I am not cut out for this sort of duty. I like to be good at things. Really good. How am I supposed to know if I am good at this. It is definitely NOT. COOL. to compare your kid to other people's kids. So there is no way to know if you are doing a decent job. Besides, a certain level of stuff is just innate. My kid learned her letters early, she liked them and asked what they were. It certainly had very little to do with my parenting, because I never worked with her on flashcards or pushed her to learn these things. In fact, much like her current obsession with asking how everything is spelled, it was a little time consuming and annoying to answer all the questions. (You spell TABLE fourteen times in 15 mins and see how excited you are about children's neurodevelopment.) So I can't decide if this is a win for me, or just for biology. (Her father learned to site read words at 3 too.)
And then there are the things that you are definitely behind on. My kid has very infrequently slept all the way through the night. She usually wakes up at least once a night. Not for long anymore. Just long enough to join me in my bed if she is in her bed, or to speak a couple sentences at my semi-comatose body if she is already in my bed. I am lucky if this is skipped once a week. But even that has a price, because she certainly wakes earlier on the days when she doesn't follow her normal routine.
Sharing a bed is something that I struggle with making a decision on ALL. THE. TIME. It is a struggle to get her into her own bed at the beginning of the night. She would much rather just stay in my bed all night long. And on a daily basis, I am pretty ambivalent about it. She goes to sleep without me being next to her, so what does it matter which bed she is sleeping in when she does? The proponents of co-sleeping say that no kid has ever left for college still sleeping in their parents bed. However, I do know a 13 year old who is still uncomfortable sleeping in a room alone. And I don't want that for A. Plus, there would be the bonus of being able to leave her somewhere else overnight if I could feel relatively comfortable with the notion that she wouldn't cause dramatics in the middle of the night when she realized she was alone in her bed.
So along with thousands of other parents I am trying to feel my way through the dark to the best way to raise a kid. And sometimes failing. So if you figure out the perfect way to to it, drop me a line. Or don't, because chances are I will find you to be an insufferable know-it-all and end up being defensive about taking the easy way out on occasion. And now I have to go join my kid in my bed for a night of being kicked black and blue because she is always restless when she is sick and it is the time when I am most likely to bend the rules.
Oh, I so know the "You're doing it RONG" feeling. I get that about the way I feed my kid(s) all the time. And I spend most of my nights in my daughter's bed. My son is a great sleeper, on his own, now, but I can't work out if that just came naturally and therefore will with his sister too, or whether I forced it a bit, which I did when I was pregnant with her, and that's not going to happen this time... but I would really like to get back to my own bed, where my poor longsuffering husband waits patiently.
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