This I Know
Posted: December 10, 2013 Filed under: Down syndrome, parenting | Tags: diagnosis, Down syndrome, instinct, Parenting 7 CommentsWe are still animals. Animated flesh, blood, and bone. Electrical impulses make our thoughts. Despite how rudimentary it all seems, animals have knowledge of life and earth in ways that are difficult to comprehend.
I think we have mistakenly come to think of ourselves as beyond animals. We exalt human intellect as if we are beings of higher evolution, but are we really better, or even more competent? After all, don’t animals have intelligence that often seems beyond us as humans? How do animals know to migrate? How do they smell illness and death, foresee invisible danger? How do they know how to birth without help? How do animals know when they are ready to die?
Some is learned, but there’s more, isn’t there? Intuition or instinct, we sentient creatures share some kind of inborn knowledge. Whether it comes through our DNA, God, spirits, reincarnation, Mother Nature… I don’t know. I may not know its inner workings, but I recognize that I have some knowledge that is beyond what can be taught or even described.
There are a lot of people who thrive on telling others what is best, ideal, or right. Wisdom and expertise is packaged into how-to books, therapy, medicine, all manner of theories and methods. All seem to be for sale. Even things that are offered for free, cost elsewhere.
Entire economies are built on the idea of expertise. How to birth, how to eat, how to get your baby to sleep through the night, how to get your child with a disability to this or that milestone, or even how to find love. I know there is someone willing to sell past experience and expertise to me for every stage and piece of life.
What about what my animal nature knows? Without expertise, without fact or proof?
When we began to suspect that our son had Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), there came a point when both Latke and I just knew it to be true. He’d grown, cell by cell, in my body. In a primal way, I knew.
Yet, our knowledge wasn’t enough. We had to get a karyotype done. No one except our anthroposophical (read: not mainstream) doctor would act on what we believed, what seemed obvious. Our friends and family couldn’t move forward emotionally, despite what we said. I didn’t blame them. They were not the ones who had brought my son into the world. They didn’t know him like we did. Still, it was hard. Once a person knows something, it is hard to undo.
An animal will never have the ability to engage in what we consider to be higher level thinking. Yet, it knows everything that it needs in order to survive. In our bodies, I believe there is knowledge. Knowledge inside our animated flesh, blood, and bone. Knowledge that is difficult to explain, and maybe should never be explained. We are still animals.
Ten Steps To NOT Night Weaning Your Baby
Posted: December 4, 2013 Filed under: parenting, the husband | Tags: attachment parenting, breastfeeding, Down syndrome, nighttime parenting 22 CommentsRemember how Latke so confidently declared that he would one day regain the bed back from LP? How LP might be winning the battle, but that Latke would win the war? Well. Let me just share my handy ten step guide on how NOT to night wean your baby.
- Tell your partner you want to night wean, make a plan. As it is predictable that such an endeavor might involve some tears, it might be best to undertake the night weaning over a long weekend.
- On the first night, get your baby good and tired, stuff him full of dinner, then let him have a nice long nurse. Put him to bed. Stand over the bed and look at his adorable sleeping face and feel a little guilty for wanting to night wean him. Remember how much your back hurts from months of trying to sleep with him perma-latched to your boob from midnight to 7am, then don’t feel so bad.
- When your baby wakes for the first time expecting perma-boob time, send your partner to soothe him back to sleep. When partner pats the baby on the back for all of three minutes and insists that you nurse the baby back to sleep, you might give in and do it. Immediately regret it.
- The next day, discuss with your partner that perhaps more than three minutes will be required to soothe your baby when weaning him from the almighty boob at night. Maybe five minutes. Maybe (gasp!) even ten or more. Have your partner reluctantly agree.
- On night 2, listen to your partner cursing while getting out of bed to “soothe” your crying baby. Also hear him irrationally arguing with your baby about how rude it is to yell in the middle of the night. Devolve into a whisper-scream argument about how to soothe the baby to sleep. Your baby will momentarily stop crying because he will be inwardly laughing. His plan has worked, the ‘rents are crumbling, milk will come soon.
- Repeat steps 3-5.
- The next day, when your partner gamely suggests that he really needs his sleep to go to work (your long weekend is over by now), remind him that not only did you lose sleep while you carried his child for nine months, but that you woke up every two hours in the beginning to nurse the sleepiest-baby-ever. Yes, there was a blissful couple months when he slept through the night, but that bliss ended many, many months ago. Invite your partner to sleep with a kicking, 20 pound bundle that is permanently attached to his nipple all night, every night. Would a few tired days at work be the equivalent experience? Would it???
- Finally, be relieved when the partner wakes up and soothes the baby back to sleep with no cursing or arguing. Unfortunately, this night, you wake up the baby with your own allergic sniffles and snores. When your partner demands that you must then nurse the baby, recall the eight bajillion times that he woke up the baby with his snoring, and wait, oh, he never woke up and did diddly-squat about it except roll over and mutter about imaginary legal briefings in his head. Drowsily try to recall why it wasn’t like this when you night weaned your other two children, then realize you’re too tired to remember anything.
- Wake up in the morning to this little person:
- Take stock. Crook in my neck from sleeping funny, check. Tired parents, check. Irritated mommy, check. Outrageously cute baby who is still on the all night milk train, check. Night weaning: mission not accomplished.
And that, my friends, is how NOT to night wean your baby. In case you were wondering.
Entering Disability Culture as a Parent: Memory, Relativity, and Truth
Posted: November 26, 2013 Filed under: advocacy, disability, Down syndrome, emotional stuff, kids, parenting, the future | Tags: disability, Down syndrome, grief, memory, Parenting 21 CommentsMouse pronounces the word “remember” with a “b” instead of an “r” at the beginning. Bemember.
I asked her once if she noticed her own pronunciation. She sat back thoughtfully, held up her hands and tilted her head in that exaggerated way unique to young children (something about the small arms and chubby bodies), and smiled. She said that it was on purpose because the act of remembering, or bemembering if you will, is about thinking about how you were being. In her words, it came out something like, “Well… Bemembering is for how you loosed to be.” (At the time, she also had a really hard time with words beginning with “u”. She’d always add an “l” in front. So “used to be” became “loosed to be”.)
I was entranced with the resulting stream of questions. Read the rest of this entry »
Kimchi Latkes 