Thursday, October 10, 2013

Schroedinger's baby

Gah things are wild around here lately. Just wild. Our faith community has this deal that we are supposed to spend 5 minutes a day doing faith stuff together and we just aren't able to manage that. Too many temper tantrums and emotions saved up to exploding at bedtime for us to manage 5 quiet minutes together... My personal favorite thing from the last week was trying to explain my sentence "Spouse has to jump through hoops right now so we can keep getting unemployment money since Spouse's job is only part time" to my 5 year old. It took 10 minutes and I don't think it really clicked with her, since she's never seen a dog doing tricks, barely ever seen a hula hoop, and has a very limited concept of money at all.

Anyway, I thought I'd talk about this interesting/strange thing that's helping me cope lately. I hear a lot from folks who are parents of babies (experience with baby/pregnancy loss or not) that they worry about if baby is still alive and breathing while asleep. I worried about it a lot too. Then one day I didn't any more.

This thing occurred to me and I have found it helps me sleep better. I just have decided that Little Monster in her crib asleep is Schroedinger's baby. She could be asleep, awake, or dead. If I go check, the odds go up very much that she will be awake since I smell like food. If I don't go check, I have to accept that I don't know. I've concluded though that (very morbidly) if she's dead now, she'll still be dead in the morning and if I've slept I'm much more likely to be able to cope so why rush the inevitable by checking on her now?

Probably having accepted sleeping Schroedinger's baby is healthy or weird or I have no idea what actually, but it is working. We don't have a monitor and we are clearly not getting one since her bed is within 10 feet of ours (in the next room).

And now Schroedinger's baby is howling awake. AWAKE and must be attended to.

2 comments:

  1. Firstly, sorry things are so wild at the moment. Secondly, I actually do this same thing... although I STILL worry at 21 months.. but I have convinced myself that there is no need to check as it wouldn't change anything and better for me to be rested, etc. Sometimes I think of checking her while in a towel about to get in the shower if she is late waking in the morning, then I think, no I'll shower, get dressed, then check if still asleep. It seems awful to say but either way, it does make sense.

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  2. I think having Stella in our room the first 6 months is what saved me from this worry. By the time we moved her, I really didn't stress about her not waking up (partly b/c she was still waking up to nurse at that point anyway!).

    Good luck with the unemployment hoops. Such a pain, but such a lifesaver too.

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