I sustained a very weird injury on Sunday from chopping ice outside. There is a pain at the very lower point of my right shoulder blade which is radiating up and into my upper arm, skipping the forearm, and ending in the wrist with half my hand being kinda numb. I did some yoga this morning instead of the scheduled weights and it seemed to help a bit. Also a b*tch turning my head to drive. Sometimes it seems there are more body parts that ache now than those that don't - particularly when some kind of low pressure (storm) system is moving in.

Is winter over yet?

Dagmar

Jessica-- sorry the news with Carter wasn't better. I agree with dh-- the vet can't PROMISE Carter will be fine with the babies so he won't.

By the way, my mom-in-law just broke her shoulder in three places (from tripping over the dog) and will have surgery tomorrow. Jessica-- did your mom have surgery? How long ago and how has she done? Can she drive? My MIL probably shouldn't be driving anyway so I'm kinda hoping this takes her out of the driving pool long enough that she quits driving.

Jessica~when DD was a baby DH would do the nighttime feeding for me. Although I always woke up, I'd stay in bed and let them be together. One night we heard her cry through the baby monitor and he didn't get up. I asked him why. He said that the past few nights he'd warm up her bottle of breast milk and go to feed her and she'd fall asleep before she finished it. He thought she didn't really need to get up to eat. That was it! She slept through the night after that. Now I know you have a few more things to deal with than we did, but I am an advocate of letting them cry it out. The first few nights might be difficult but it may work out.

Oh my, it's tax season! I've been gathering tax documents for our LLC to give to our CPA and haven't even begun to work on my personal stuff. I'm going to have a busy week or more.

I agree with alinnell, Jessica. Read The Sleepeasy Solution again. Children need to learn to self-soothe. If you teach them that you will always come eventually, you're conditioning them to keep crying until you show up.

I know it's hard, but it's better (for all of you) to make sure the babies are OK, and then after that let them work through it--or you'll be dealing with this 5 years from now. At least, that's what I have read.

Morning all,

We have been socked in with fog for about 4 days now. Visibility is so low it's eerie driving around. You see the bridge about 200 feet in front of you and fog all around - like you could be in a fog tunnel going anywhere. On Superbowl Sunday BF was getting ready to go out of town for 4 days for work Monday morning (which did get pushed back to leaving this morning, but he didn't know until later that night) and I could care less about the sport and was trying to use my only free time to tidy the house and prep for the work week, so we ate our typical dinner of grilled chicken salads and had a few beers at home. I did enjoy the halftime show. On Sunday morning I went to help paint the set of our upcoming play. I'm not involved this time around, but the set designer made the set for my play last fall and I owe him big time. When he called for help I came.

My mom finally got into her neurologist 2 weeks ago and found out she didn't have sciatica but rather a ruptured disc in her back. He says the lesion is still "significant" and she needs to have surgery on it and was surprised that she was able to walk around, go to work, and function as well as she had been. Thinking of anyone having back surgery, let alone my mom, makes me very nervous!

There seem to be a lot of shoulder injuries going around too. Jessica, I'm glad your mom is recovering and finally able to come visit you and the girls. Michele, I hope your MIL's surgery goes well and she recovers well (and that she can't drive anymore if she shouldn't be). Allison, I hope your symptoms ease too. Dagmar, weird - maybe a pinched nerve or something? My advice for any new injury is give it a few days of rest and then see how it is. Take care of yourselves, everyone!

Swan, good job budgeting your calories for the big weekend. How long before the Bloomsday race? Good luck training!

Arctic Mama, glad you're still out there!

I'm going to go wander around in the fog some more... have a good day all.

Hi all!

Just checking in - things are pretty quiet here.

Jessica - I can't imagine what it's like as I don't have kids but I do have some training and they say that babies have to learn to soothe themselves. I wonder if it's anything like crate training dogs? I have crate trained all my dogs and that first night is HORRIBLE as they bark and cry and squeal. Eventually they learn to settle down - that has been my experience with all of my dogs except my last one, Archer - he NEVER learned to like the crate and would bark HYSTERICALLY all night - this went on for nights and nights. Stubborn little s**t!!

Jen

Jen~there are some dogs that just cannot be kenneled. My friend was attempting to kennel a foster dog and she ate through three separate crates! I don't know if she attempted a wire crate or not.

Megan~sorry about your Mom's back. My MIL had back surgery for a ruptured disk years ago. I remember her saying when she woke up that it hurt but in a different way. She even declined most of the pain meds they wanted to give her. I hope your Mom gets better soon.

Michele~I hope you Mom's surgery goes well also.

Michele, yes, she had surgery to have a metal plate put in 8 weeks ago. She is now allowed to swing her arm back and forth and if her next x-ray looks good she can start lifting things in PT. She wasn't allowed to drive for a while but I think she can now. I think overall she's doing fine -- there was a tough period where she couldn't wash and dress herself but at this point she's able to do both.

Jen, that is my fear with sleep training! *Most* kids get the hang of it right away and are sleeping great in three nights. But just like some dogs can't be crate trained, some kids can't be sleep trained, and I won't know if my girls are part of that group without trying, and if they are then I will have put them through hours and hours of crying for no reason at all.

Allison, if it was waking up at night to eat that would be one thing, but they don't actually eat at night anymore. If they wake up lately they're either stuck on their tummy and don't know how to get back, or they are upset or uncomfortable in some other way and need a paci to distract them.

Megan, good luck to your mom with the surgery!

Sending supportive thoughts for Megan's mom's back and for Michele's mom's surgery. Hope all goes well.

