Grabapple.net

..using Oompa Loompas. Enjoy.

Jeez, cleaning out spam from old-post comments is like cleaning the slime out of a swimming pool. Leeches.

I may have to make commenting more difficult with passwords or something, looking into it.

Though there was one accidentally-appropriate “try X@n@x!” comment on a post about depression. ha.

Now that Nathan’s sleeping more and I’m sleeping more, I find myself struggling with some unpleasant tasks (still having to write those letters about Nathan’s birth) and a confusing decision.

Actually, I’m not struggling now with the letters, just needing to find the time to get them down. I woke up about 5 this morning thinking about my stupid midwives (they’d just sent me a card commemorating all the babies born in their practice), and the letter I needed to write kind of came to me. I took my shower and cried a little, as thinking about this always makes me do, but then I was able to go to work. I know I’ll get those letters out soon, now, because I’m a lot stronger than I was five months ago. A lot less ignorant, too, thanks to ICAN. And people like DoctorMama.

Anyway, so going to work. It brings up a new dilemma, one that I haven’t really discussed with anyone yet, not even Matt (hi honey!). Today was the last day for the girl I’m ostensibly replacing. And I was asked more than once, “So you’re going to stay, right?” And since I was being asked in front of my boss and a big group of people, I always said brightly “That’s the plan!” and made a joke about staying unless they booted me, ha ha. Because there’s almost no chance they’ll boot me. I’m here, I’m partially trained already, and god knows no one else is volunteering to do my job.

But I don’t want to stay.

But we need the money.

But Jesus gay, I just hate this kind of work. I haven’t been an admin assistant for over 7 years…haven’t filed anything, or made copies for people, or given a rat’s ass about anyone else’s messes unless they made messes for me. And suddenly here I am, back doing crap I hate, and I know this will sound snotty, am way too talented to be doing.

Do you know what I did today? I printed out clip art of rabbits and eggs and lilies and glue-sticked (stuck?) them to construction paper. Then I went downstairs and stapled them to a bulletin board. This is part of my job. This, and ordering coffee (I don’t even drink coffee) and replacing toner, and faxing things for people, and checking out AV carts. And some never-ending data entry. And printing out forms. And reserving rooms for classes. All of them necessary jobs, except maybe the rabbits, but professionally speaking, it’s like being sent from high school back to elementary and being taught how to spell “cat” all over again. Aagh.

You see, here’s the stuff I actually know how to do. I can design books and newsletters and annual reports. I can edit and write textbooks…I’ve written five already. I aced the copyediting test Simon and Schuster sent me (they didn’t hire me because they were cheap bastards, but they told me over and over how impressed they were with my test). I can manage a budget, train a new employee to do my job, hell, write a fucking training manual (I’ve written or rewritten at least 3 that I can remember). I can scan and professionally touch up photos, develop negatives, and make prints in a darkroom. I can use PhotoShop, Quark, InDesign and several kinds of databases. I know a little bit about web design and animation. I’m one of the few people I know who have ever had to use a pica ruler or spray mount.

And I’m not using any of that knowledge here, and it makes me feel mean and hateful.

To make it worse, I’m working for a hospital, a place thick with bureaucratic foofaraw, endless minutiae, and constant tiny crises that make everyone scream and run in circles. There are 3 forms that have to be printed for everything, and I’ll tell you right now, they’re all stored on a single computer drive with no logic whatsoever, so the simplest tasks take dozens of clicks. I spend half my time just looking for some damn Word or Excel document that somebody stuck somewhere and named something random that has nothing to do with its function.

So it’s not like I can just turn off my brain and do the job. Stupid as it is, you have to pay attention not to fuck it up. And I don’t want to. I resent using any of my memory for the work I’m doing. I resent having to care about it.

On paper, it should work as a temp to perm job. The money’s ok, and better than my alternative, which is butt-ass broke unless I get a successful interview soon. The people are very ordinary but nice, not any more psychotic than your average minor bureaucrat. I get to scurry around the bowels of the hospital several times a day, which is good exercise, and kind of fascinating. And I am certainly physically capable of faxing things and printing out bunnies. But really, it’s killing me.

It sounds sensible to say, just take the job but keep looking for a better one. But it feels uncomfortable to me. It requires me to lie all the time about whether I want to stay, and then it will require me to lie to get time to do an interview, and then I will eventually leave after my fairly nice boss has taken a lot of time to teach me all the tiny details of my job and she will have to start all over.

In the past, I’ve just turned this kind of thing down. I’ve been able to be hopeful that Better Job will come along, and it did. But I wasn’t a mom in the past, wasn’t trying to help my husband get his business off the ground, wasn’t living with my folks. I’m feeling all this pressure to play it safe, and it’s messing with my head.

It worked, I’ll be damned. Well, it’s worked once. He barely cried five minutes last night before passing out. He woke up twice, cried briefly and got his diaper changed and his back patted before going back to sleep. I slept five hours uninterrupted, then got three more. Heaven. Though I’m still behind on my sleep deficit.

