Wait, there are how many mommy bloggers?

I'm reading a lot about blogging, for a piece I am writing. About mommy blogging, in particular, in the US and here in Switzerland. I came upon a number in neighborhood of about 3.9 million mom bloggers in the United States. Do you know how much data those people could provide about any number of life issues?! About marriage, about kids, about women's health, about parenting and work and all the rest.

That is a lot of writing about parenthood.

And given how confusing I find the whole "pacifier surrender" question, for our particular situation, I'm thinking that the data in there could be so useful. I'll bet there are at least two groups of kids when it comes to pacifier users. The casual and the addicts. I think my kid is the latter. And I would love to know more about her type, who are still walking around during the day with coat collars or anything else portable to chew on, even when they don't have a pacifier. Who are extremely orally focused, and get a lot of comfort from that. Is she at risk for smoking and a host of other drugs, the withdrawl from which I may one day have to witness in the same way I held her shrieking in the middle of last night when she didn't have her pacifier? Was that a foreshadowing?

Turns out, she didn't even remember that crying.

I do.

It was rough. On me and M more than her, apparently. And we finally gave it back to her (it had been her choice to try without, and, honey, I gave it the grad school try). And retreated in slight panic to the living room, kind of feeling echoes of her early months, shrieking in the middle of the night. Sheesh.

Or maybe she will just always chew on something as an adult, and a pen will do fine. Will trying to break her of this habit lead to good things or bad? Or at the very least, is she likely to snap out of it, like with so many other things that seem to just click into place with time?

Come on, Big Data, start looking at child development - things like colic factors and behaviors, tantrums, milestones, and, please, first of all (and soon), pacifiers.

Thanks. Hope to hear from you soon.

In control

I'm a control lover. I don't know that I'd go as far as calling myself a control freak (although M might, at times), but I like to plan. Especially for trips. I like the feeling that if I just pack the right things, everything will go well. I am the person you want to have on your Eurail trip, or vacation in Costa Rica or Ghana. I'm the one who brings tiny mosquito nets, and Cipro (for, um, traveller's, um, food related illnesses), and Ibuprofen, and sunburn cream, and sea sickness pills, and extra ziploc baggies for stuff, and a lock for your huge ass backpack. And cards, and a small pair of binoculars, and a camera with a waterproof case for underwater photos, and extra batteries.

And, you get it.

With the arrival of baby A, and her who-knows-what-it-was sleeping problems almost 2 years ago, I turned these skills onto managing her environment. It didn't work, but it gave me something to obsess about, and make myself calmer.

She has now had 3 chest infections in the last few months, complete with horribly constricted airways that make her wheeze and breathe hard. And after bout number 3, I sit here at the computer, with baby Singulair in an unopened box. The pediatrician has suggested it, and said emphatically how it has no side-effects. And I chose it instead of an inhaler with spacer that she'd have to learn to take 5 deep breaths from. Last night, before opening the box, I went....yes, online.

I know. Dumb. But it is one of those basic-good-parenting things, where at least I want to see what side effects are written on the drug's website for this stuff she is supposed to take all winter long once a day. And even the pharmacist said only that it might make her a bit drowsy (so I was thinking, "Score!"). Let's just let the website speak for itself:

"SINGULAIR may cause serious side effects. Behavior and mood-related changes have been reported: agitation including aggressive behavior or hostility, bad or vivid dreams, depression, disorientation (confusion), feeling anxious, hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that are not really there), irritability, restlessness, sleepwalking, suicidal thoughts and actions (including suicide), tremor, and trouble sleeping. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have, or your child has, any of these symptoms while taking SINGULAIR."

You have got to be kidding me! Aggression and hostility and sleepwalking?! I mean, ok, now I've also gone to the forums and heard from parents whose kids have night terrors from the stuff. But how am I supposed to know if they are from her medication or would have happened anyway? Depression? Ai, ai, ai.

The package sits, still unopened, on my desk. Between this keyboard and the screen. And I'm thinking that the inhaler isn't sounding so bad anymore. I think that for a kid who is already excitable, and who is going through the tantrum stage, while we are also trying to adjust, and already screams in the middle of the night, and who I've suspected might sleepwalk someday based on how she wakes from sleep,....this medication will have to be the only option for me to start her on it.

So this is one of those cases in which I can control. But if I couldn't, as I've realized will be the case with any future pregnancies and birth defects, or behavior disorders (let's just say that the NYTimes Motherlode blog has been going all out on posts about all sorts of scary things), those are the situations I start to get nervous. Maybe, if we decide to have another child, we should adopt. How horrible a thought is that, to adopt to avoid birth defects. What if we have a kid who says he/she wants to kill us, at age 5? There was a post on Motherlode about this, too. Granted, the follow-up from the mother calmed me down.

