Week 1 of the "No TV on Weekdays" Experiment

A couple of weeks ago I was reading an editorial article in parenting magazine about a family that decided to change their TV rules and what happened.  The author said her two daughters (roughly elementary school age) would ask to watch TV a lot and while they had limits on how much they could watch, they did watch some every day.  The parents decided to make a deal with them, that during the week there wouldn’t be any TV and on the weekends they could go crazy and watch as much as they wanted (barring any planned activities).  It ended up working really well for them, and after the first weekend, that they spent obsessively in front of the TV, on the following weekends they watched a couple of hours on Saturday morning and then became interested in other activities and didn’t notice when their mom walked into the family room and turned the TV off. 

I have been pondering what to do about TV watching in our house.  Our kids don’t watch that much TV in the first place, but probably about 30 minutes in the morning and then 30 minutes on some evenings but not most.  While this fits into the “less than an hour a day” rule that I recommend when I’m seeing pediatric patients in the office, it still seems like too much to me.  I don’t think there are any good studies with “no TV watching” as one of the categories, because it’s just not realistic in our current society (sadly) but theoretically I think it is better for them to not watch that much TV.  I also get sick of them asking (or begging) to watch “just one more!” and so I thought we should try this strategy.

We implemented it one week ago and so far it has been really good.  They didn’t take advantage of the rule over the weekend like I thought they would, but they were busy with a lot of activities.  I was impressed though because at one point I offered to let them watch TV and they actually chose to go play instead.  Once the weekdays started there have been occasional complaints about “I hate that rule!” when they have asked to watch something in the morning and we have said “no,” but for the most part they have adapted well.  One morning I came downstairs with the baby and found Avery on the couch reading a book and Asher sitting at the table coloring.  They hadn’t even been told to find something to do, they had done it completely on their own! 

Interestingly, I’ve also found that I am watching less TV too.  I like having the cabinet doors on the media center shut, it makes the room feel nicer to me.  And there isn’t anything I really want to watch so I don’t have the same impetus to mindlessly turn on the TV like I sometimes will do when the doors are open.  I don’t know how long this experiment will last, I feel like with kids you just have to keep trying things and find the things that work, but I have my fingers crossed that this one will stick!

Four Months

Ok, so I’ve been meaning to write about Vivian since she turned 2 months old, but what they say about the 3^rd kid is true, their early existence rarely gets documented in the same manner as the older siblings.  But I thought it would be worth putting some thoughts down for posterity’s sake.

Let me start with the good. Vivian is pure joy in the form of a cuddly baby.  There is something about her, and it could be just me (since she is my last baby), but I am enraptured by her.  When I’m with her I feel like a little bubble of enchantment is surrounding us and time seems to slow down.  It’s almost like she’s a drug and I’m addicted to her; when I’m away from her I feel like a little part of me is dying and I just can’t wait to be with her again.  Every chance I get I snuggle with her, kiss her, and breathe in her sweet baby scent.  I know it doesn’t last forever and so I have been focusing on enjoying every moment that I can.  In fact, the other day I saw this Dreft commercial and at the end they say, “you have a child forever, but a baby for just one year” and I was a crying mess!  Only a year!  And it’s already 1/3 over!   

Other great things about Vivian (aka V, Baby V, Viv, Vivi, Cheeks McGee, or Chunkers) include her general “good behavior” (for a baby).  She started sleeping through the night around 8 weeks.  And by sleeping through the night I mean 10 pm to 5 am, which is a pretty good stretch.  By 3 months she was about 9 pm to 6 am and recently she has even extended that to the occasional 8:30 pm to 7:30 am!  I don’t think Avery slept through the night until she was over a year old, and Asher still wakes up at 5 or 6 in the morning!  I have heard patients tell me about their babies who do this and I tell them to keep it quiet, the other mothers will curse at them if they hear, never thinking that I would potentially have a baby who does that!  Also in terms of being a “good baby” she hardly ever cries and her cues are very clear (it’s easy to distinguish the “I’m hungry feed me now!” shrill refrain from the “I’m poopy” whine from the “I’m tired” whimper).  She can fall asleep pretty much anywhere and she doesn’t fuss, she just gets heavy eyelids and before I know it she is out cold no matter where she is.  She also is the only baby I have known who wakes up smiling.  It is the most amazing thing, because I will hear her in her co-sleeper making those cute little baby squeaks and I look over at her and as soon as she sees me a big smile spreads across her face and she starts to coo and blow raspberries.

The bad things are things I’ve already written about and so they aren’t really news.  We didn’t click with breastfeeding.  The lactation consultant that I was seeing every other week for the first couple of months felt like it was probably because of her being so sick in the NICU.  That combined with her tight jaw, poor tongue movement, weak suck and general distractibility at the breast.  Add to that that I’m not a prolific milk producer and we had the perfect storm for a bad breastfeeding experience.  For the past month I have been mostly pumping, and hating every minute of it and so I finally gave up and am in the process of weaning myself from pumping.  Vivian is oblivious; she doesn’t care and seems happier with the bottle anyways.  I know what we’re missing out on though and so I mourned the loss of our breastfeeding relationship for a couple of weeks before finally deciding to stop pumping.  There was a lot of crying and I don’t think I was very fun to live with during that time, but I have finally worked myself through all the grief stages and reached acceptance.

Another bad thing is the PTSD from watching her be so ill and in the NICU.  It’s only over the past few weeks that I’ve stopped having nightmares in which I go into her hospital room and she isn’t there and I am frantically searching the hospital and can’t find her and no one can help me find her and I wake up panicked and sweaty and shaking.  On a side note, a friend sent me this articleabout NICU PTSD, which is interesting.  Also a move in the positive direction is that I’ve stopped waking up randomly throughout the night to reach over and touch her and make sure she’s still alive.  I try not to think about what would have happened that night she was born if we had just gone to sleep (which is what we were in the process of doing before we decided to have the nurse unwrap her and take a look at her color) and I know that we would have woken up to find her dead and I’ve imagined calling the code and the whole horrible resuscitation scene that would have followed.  I recognize that thought process is not helpful (particularly since that didn’t happen) and so I’m working on letting go of that.  I realize there are so many worries and “what ifs” as a parent and living with that uncertainty is not easy for me, but seems worth striving for in order to live clearly in the moment.  It’s a process.

The final difficult thing is probably the biggest ongoing issue of the balancing act that involves managing 2 children and a baby and a husband and a part time job and a house that seems to want to fall apart all the time.  I may have used the juggling analogy before but I always remember it at times like this.  Someone gave us a lecture in medical school and told us in order to manage our complex lives we should imagine that all of our responsibilities and things we do are like balls that we’re juggling.  The key to making it all work is not to try to juggle more and more balls, or to juggle them better, it’s to figure out which balls are rubber and which are glass and then drop the ones that will bounce and not break.  I’m refocusing my efforts to become better about this because I know how precious my time is, not just with Vivian, but with everyone I care about and I want to be able to really focus on the things that matter the most to me and drop all of the other balls without breaking any.

So as you can see, overall she is the most amazing and wonderful baby on the planet (ok, ok, so I’m biased!)!  But in all seriousness, I do absolutely adore her and appreciate having her in my life; I feel so incredibly lucky.  She is truly a blessing and every day with her is a gift.