Tonight he wasn’t as tired at bedtime, and fought it. He cried about 15 minutes when I put him down, angry “mah-ah-AHH-AHHHH!” cries. I went in and rocked him for about five minutes, and he went to sleep. He’s asleep now, hasn’t moved.

I’m not at all certain that we’re out of the woods, but now that I know he doesn’t have to eat every 3 hours at night anymore, I know we’ve made progress.

I know a lot of people think babies just scream at night for no reason whatsoever, but I think it’s understandable. I mean, we all have nights where we can’t sleep and have to distract ourselves to relax. Babies can’t do that. They can’t even wiggle themselves into more comfortable positions until they reach a certain age, aren’t allowed pillows, have no idea what a strange noise outside signifies, and can’t possibly understand why Mom and Dad can’t be up whenever they are. Going to sleep and going back to sleep is a skill, and they need practice at it. Nursing was first necessary, and then a prop for Nathan. Now we’re taking off the training wheels, and hoping he can find his balance.

My bed is calling. See ya’ll later.

After nearly five months with Nathan, I’ve discovered there may be different rules for huge, strong babies. Especially when it comes to sleep.

For one thing, we haven’t been able to swaddle him since he was 3 months old. Some babies go up to 7 months with swaddling, long enough to transition them into more mature sleep patterns. Not our Hoss.

For another, although we cuddle him constantly, we can’t carry him anywhere in a sling or a Snugli–because you don’t know pain until you try to carry 23 pounds of squirming, flailing, not-yet-sitting-up baby in a piece of fabric slung around your middle. So “wearing him to sleep” as suggested by the good Dr. Sears–out.

I don’t know if this is related to size, but he mostly hates co-sleeping. And a 27-inch long child can kick you hard in tender places when he flails about at night. So feeding is complicated (he’s in a crib, he’s heavy to pick up and put down all night), and so, yes, we have been known to bottle-prop. I know. We’re going to hell.

Oh yeah, and that whole keeping him on his back thing till he’s a year old? I don’t know how we can do that, now that he’s figured out how to flip over, short of tying him down, which I can’t imagine CPS would find OK. We tried putting him in a curved padded changing pad with a sheet on it, to keep him in place…and he can wiggle himself right around and out of it. Hulk smash. Hulk no want to sleep on back…Hulk’s parents out of luck.

And tonight we’ve had to give up one more good-parenting bit of doctrine, and try letting him cry himself to sleep. Because we’re done. Zombies, the walking dead, feeling-that-you’re-not-far-from-death done. We can’t keep it up. I don’t remember what it felt like to have gotten enough sleep, and I need my brain back, I need to function.

The funny thing is, I didn’t know how bad it had gotten until Matt started staying home and took over Nathan duty at night. I was used to my suffering, but I couldn’t stand watching him suffer through it, because I knew just how bad it was. Nor could I keep doing it myself while working during the day, not that Matt would let me do that. When you get to the point where you can see no relief in sight, ever, then you have to do something. So we are.

So far he’s woken up a couple of times, cried about 5 minutes, and gone back to sleep. But this is usually the best part of the night for him, so we don’t know how he’ll do between midnight and 7, the worst part. And in some ways, we don’t even care. Hell,we’re not sleeping anyway. Not sleeping because you’re waiting for him to wake up and complain and not sleeping because he’s already complaining and you’re just waiting him out feels about the same.

Nothing else has worked–not the things I’ve mentioned above, not the things others have told us to try. Not feeding him cereal, more milk, elevating his head. Not the crib vibrator thingie, or music, or white noise, soft lights, or a toy to hold. Not cuddling, not songs, not baths, nothing. Nothing has kept him from waking up every 2-3 hours and needing us to get up and soothe him or give him a bottle to go back to sleep.

So this is all we have left; let him cry. Hope he’s old enough to learn how to put himself back to sleep. He’s not a hysterical cryer as a general rule, he actually hates crying, so I have hope that he’ll decide the whole thing’s not worth the effort and not cry very long. But I have no idea what will actually happen. Matt and I are sleeping in the living room tonight, because there’s no way we’ll sleep if we’re in the same room with him. We’ll check on him if he cries, make sure he’s safe, but that’s it. No getting up till 7.

I’ll let ya’ll know how it goes.

2 am. Not sleeping. I’m supposed to get up at 6 to be at work by 7:30. I’ve been sleep deprived all day, and I expected to conk out the minute I lay down..but no dice. So I took a sleeping pill a few minutes ago, and I’m going to have to call in a sick to a job I’ve only been working at for 4 days. Because getting behind the wheel in my current condition is a Bad Idea.

I’m really in a quandry about this job anyway. It’s an assistant position, and to be honest, it hurts my pride to be anyone’s assistant anymore. I don’t like making appointments and keeping track of other people’s crap. I want to have my own projects and work on them, not be at other people’s beck and call for random assignments all day.

But…we’re broke. And this hospital education job is mine for the taking, if I want it, providing they’re willing to offer me a decent raise from my current temp wages at hiring. Which would seem likely. I’m supposed to be in a test-drive period, but they’ve already given me the Grand Tour of the place, introduced me as the current girl’s replacement, etc.

