Hey there, new mom! How many parenting books have you read today? Two? Five? None?
If you answered none, you’re my new hero (or maybe you’re just too tired to cram words into your brain.) Also, I don’t believe you.
Y’all, I read EVERYTHING when my first was born. It made me crazy.
#RockStarDad liked to ask his hormonal, sleep-deprived, rage-filled wife (ME!), “What’s the parenting method we’re trying this week?”
One such method was E.A.S.Y. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Maybe you swear by it. Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about.
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E.A.S.Y stands for: EAT-ACTIVITY-SLEEP-YOU. And you can thank Tracy Hogg for this FUN!! acronym filling the pages of her book, Secrets of the Baby Whisperer.
The book reviews promise:
The first half of the book is devoted to E.A.S.Y – [Hogg’s] name for creating a structured daily routine for you and your baby that makes the most of your baby’s awake times and also leaves time just for you. These concepts aren’t designed to force your bundle of joy into not following her body’s needs, but rather to create a feasible middle ground between total rigidity and on-demand food and sleep (and no time for mom to shower). If it still strikes you as too regimented, keep reading.
Giving E.A.S.Y a try
This momma L.O.V.E.S rigidity and structure. Newborns are the anti-Christ of rigidity and structure. So I devoured this book.
And I rigidly and structurely enforced E.A.S.Y.
Baby woke to EAT!
Feeding-time cuddles are the best.
Baby did an ACTIVITY!
Like tummy time (is there anything more hellish than tummy time for a newborn?) Or gazing at pictures of purple horses. Or reading Look, Look! by Pete Linenthal. (I recommend pronouncing the author’s name in a German accent to make this a more intellectually stimulating read.)
Baby tried to fight me when it was time to SLEEP!
I played around with the concept of YOU! Should YOU take a nap? Should YOU eat some food? Should YOU do laundry? Should YOU take a shower? Should YOU masturbate stare lamely into nothingness?
Somehow YOU-time never achieved the time-just-for-you nirvana I was hoping for.
I kept at it.
I practiced E.A.S.Y all day long and into the night.
It worked great during the day, but at night I turned into a bit of a dumbass.
The E.A.S.Y midnight disaster
Once the sun went down, when babe woke to EAT!, I thought we needed to move into an ACTIVITY! Typically called, “Let’s change your diaper,” stinky or not. Baby never liked this – baby was smarter than momma and wanted to just skip on over to SLEEP!
But, no, dear, diapers MUST get changed. Can’t be havin’ any pee or poop-soaked diapers rubbing up against newborn skin all night, right?
I discovered that babies aren’t real excited when they nurse themselves to sleep and you wake them up for a little diaper-changing ACTIVITY. This morphs into the hours-of-no-one-sleeping-and-baby-crying ACTIVITY.
Y’all, the baby whisperer left the building, whisper-screaming, “Good luck!,” over her shoulder at me.
Thankfully, my best friend and mother of four rescued me from all this. She simply said: STOP READING BOOKS and start nursing the kid to sleep.
Okay, but what about the whole wet/stinky diaper thing?
I moved beyond the dumbass-mom stage and searched my soul. I tapped into eons of mother-wisdom and came up with MY OWN PARENTING METHOD.
How to successfully implement E.A.S.Y at night
Here it is: 10 steps to implement E.A.S.Y once the sun goes down. Otherwise, it ain’t E.A.S.Y being the baby whisperer.
1. Prepare baby for bedtime.
2. Lather baby’s bottom with 50 gallons of maximum strength diaper cream. (I HEART Bourdreau’s butt paste.)
3. Put baby in 12-hour, overnight, soak-proof diaper.
4. Nurse/bottle-feed baby to sleep.
5. Hours later, baby wakes to EAT.
6. Nurse baby on one boob (or bottle-feed).
7. Indulge in the ACTIVITY of cuddling while baby eats.
8. Put baby down to SLEEP! But FIRST, CHANGE DIAPER only if stinky.
9. If you changed diaper, nurse baby on the other boob (or bottle-feed AGAIN) until sweetness falls back to SLEEP!
10. Spend YOU-time sleeping.
What are your baby whisperer tips? Comment below or on Facebook at MothersRest.
Photo credit: Sadık Kuzu from Unsplash.com