DADWAGON

Here’s the way I see sleep training: Nothing works, and it’s evil. Here’s the way I see sleep training: It works, and it’s evil not to train your child to sleep. Here’s the way I see sleep training: I need sleep, and it’s evil for my child not to let it happen.

See where I’m going with this? Sleep training is a good thing if it works and you can live with it. If it doesn’t work (or you can’t handle the crying), then it’s evil and you shouldn’t do it. The decision is yours, it’s not necessarily applicable to anyone else, and frankly, the kid doesn’t have any say in it, memories or not, abusive parenting or not.

My ex and I got nowhere with sleep training JP until he was about seven months. Prior to that, all the basic techniques we were advised to use–early bedtime, bath-book-bed, co-sleep or don’t, put him down drowsy but awake–simply didn’t work. He had to be rocked to sleep, then placed comatose in the crib, and we had to leave the room silent as death or he’d wake up and bitch.

At seven months, we let him cry it out, which wasn’t much fun, but worked almost immediately. We were thrilled. Then we went on vacation.

When we came back, all sleep habits went out the window, and furthermore, JP learned a new trick–if he cried with his fingers in his mouth, he would throw up, and guess who’d come running? Us! This went on for quite a while. We searched on the Internet about it, talked to our pediatrician, consulted our inner daemons. Everyone seemed to say that this was unusual but not abnormal. We should simply keep doing what we were doing, clean him up, change the sheets, and put him back to bed, without making much fuss.

Easier said than done, but we tried.

Fact is, for about another year, we never got him down in the crib awake. Things improved slightly at 18 months when we shifted him into a toddler bed, but it wasn’t perfect. He could lie down awake, but if we tried to leave the room while he was still up, he’d freak. I’d end up standing in the dark for about twenty minutes before I could sneak out. Then he might wake up during the night or he might not. It was completely unpredictable.

JP’s pushing four now and these problems have grown hazy with time. He sleeps fine now (bath, brush teeth, book, night light, Curious George doll, song, kiss, sleep). But I haven’t  entirely got over the trauma of seeing him covered in vomit, screaming bloody murder, and weeping. I guess it’s part of the burden of parenthood. You move on but you never really recover.

I will, however, take some strong issue with what I felt was a certain air of smug complacency in Matt’s post on this topic. Like Matt, I approached sleep training “in a structured way.” In fact, I did all of the things that Matt did–only it didn’t work. Frankly, I don’t think this is a reflection on either of us as parents. It worked for him cause it worked for him. It didn’t work for me cause it didn’t work.

Now leave me alone. I need a nap.

Last night over dinner with an old friend, I found myself explaining, for the nth time, our childcare situation: We have two nannies, one who works three days a week and is awesome, and another who works two days a week and is pretty good. There’s one problem with both of them, however. Together, they cost at least $2,000 a month—our single biggest household expense. Honestly, that is a a fuckload of cash. (Or, apparently, only about a quarter of a fuckload.)

So, even though we love at least one of the nannies, we’re doing something about it. We’re going to send Sasha to day care. And we think we’ve found the right place, a bilingual English-Chinese school in a brand-new building in Chinatown. There, for about half what we’re spending right now, little Sasha will get to sing songs, finger-paint, eat home-cooked Chinese meals, and play with kids her own age who, at the moment, include one French kid, one Japanese, two mixed Chinese-white kids, and a black kid. It’s called, aptly enough, the Preschool of America.

So why do I feel so guilty? Is it because we’re going to have to reduce the hours of, and eventually fire, our awesome nanny, who herself not only adores our little Sasha but cleans the house, does the laundry and takes out the trash? (About the only thing she doesn’t do is speak English; her sole language is Mandarin, which has made for some comedic episodes in the nine or ten months she’s been working for us.) Is it because sending Sasha away for up to 10 hours a day seems like too much for a 14-month-old? Is it because I feel, on some level, like I should be able to watch Sasha myself and get a ton of writing done? (This is what women have dealt with for decades, right?)

Or maybe I’m just jealous: I want to go back to preschool, take naps, sing songs out loud, and eat food other people prepare for me!

Oh, wait, I forgot: I’m already a freelance writer. I’ve been doing those things for years.

Just returned from a midweek visit to stay with old friends and their toddler up in the stormy, lovely hamlet of Pt. Reyes Station, California.

They are in a mixed marriage. He “grew up redneck,” as he put it, in Southwest Virginny. She’s from the heart of San Francisco, and even went to the Waldorf school, a sadly anti-redneck institution.

As with many mixed-blood kids, their 18-month-old child is freaking adorable. Blond and sunny, with a fat belly and a fat lower lip, he’s just one of those children that even the kid-haters fall in love with.

But when it comes to language, he’s hit an early stumbling block. No, he’s not confused about whether to say Taters or Potatoes (I bet he sides with his daddy on that one, because really, Taters is fun to say, even for Yankees). Rather, the problem is that the boy’s first real, reliable, repeated word seems to be Goddamn.

He says it breathy and half-enunciated, like Will Ferrell’s kid mouthing off in The Landlord, but it’s unmistakable. He likes to say it especially when he’s climbed on top of a chair or bench. It’s kind of an exultation.

But just what should be done about it? They’ve decided to ignore it and hope that it would go away. It is a reasonable suggestion. It worked well when our girl dropped an F-bomb just a couple months after her third birthday. We kept a poker face about it, and she moved on.

Now our daughter Dalia has gotten permanently excited about other ribaldries: stupid, stupidhead, doo-doo-head—things she learned at school.

That I can deal with. All it proves is that her preschool classmates are a bunch of asshats who think doo-doo is a funny thing to say. But when a toddler—whose ears are still virgin to playground obscenity—swears, it’s a direct reflection on the parents. It’s a window into the less-than-perfect life we all lead behind closed doors.

I always felt this way when I heard Dalia scold her little brother. She didn’t know anything to say except what she hears me say: “Shoot, Nico, shoot. Shoot! I told you to leave that alone twice already!” She sounds like she’s doing a spot-on impersonation of an uptight, impatient bastard. Which, in effect, is exactly what she’s doing.

Notice that it’s grating even though there are no swear words. I guess I’d rather she just let out a happy hillbilly Goddamn than parrot my obnoxious G-rated tirades.