Friday my potential boss asked me if I liked it there, because she was going to set me up on email and didn’t want to bother if I hated it. I smiled and said of course I didn’t hate it. But what I meant was, I don’t have anything else going on and we need cash, though I will certainly bail if something better comes along before my probation is up.

I know if I leave they’ll be mad, but I also know they could fire my ass for no reason any time, so I’m not going to feel any guilt. But that doesn’t mean I like lying.

The people are nice, and I can do the work, even the assistanting parts–I even have ideas for improving some of the processes I’m being taught. But as far as engaging my brain the way my last job did, no. I really miss that job.

This is the second time I’ve had to leave a job I loved, and it still sucks. It wasn’t anything that could be helped, either time, but it’s so hard to find work that both pays decently and makes you look forward to going in every day. Jesus God, there are so many sucky jobs out there.

I’ll tell you something else that bugs me about this place, and it will sound stupid to some of you and totally understandable to others. The decor sucks. It’s all done in that institutional blue-gray noncolor of carpet and walls. The walls are beat up and there’s no art on them. Our lobby is just this featureless space with computer-printout Mission Statements as its only decor. In the middle is a round table where we all eat lunch together (not thrilled about that either), so it always has plastic spoons and half-eaten bags of chips scattered on it.

The rest of the office is a little cubicled space where I work and where the file cabinets are, and then offices all around the edges. Part of the cubicle space contains abandoned office supplies (adding machines, broken chairs) and one of the offices has a hospital stretcher full of broken resuscitation dummies and fake plastic limbs used for some kind of medical training. There are broken IV stands in the corner. Why? I don’t know.

The cubicle walls of the girl I’d be replacing have a depressingly predictable assortment of Dilbert cartoons and “You Want It When??” type office-humor printouts that date back to the Stone Age. My first day I wasn’t set up on the computer yet, so I spent a large portion of it rearranging the magnetic-poetry words (which no one had ever made poetry with) on the file cabinet into categories of Verbs, Nouns, Descriptors, Punctuation Marks, etc. It seemed the right thing to do, in case, you know, anyone ever did want to make some poetry.

Add in the inevitable stained ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights and it’s all just all so Joe vs. the Volcano.

So anyway, it’s not breaking my heart to call in sick tomorrow, though I genuinely didn’t plan to and would prefer to work and get the money. I wish getting the money was just a more enjoyable process. I wish I could just take a pass on this and be gleefully optimistic that I’d find the better job out there. Then I go and buy a $25 can of formula, and pay $2.65 for a gallon of gas, and I think, well, hell. I don’t know what the fuck to do.

Every blog that involves baby-raising must have a sleep-related post. And if it’s a better read blog than mine, it will even have flame wars. Thankfully, my obscurity means I get more spam than flaming.

But as I was saying: sleep. I sure do miss it.

I have given up on ever Not Being Tired for the immediate future, like say, the next year. It’s like having mono, this feeling. I’m always operating at sub-usual energy levels. I actually slept in today, and it didn’t make much of a dent. Every parenting book I can remember reading says that this is normal, although I tend to question whether the way we structure work and home life now makes it much harder than it has to be. But since it’s supposed to be normal, I can’t complain, except here on the internets, because if you complain to most more experienced parents about not getting enough sleep, they inevitably say “Yep, I didn’t sleep for six years when little Cletus was born!” and thus cut off your whining at the knees. Because this is Just How It’s Supposed to Be. Or something.

Or they tell you “Hey, let ‘em cry!” which also seems a little wacky, considering the amount my kid eats at night. He’s hungry, obviously, and he does eat a lot during the day, too. So should I just let him go hungry? And then, we share a house with my mom, so it’s not just us to listen to the wailing, it’s us and her and her husband. Nathan’s only four and a half months now, so his waking every 3 hours isn’t unusual. Just kicking our asses.

And he’s not really a screamer when he does wake, just a grunter and moaner. He doesn’t even seem to want to wake up, because he hardly opens his eyes, just flails around (being too big to swaddle) and whimpers and grunts until you feed him. You get the feeling he’d rather stay asleep too. I wish I could help him with that. But the way he empties bottles, he seems genuinely hungry, and he won’t take a pacifier. He’s not quite old enough for a lovey to snuggle, mostly he just stuffs blankets or toys into his mouth and makes muffled grunting wheezes.

He’s not one of those babies that has a hard time getting to sleep, most of the time. A little rocking, a warm bottle, he’s out. Or even some days when he’s not quite out, you can just put him in the crib and he will get himself to sleep. But only once or twice in his whole life has he slept more than 3 hours at a stretch. And my face shows it.

Most days I wake up sore, like I’ve been hiking, only without the healthful benefits and fresh air. My caffeine habit is alarming, and yet I would not dare make the drive to work without some. Matt is doing his part, by the way; it’s not that I’m going it alone. But two people without enough sleep isn’t any better than one person without enough sleep.

And I miss the rest of my life, the non baby-minding part where I read books and planned weekends without having to schedule sleep makeup time. I miss being sharp, not having this fuzzy curtain over everything.

It won’t last forever, but when you just want to sleep again, even waiting one more day might as well be forever.