Even though my brain can imagine a kid with all the possible problems all at once, nature probably cannot, and it is only in my upper-middle-class existence that I even have the luxury of pretending that any of life is predictable. That serious illness won't strike, since we can afford medication when A's breathing gets hard or my depression sets in. That it is worth planning for 10 years from now since we can assume we will all be around. That life can't suddenly get turned upside down. I forget sometimes that it already has, two years ago, and that it sucked, it was hard, I hated being in the middle of all of it, but, that in the end, we all survived.

Time to get some predictable work done, in my predictable Thursday, with my predictably sleepy dog.

Do they even make binkies in my size?

Two things have been going on at our house lately that probably shouldn't mix. We started trying (on my insistence) to wean our daughter of her pacifier, and she is having a "don't touch me, help me, comfort me, push my stroller, carry me, mom" month. The latter I've posted about before, and I'm still working through my resentment and hurt feelings some of the time.

I'm not so far gone that I can't see the benefits of having a daddy's girl. I get a break. I can go lay down with a magazine for 5 minutes because she could care less what I'm doing. But the becoming just a cook and cleaner is tough on the ego (good thing I've started work again) because I've been so focused on successfully navigating motherhood and bonding with her these last 18 months that it is a slap in the face to be physically pushed away by her tiny hands. "Ne, ne ne ne ne!" she shouts in Lithuanian, her one unconscious concession to my influence.

I feel pretty alone in figuring out how to deal with it, in that I don't feel like I have viable, mature models for how to weather this storm. How do I not take it personally? Should I stay in the room, or can I leave to pout a bit and cool off? What does it mean about me? Or is it just about me as a mother versus her father? Is it a phase? What have others gone through?

This is where Facebook has once again brought me comfort, from those who've gone before me and seen it pass as a phase. From R, posting on here, that's she's also felt hurt by it. And the parenting forums also brought some relief, through my tears yesterday (I'm still hoping it was a PMS day, how emotionally raw I felt by evening), assuring me that it is a phase, that it happens to many people, but most importantly for me, letting me know that a lot of people feel hurt by it. Knowing that my experience, as well as my reaction, is common, helps. That this is a tricky thing to navigate, especially for those of us who are still working through self-esteem issues.

And once again I'm convinced to try to fake not feeling hurt, in the hope that the practice will help me take it better, to concentrate more on myself as a person and not just a mom. Maybe it is finally time for me to take that 3 day trip by myself now. As usual, I can swing quite far in either direction, so at some point I even wondered if I should try to get pregnant again if this was a long phase, because then she wouldn't mind me not being as physically available. Yeah, that last one has been set aside, but it was a good exercise in trying to think around the hurt.

But it is important for me to acknowledge the hurt, because that was not something that was done often in my family. And you can't deal with something, or work through something that you don't admit exists.

There are some changes in our house, now. I've asked M to make sure he takes care of himself enough during the day to be able to be her one-and-only in the evenings and to have the energy for it. I have to find some set of things that A and I can do together, just the two of us. Things she does with her mama. After some serious screaming in the middle of the night, which did not result in a poopy diaper, I seem to have come back into vogue in A's world and we had a fun morning together. And given how much I could have used a huge pacifier this weekend, and a bunch of parenting forums that tell of kids growing out of binkies on their own time, I'm thinking that A should keep hers until she's ready to let go of them.

The plural of anecdote is data.

Well, it can be.

I both hate and love online parenting forums and discussions because they can make me feel totally horrible about myself, like a parenting super-failure, or they can make me feel normal again. The latter kind are the data of which I speak.

After a 5-7am mama-as-doorstop session, I was googling "fidgety kicking baby sleep" this morning and stumbled on a blog entry followed by a slew of comments by parents with kids like mine. Not the same age, not all girls, and definitely not all born in Switzerland. But these kids all seem to perform the same sleep gymnastics that Baby A does. I say she tries to bench-press me off the bed, they call it Kung Fu hour, and Olympic sports trials. They speak of trying to calm flailing little legs and arms that constantly wake the owner by....GASP....practically immobilizing their kids with wraps, parent legs and arms, you name it. Just like I've done.

And, just like for me, it works. About half of the time. The other half of the time, the mini-gymnast just gets pissed off and screams their head off. Yup, that sounds about right.

All of a sudden, as I'm chuckling about another parent's description of the same thing I've been though, I feel okay. I feel lighter. I even sign in and write a comment. Not only is the flailing happening to other babies, but so is the parental exhaustion and the being screamed at, loudly, when executing a move that just worked this morning. The pressure is off again. My kid is just a wiggly. Like all these other babies that parents are posting about. We've gone to doctors and read books, and we're all still no further in finding a solution to the wiggles. But boy is it nice to know there are others out there.

That transformation through mutual understanding is what makes it not only data, but very valuable data to me. When someone can describe many aspects of my kid's movement habits, even more accurately than I can, it is data. When the same 5 or 6 traits come up over and over again in these comments - fidgety, early development, sleeps in a swing, swaddling not working after about 4 months when the kids just get really good at escape, knocking binkies out of mouths, Kung Fu time, I consider that data.

Whether or not there is an explanation, there is a common experience, which is data.