It was sunny for a spell today - despite such dire warnings of accumulating snow starting tonight that I've preemptively cancelled a book group. Now I'm in that uncomfortable position of wishing to have been right and to have been wrong both, LOL.

Jessica for you and for Alison and Cecilia (sorry if spellings are wrong). Listen, you can't see into the future and you don't know whether this will be the case or not. If you are confident then A and C may well get into the swing of things quite easily. Soon they'll be able to roll over and their digestive systems will be moving along nicely. They'll love to sleep through the night and rampage around all day. Don't worry about what ifs, just try things out with as much confidence as you can manage. Tell them that this is what you do and it's a good thing to do. Tell them how a good night's sleep helps you and their daddy, and how it sets you up for the next day. They understand a great deal of what you're talking about now and they understand your tone of voice very clearly. Set things up, as far as you can, for success. It may not work at first, it may take quite a while to get straight and a few tries of different things but suddenly it will happen.

Jessica - this is going to sound cold and I don't mean it that way! But putting it in perspective - no baby every became permanently scarred by crying all night,

I know - easy for me to say, but if it's ultimately the best thing for them....right?

Jessica, I've had 3, and I've done the "let them cry it out" method with each one. My advice: wait until they can turn over from tummy to back - that way, you know there's no danger of suffocation. Then, be ruthless. My 3rd one (the most stubborn) took 10 days of nightly wailing before he quit. And there's always this thing called the "extinction burst" - a period of hysterical, renewed frenzy after a longish lull and fade-off of the crying, when you think they're going to simply explode with rage (and that's what it is- fury that you're not coming with the tried-and-true comfort).

The book I read (Solve your child's sleep problems by Ferber) actually recommends going in to verbally reassure and maybe even touch/pat the baby (but not pick her up) at increasing intervals: 10 min, then 15, then 20, etc. Eventually, we got to the point where we would talk soothingly from the door but not even walk in the room.

Believe me, babies don't have pain at night any more than they do during the day, and once they can roll over front-to-back, they can also learn to self-soothe. If you wait for them to learn how on their own terms, it may be 2-3 years before they reliably sleep through the night (some of my friends tried this approach, and regretted it).

Silver, thanks!

Andrea, yeah, the sleepeasy solution book we have is basically the Ferber method. If we do it, that's the technique we will do.

Jen, the problem is that the people who are anti-cry-it-out will tell you that it WILL permanently scar your kids, and there is no definitive research on the subject (believe me, I looked -- there are only self-reported results with no control groups for comparison). I don't really believe that they will be permanently scarred but I'd feel better about it if there was a cohesive study proving it. And it's just hard to listen to your baby cry when you know you could go in and calm her down, which is why they say cry-it-out is harder on the parents than the child!

In any case last night the prunes worked on A and she had a big #2 right before bed, then slept from 6-4 without any intervention required, so maybe the constipation was the problem after all. C meanwhile started crawling around and talking to herself at 2am then got angry when she couldn't manage to grab her pacifier that she'd knocked into the corner of the crib, and we had to go pop it in her mouth for her (after which she instantly fell asleep). Still not quite sure what to do about the 4am waking -- they're hungry, but they're not really ready to get up. Ideally they'd sleep until 5 or later, then get up and eat. Perhaps we need to feed at 4 and gradually reduce the amount or gradually shift the time later.

Sorry to derail the conversation with my babies' sleep problems! In other news, we got about 7 inches of snow last night so I'm working from home today. The main roads are probably clear enough but they haven't plowed our neighborhood yet.

Edit to add -- I can't remember if I mentioned it or not, but we did get the baby gates up and gate off a playroom downstairs. It is 10000% better than the situation we had before! The babies don't care which room they're in as long as they have their toys and mommy or daddy, and Carter has been amazingly good about it and seems happier with the girls gated away. He whined for a minute the first time I went in there with the girls but then wandered off and took a nap on the couch. DH tells me yesterday during the day Carter was very relaxed and did his usual migration between his dog beds and the couch all day, spending some extra time in the front hall where he could keep an eye on what was going on in the playroom.

dagmar, if the half of your hand that's numb is your ring and little finger, welcome to my (waning, thank goodness) world. T1/C7 nerve pinch at the base of the neck. I roll up a hand towel with an ice bag on top of it, and flop down on the floor on it for about 20 minutes. Sometimes need to do it a couple of times. My chiro is great about fixing it, but I still end up needing to ice it anyway.

allison, thanks for reminding me about taxes - yippee (not).

megan, sorry to hear about your mom. Back surgery is really scary; I hope she has access to several different opinions and a good stable of very experienced surgeons. 4 days of fog ... doesn't sound like much fun!

jessica, I hope the girls settle in and figure out the sleep thing soon! Being able to roll over is a big game-changer - I think about what it's like at night when I wake up and want to move - what if I couldn't? I'd yell, too!

Working from home today. For a change, it's not because of the snow; we're getting a couple of inches, no longer a big deal. DS14 has a stomach bug and is home for the second day. I really thought he was past it ... til I got the knock on the door at 4am. Plus there are 3 inspections on the bathroom today. From the looks of it, I will still need to do some shoveling. Yippee.

I've been AWOL after just starting to post again. Life getting in the way...
Jessica-I'm not in the cry it out camp but they are YOUR babies. Go with your gut on what to do.
Mud pie-ouch! Take care of yourself

Plenty of avocados here but no milk or bread as we got socked with snow. Again. Someone shoot that groundhog!
I had a cream cheese Danish relapse yesterday but I'm back on the horse this morning.
Make it a great one today everyone.