Desperation

From Bambini

This week we made a big change to the schedule as we desperately try to find a solution to the 5am wake up problem. I suggested we ask our nanny to come then so I can can just slide into bed and relinquish the stress of keeping them from screaming and waking up Barbara ending her sleep an hour early. You can go a few days without that last hour but week after week it really starts to get to you.

We discussed several possibilities and finally settled on her choice of taking over at 3am after only 5 hours of sleep. The reason is that Luca in particular will wake up and scream until mom comes then he goes right back to sleep. I am unable to get him to do that without an hour of rocking him around the living room if I am lucky.

So we make up the sofa bed and she sleeps in the nursery until they wake up and then gets them back to sleep so she can get her 7 hours. Then the nanny comes at 7am and she comes back to bed for an hour before starting work. So far she says its working. This is great for me cos I now get the first 7 hours of the night.

We have been asking everywhere for a solution to this. I called all my friends this week and told them how miserable this is. They all say the same thing. It gets better. Twins are ten times more difficult.

We were accosted by a man and a woman in the park who saw us walking around with our usual dazed and confused expressions and the neon sign on my forehead that reads "just shoot me". There were so chirpy I wanted the ground to open up and swallow them. Then they told us they both had twins. I asked if they were together but I couldn't make out the answer. Can you imagine having twins and then finding a partner that has twins?

Any way he had two girls and she had a boy and a girl. They told us this is the hardest part and "it gets better" and right before I could find something appropriately cynical to reply with, he announced he was a SAD.

The whole situation then just moved into an alice in wonderland experience for me and I just shut up and let Barbara be polite. He went on to tell us he was the Stay At home Dad... SAD. Then he went on tell us he thought he was having heart problems and went to see his doctor who prescribed tylenol pm... for the babies!!

I just stared at him dumbfounded as the most cherie person I have met in a year explained that his doctor told him is was really important for him to get sleep and this worked really well. I heard Barbara mutter something like "don't even think about it" as I ambled off to find somewhere to sit down.

He went on to tell us his astounding experiments with his twins. First they decided to see how long one of their daughters would go if they just let her scream in the middle of the night. After the Tylenol revelation, I couldn't wait to hear this answer. "Six hours" he announced with a kind of "shucks wouldn't ya know it" tone of voice. I think my mouth must have fallen open at this point cos Barbara grabbed my hand and dragged me off the bench.

My god, is it any wonder the world is filled with dysfunctional people. I would love to have heard about his experiments with disciplining these kids. Every sentence containing advice ended with "but check with your pediatrician" like a mandatory lower third disclaimer in a drug commercial. Now that I think about it, he must have been medicated himself because normal people just are not that happy.

This week we did check with our pediatrician because Nico's head is not growing evenly. We noticed it a little while ago, and the doctor mentioned it, but no one rang the alarm bell so we figured it was a part of the growth process.

I decided to read some more just in case and discovered that this is actually caused by the baby sleeping on its back with the head in the same position. Who would have thought! If not caught it can be permanent. I then read about a treatment that involves fitting the baby with a plastic helmet that pulls the head back into round slowly over a month or so. The helmet must be worn 23 hours a day.

The simple solution is to just keep him off that side of the head so I began to design a new bed for him. The first idea was to see if he would sleep on his side. I had noticed that he would be uncomfortable in his back all night and he seemed to want to roll onto his side, so I propped him against the side of the crib and experimented for a few nights. Mr Happy from the park would be proud of me.

That seemed to work really well so I moved him into the wicker bassinet thing that we have and propped him in place on his side with blankys, pillows dirty laundry or anything else that came to hand. Apart from being cited by Barbara for a dress code violation this worked great. The only problem was SIDS.

SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) is another one of those medical mysteries.
"To date there is no known definitive cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). What is known is that male infants are at a slightly higher risk than females and there is a higher rate of incidence between 2 to 4 months."
Basically babies just drop dead in their sleep. They stop breathing and the first thing you know about it is when they don't wake up.

Since no one has any idea what is going on, the medical community looks at statistics and makes observations. They began a campaign with the annoyingly trite title of "back to sleep" (runner up in the retardedly obvious pun of the decade award, second only to the severely aggravating, embarrassingly inane; "Click it or ticket" campaign by law enforcement.)

Doctors used to tell anyone that would listen that babies should sleep on their stomach. Then in the 90's they did some studies that showed the incidence of SIDS was reduced when babies sleep on their back. Side sleeping is a slightly higher risk it seems, but nothing like sleeping on their tummies.

While doing my research, I spent at least a few minutes wondering if Mr Happy would have any qualms about participating in such a study. I could imagine him eagerly handing over both baby girls to the men in white coats with some gleefully helpful quip about doing anything to help the cause. We decided to be a little more cautious.

I thought it might be fun to design a baby monitor that detected breathing. I had all kinds of ideas that the mere description of which would make Barbara;s hair stand on end. So I did an internet search and discovered someone beat me to it with the breathing monitor.

This clever little device just detects movement, even breathing. It is that sensitive and it works beautifully. If there is no movement for 20 seconds, an alarm sounds and you rush in to find your baby dead. It also has a microphone so you can hear them in another room. I think they got this part wrong because everyone knows babies come equipped with a scream capable of piercing cement walls, but it makes you feel like you are right there with them.

So now we are ready to begin another chapter in the sleep deprivation project and hopefully this will work better.