Strudel is now in her sixth month. She is approaching the apex of baby cutedom, which I think peaks at around eight months (after this you segue into toddler cutedom). She is getting wiggly–very wiggly. Wiggly like jumping up and down in my lap like an agitated baboon, and doing tummy doughnuts in her crib when she should be napping.
My companion and I have been following the basic tenets of attachment parenting, which seems to make Strudel happy. Many people say the key to making attachment parenting work successfully is to do as much as you can without going insane. In other words, to find a balance that works.
It seems everyone who cares about it has a slightly different definition of AP. This is how we do it:
1) We hold her as much as possible.
This is now getting difficult, as she flings herself around so much that even the sling is a two-handed proposition. Plus she has hit twenty pounds, so the sling is now hell on my neck and back. I am using the strolly a lot now, which she likes.
2) I still breastfeed her.
…Even though she now has sharp little fangs on the bottom and when she is really hungry she grabs my clothes with both fists, as if she is roughing up some punk, and headbutts my boob, openmouthed and panting, until I give up the goods. Her animally fervor is a little intimidating. Once these were nice, unabused boobies; now, not so much.
3) We spend as much time with her as possible.
I am going back to work soon, but I am arranging my schedule so that my Companion or my sister will be here when I am not.
4) We sleep with her…sometimes.
We used to sleep with her every night, from birth. But about a month ago, she developed a mean donkey kick and a tendency to rip out her father’s body hair, of which there is A LOT. It turns out that nothing makes a thirty-year-old man scream like a little girl like involuntary depilation while sleeping. Who knew?
5) We respond to her quickly.
Babies often cry a lot in the first month because life goes from being pinkinsh, soothing, and liquidy, to loud, colorful, and confusing. My friend Supa refers to this as the “perpetual acid-trip stage.” The textbooks call this “overstimulation.” For that first hellacious month of howling, we could do nothing but hold her while she howled. Eventually, she got the picture that we were trying to make her feel better. So now instead of an hour of crying, we get a couple of minutes of whining until we figure out what she needs.
Something had to give, though, after a few weeks of donkey-kicking. Those fat hams we call “legs” are getting stronger and stronger as she prepares to crawl, and my back was getting sore every day from holding her as she bounced. So we got the most wonderful thing in the history of Unattachment Parenting: The Jumparoo. It’s just like those old doorway jumpers, except this comes with its own frame. Strudel loves it; one day she went up-and-down for forty-five minutes, time that would would have ordinarily been spent fussing in my lap, because I don’t have that stamina. I can now forgive Fisher-Price for making that busted-ass Tickle-Me-Elmo.
