why that is.

A marriage is like an inside joke. Once a lot of other people become privy to the joke, it is not as funny.

Another thing that we've learned is to never try to move furniture or hang artwork after 9 p.m. It is a sure recipe for a knock-down, drag-out fight. No matter how good a mood you start out in, no matter how firmly in agreement you are about the right thing to do, three hours later you will both be sweaty, furious, not a single step closer to having things arranged how you want them, and quite sure that you've married the only person on earth who can screw up the use of a laser level.

Your spouse is family you choose. This information is more important than you think.

Sometimes you feel like this person's conjoined twin, sometimes you will need a little space. Sometimes you will feel like you will never run out of things to say to each other, and sometimes you will worry that you will never have anything to say to each other again. Sometimes you will feel like everything is worth it all the time, and sometimes you will feel you've never been happier than when you were living alone. In every case, you are both right and wrong, simultaneously.

Don't assume that your spouse can read your mind, but if you're trying to hide something, keep in mind that this person knows you better than anyone has ever known you, and part of the reason you married them is their brain. You are probably getting away with much less than you think you are.

Your marriage is not a static thing--you will go through cycles of being close to each other and needing distance, talking a lot and leaving things unsaid, getting along famously and bickering a lot. There is a level of comfort in getting the distance that you need and knowing that you can come back, knowing that you can argue with your spouse without them holding a grudge.

Don't hold grudges.

Respect each other's privacy, space, needs, dignity, foibles, pet peeves, and opinions. You can safely assume that someone who loves you will willingly make sacrifices for your happiness and safety from time to time, but you didn't marry a martyr. Neither did they.

In my experience, relationships fail because women expect men to change, and they don't; and men expect women not to change, and they do. Accepting your partner for who they are, or aren't, is a key to living happily with another person.

An excellent way to end a fight with your wife is to suggest that she might feel better after a nap. Then make it possible for her to take one. Likewise, an excellent way to end a fight with your husband is to suggest that he might feel better after a snack. Then make it possible for him to have one.

Pick your battles, and learn when not to talk.

Whatever challenge, opportunity, disappointment, disaster, or hardship comes your way, remember that you are on the same side. You chose each other for a reason. You are each other's advocate, partner, and best friend, and those things are even more important than the mere formal title of husband and wife. You were those things before you stood up in front of your friends and family and took vows, and, at least in my mind, they are just as sacred, just as significant, and just as permanent as the vows you took.

Don't worry. Marriage is easier than it looks. Anyone who tells you how "marriage is a lot of really hard work" may potentially be doing something wrong. I have found being married to be a hell of a lot less work and complication than being single ever was.

I love quotes. This is part of what our friend Kurt read at our wedding, and I found it to be profound then, and still true now:

"Marriage hath in it less of beauty but more of safety, than the single life; it
hath more care, but less danger, it is more merry, and more sad; it is fuller of
sorrows, and fuller of joys; it lies under more burdens, but it is supported by
all the strengths of love and charity, and those burdens are delightful." --
Bishop Jeremy Taylor

Dan and I wish you both the best of luck. We hope you find marriage as otherworldly as we have, and we are thinking of you this weekend.

Love,

Molly and Dan