Little Sinners

One of the most precious things I’ve ever seen is the sight of E playing with R and successfully making her laugh.  R has a wonderful laugh—if I do say so myself—very giddy and infectious, but it is not particularly easy to make her laugh without tickling her.  But E manages to make her laugh quite often.  Usually this is just because R finds E quite entertaining, maybe because they’re both children and thus share that childhood connection, but sometimes it’s because E is actually trying to play with her and make her laugh.  Like playing peek-a-boo.

It’s one of my favorite things in the world to see.

After I wrote yesterday’s post, I remembered a moment I’d had one day when E woke up from her nap—a good year ago, if not more.  And I thought at the time that there was no better definition for how I felt (which was tired, worn, and otherwise struggling) than poured out.  It fit so perfectly.  Parenthood is so often about giving and doing and going on when you have no energy to do any of those things, about realizing that you can’t but you must and so you do.  (Er, not to sound unremittingly negative—I only mean that sometimes there are moments like that.  They seem to be fewer now than they were at first.)

So there I was, feeling the full weight of the phrase “poured out” in a dramatic way that I’d never understood before.  Of course, the next second I realized that I had unwittingly used a Bible phrase in a non-Bible context—and then it hit me like a load of bricks: if this is what being poured out feels like, then that same sort of dire abandon, that extravagant consumption of me-ness, should rise out of being a believer, in even greater measure.

I never cease to be amazed at how much parenthood changes and informs me about things I should have known long before.  It is so gracious the way that God uses everyday, mundane circumstances to impact me eternally.

So, it turns out that being convinced of cry-it-out and being accomplished at it are two different things!  E has defied all expectations—in a bad way.  After some three whole weeks of misery, we’re still at… misery.   A lot less misery than there was a week ago, but the child is still crying every time we put her down, taking unacceptably short naps, and being a wee bit clingy.

But it’s to the point of being quite livable, and is beginning to clearly improve.

She is also clearly doing vastly better in terms of intellect and even happiness.  She takes a much more proactive role in playing with us—inventing her own games commonly rather than rarely—and has actually started to play with her toys, whereas before she mostly ignored them.  Her babbling has increased.  Her physical skills have multiplied; she’s well on her way to being able to do whatever physical task she can conceive (this is scary!).  She has a new smile and smiles so much.  She also doesn’t seem to “wind down” before nap/bedtime as much as she did, although she goes to sleep faster than before.

All in all, cry it out continues to have clearly been the right choice, but I wish the books didn’t all say “10 days or less.”  With E, the 10-day mark left us with no hope in sight, and it’s really only been nearer to the 20-day mark that we’ve seen enough improvement in her sleeping habits to begin to feel confident that life would indeed go on, although many non-sleep-related gains were clear before then.

We’ve also found out the gender of #2—girl!—and named her R.  :-)  Hurrah!