Scratch that idea

[wrenb]

My afternoon has reminded me of all the reasons I shouldn't take on the care of someone else's baby. I don't really know what I'm doing here, parenting, I'm just making it up as I go along. That's fine to inflict on my own offspring but not so cool with someone else's.

Danny will be 9 months old in a couple of weeks. He's starting in on separation anxiety which makes my goal of Nap Week very much 1 step forward 2 steps back. This afternoon we napped together for a little while and then I tried to get him to go back to sleep. No dice. As a parent I can do that. As a daycare provider, no way. I know I need to teach him how to go back to sleep, but I don't know how and I'm not going to let him scream and cry the way my husband's cousin thinks he ought to. I've heard her daughter cry -- it was heartbreaking and she's still a lousy napper.

So I'm going to muddle through this milestone-strewn month. I'm going to watch my baby work out how to walk and how to say Mama and Dada (or Abba, Drew's not too picky), and he'll cut those two top teeth, and then the two wonderful hours known as Nap Time will return. I'm going to be helpful but I'm going to admit that I cannot make my son sleep, it's like trying to teach a pig to sing.

Comments

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

Really, we're all just making it up as we go along. All of us. Even (especially) me. The parents who think they know it all, simply haven't yet had the kid who will teach them otherwise.

9 months old is a hard age, and as you point out, there are lots of milestones happening in Danny's life right now, which makes it harder. Cut yourself some slack, and take it as a clue that it's a good thing you're not trying to do two 9-month-olds simultaneously. If doing in-home daycare will solve lots of other problems for you, which it sounds like it would, then go for it -- with the expectation that there will be a learning curve, that mothering two for several hours a day will be harder than mothering only one, and that everyone will have some adjustments to go through before it becomes smooth sailing.

Also, no reasonable parent would expect you to do with their kid something that most parents can't do with their own. Kids sometimes skip naps, or cut them short, and it's not like daycare providers have magic to make them sleep longer. At least, I've never heard of any. Screening parents of prospective charges for compatible parenting philosophies and expectations is totally possible and very helpful.

Also, good luck with sleep this month. I hope Nap Time returns promptly for you.

Newt

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Also, no reasonable parent would expect you to do with their kid something that most parents can't do with their own. Kids sometimes skip naps, or cut them short, and it's not like daycare providers have magic to make them sleep longer.

Yes this.

My kid goes to daycare. Some days he naps. I prefer those days. Some days he doesn't. Not the DCP's fault.

Now, it is also clear to me that my child sometimes behaves quite differently in care than he does at home, and that (sometimes) this *does* equate to "magic" for the DCP, from my perspective. (Other times, it's magic for me, from the DCP's point of view.) Now and then, I have heard something about my kid from a DCP that causes me to question whether they have, perhaps, mistaken me for someone else's mom.

It's fine with me if DCPs make it up as they go along, within certain very broad guidelines. I need them to be consistent, caring, affectionate and reasonable. I expect that we cannot possibly anticipate every contingency. I expect that there will be a schedule and that my kid won't always go along with it, and when that happens, what I expect is not that the DCP will crack down on my kid and Preserve the Holy Schedule, I expect that the DCP will have a reasonable set of backup plans (if you're not napping, color quietly, read a book, whatever) and that they'll let me know.

And I expect nine month-olds to be composed of equal parts devilment and sunshine. It's a tough age - I remember feeling as though someone had come in the night and replaced my baby with this completely different kid.

[wrenb.livejournal.com]

It's not so much that he didn't nap, is that I did. I can imagine the enraged blog posts of "My DCP was asleep on the job!".

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

Ah, that. Yeah, that'd be a bit more of a concern, although juggling two kids does just change things in interesting ways.

Newt

[mijven.livejournal.com]

Thus my advice to write out a typical day for you. Is your catching a nap when one kid is asleep okay by them? Or does it need to be both? Do you need to be in the same room, same level such that a kid crying in a crib(?) would rouse you (i.e. what most moms do occassionally.) I've certainly napped when kids were awake (although not mobile & awake before this past year - when my sometimes 5-am little monsters were told that intentionally waking me before 6:30 got them put into bed until 7am.)

[anemone.livejournal.com]

My daughter's daycare couldn't get her to nap, and I was never bothered by it at all. (All the other kids napped nicely in the morning and the afternoon, but there she'd be, awake and playing.)

Now, if they'd left her to cry it out, I'd have felt differently about it...