I can't keep a plant alive and you expect me to raise a kid?

Two months in to motherhood and I live in fear of one particular thing. Well, two if you count Princess Fussbudget's bad moods.

I am afraid of the eternal Forming Bad Habits. It is the specter that lurks behind every decision I make, the start of every day, every time I get up in the middle of the night. It is the nightmare that haunts my plans and dreams of the future.

So The Books say to put baby on a routine. Not a schedule, mind you, a routine. A schedule says they eat at 10:30, stay awake until 11:30, and then nap until 13:30 and then eat again. A routine says that they eat when they wake up, stay up for about an hour or whenever they start showing tired cues, go down for a 1 1/2 to 2 hour nap, and when they wake up, they eat again. If they get hungry in the meantime, really actually hungry, you can feed them again instead of holding off until the clock.

A routine is the greatest thing for babies, the best thing since sliced bread. Touchy babies are comforted by routine, babies are build for routine, they like knowing what comes next. Routine routine routine. It will save your sanity, your sleep, your marriage, your life, whatever. Eat/wake/sleep routine is where it's at. Or so they tell me.

So I want wakeup time to be 07:30-08:00. What do I do when she wakes up at 06:30? What about 07:00? Feed her and put her back? Consider it her getting up? Let her cry it out? If I get her up, won't that reinforce her bad habit of waking up early?

So I feed her at 02:30. What do I do when she wakes up again at 04:00 and wants to eat? Babies can go a lot longer than that without eating, but that's what she wants. Do I spend half an hour trying to calm her back to sleep (to sleep or just to drowsy?) or do I feed her and let her fall asleep on the breast in fifteen minutes? Feeding her again so soon, that probably forms bad habits of waking up too much and letting her fall asleep while nursing is also a no-no, so I'm committing like double sin or something. But it takes fifteen minutes and often I don't even have to go back in to get her back to sleep. Then I get to go to bed. And I like my sleep.

Often during the day she asks to nurse maybe a half hour to an hour after I fed her. She doesn't need it. I'm relatively sure she isn't actually hungry. She just wants to nurse, for comfort I assume. That's not part of the routine! I'm sure nursing her all the time will form a bad habit.

What about when I put her down for a nap and she wakes up forty-five minutes later and wants to nurse (nursing after waking up is the part of the routine she seems to agree on)? Probably a bad habit.

I had been putting her down for naps in her crib (after she no longer seemed to be able to sleep on the couch) and those worked fairly well for a couple of weeks. I would go in and unswaddle her to encourage her to wake up at the end of two hours. It was great, everything seemed to be working, I got things done. 'Course, at that point I worried about putting her down to sleep too soon after her waking up, but I swear she was yawning a bunch and then getting fussy. Now, she seems to wake up in her crib after forty-five minutes to an hour, but if I let her fall asleep in her bouncy chair, she can sleep for two hours easily. She rouses from time to time and I just keep bouncing her with my foot and she'll put herself back to sleep (kind of like while I'm typing this). Is letting her nap in her bouncy chair a bad habit? I'm not sure what it's enforcing... getting used to being bounced, or not getting used to her crib.

There seems to be so many bad habits to try and avoid and the girl is only two months old. I can only imagine how much I'm going to mess her up by the time she hits three. Or thirteen. Or eighteen. And I'm sure it will be some sort of blowback from that time I let her sleep in the bouncy chair as a child. Wait for a psychologist to bring that up someday.

Look at all the evil sleeping habits she's been infected with:

I'm sure it's my fault when she doesn't sleep at night.

I have a theory...

My baby (or LO) turns two months tomorrow.

I don't actually know what LO means. I presume "Little One?" It's a shorthand I see frequently on stuff like the Birthways Breastfeeding Support Facebook group and the Ames Babywearing and Beyond group. I don't get it. I mean, it's fine calling your baby "Little One," as its a nice gender-neutral non-specific-age term of endearment, but why abbreviate it? While, yes, it takes about half a second longer to type out little one than LO, this is a PC with a full keyboard. I'm not texting. Heck, autocorrect even made abbreviations old fashioned. Seems weird. It's also another one of those random things that I've learned since becoming a mom. Like you have no idea how many new words I learned that relate to breastfeeding...

Anyway, that's not where I was trying to go with this.

I frequently have questioned how on earth people could have more than one kid. Like I said, my "LO" is turning two months tomorrow. During those two months, I have been cried at, had to get up multiple times a night (usually three, not counting all the times fifteen minutes later to calm her back to sleep), had to spend inordinate amounts of time bouncing, can't seem to take a minute to myself to dress or eat breakfast unless I wait for her nap time, have to watch my alcohol consumption and timing, been pooped on, changed multiple diapers, can't get away for more than a couple hours, and let's not even talk about how I haven't slept for more than four hours in a stretch and usually no more than six a night for those two months and not even a smile in repayment from a super-demanding tiny individual. And this was all after the traumatizing birth (that also kept me up all night) that ended with me in the operating room with a third degree laceration. Why would people repeat that? I love my little girl, but man, why try this over again?

People all tell me it gets better, but can you truly forget all of this within a year or two?

I have discovered the answer: sleep deprivation. Oh, you think it's a bad thing? Well, yes, it's a bad thing. There have been days where I have been dead on my feet and nights I cry in desperation when I hear her start to cry again after I had just begun to drift off, clocking only three hours of sleep by 3am. Sleep deprivation sucks. BUT, sleep deprivation brings memory loss.

Sleep-deprivation based amnesia. That must be the answer. For example, I honestly cannot remember how many times I got up last night. I know she woke up at 01:30ish, and again at 03:00ish (which is stupid), but I can't for the life of me remember if she woke up at 05:00ish or not. I thought she did, but examining that idea more closely, I found I couldn't link any memories with that specifically. Kind of like how you sometimes can't remember if you brushed your teeth because you've done it so dang often that it all seems the same and you can't tell if your teeth-brushing memory is from this morning or yesterday morning or a week ago.

So in six months or whenever she hopefully starts sleeping through the night and I start getting normal amounts of sleep, this whole episode will fade to the murky consistency of a dream. Kind of like how right after she was born, I'm like "If this is the way childbirth goes, I am never doing it again," and then I was sleep deprived because labor had started at like 22:30 (not when I would choose to run a marathon) and then it was exhausting and then I was drugged for the OR and all groggy and I haven't had a good night's sleep ever since. And I talk about "next time."

Well, it's either the sleep thing or kids get a lot more fun later on. Hard to imagine at this point (this week, she's cut her nap times in half).

(Ironic onesie)