 Yesterday at my 27 week prenatal visit, the doctor told me my baby is measuring small, only in the 4th percentile.
Me being me, I immediately started freaking out. I used to be a NICU nurse so I have seen plenty of premature babies with “intrauterine growth restriction.” It can be a very long and arduous journey for families. And more research gave me even more reasons to worry. The doctor doesn’t yet have an explanation for why she’s small. On the ride home from the appointment, unrelatedly, I was listening to a business coaching podcast, and the host said, “numbers in your checking account don’t cause anxiety.” It snapped me back to reality in a surprising way. My baby being in the 4th percentile isn’t making me feel anxious. It’s my thoughts about her being in the fourth percentile that are making me feel anxious. Lots of people would be anxious about her percentile, but not everyone would be equally anxious. My knowledge of the NICU increases my anxiety. Some people might think, “well, this is her first worrisome measurement; let’s wait another two weeks and see what happens.” Someone else, at the other end of the extreme, might have an absolute meltdown over the news. None of these reactions are right or wrong; they just prove that the facts, themselves, don’t cause emotions. In my case, just remembering this actually lowered my anxiety a bit. I’m still worried, and planning to research the issue, and get the bloodwork he recommends and take the vitamins and do the biweekly Doppler studies… but I am remembering it’s my choice to freak out or not. And freaking out doesn’t really serve me or anyone else so maybe… I’ll hold off a bit longer on freaking out. Also, he doesn’t want to see me again for another two weeks and one could argue that means he isn’t that worried. I mean, he could’ve sent me straight to Labor and Delivery and he didn’t. I think – now that I think about it – that he actually told me not to worry yet. Some people might actually take that advice. I’ll let you know how I do. PS It's been two days since I wrote this post and my anxiety has waxed and waned (currently at a moderately low level that is allowing me to function pretty well). More evidence that it's not the facts that cause my anxiety, since the facts haven't changed since my appointment two days. PPS The goal with self-coaching here is not to stop worrying completely. I want to worry, a bit, because it's making me get my blood work done, order the fish oil, and eat more protein and fat. But huge swirling anxiety just paralyzes me and prevents me from functioning in life. That's obviously not helpful. Self-coaching helps me manage my anxiety so that I continue to move through life. It creates awareness and helps me move through the anxiety, without resisting it, so that I can get on with things. PPPS If you'd like help managing your own big emotions, schedule a free consult for life coaching and experience a transformation in just one hour, guaranteed. If you love it, continue on at $579/month for weekly sessions. If you don't love it, no worries, no sales pressure. I'll be grateful to have had the experience of coaching you either way.
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 This phrase might be my favorite life advice of all. Apparently it’s credited to Voltaire.
My life coach teacher, Brooke Castillo, advises us to “do B- work.” Her reasoning behind that is if we wait until we are doing things perfectly, we aren’t getting our work out into the world. Here’s how I am applying it in my own life. One way is with this blog. I really want to write a sleep post AND a life coaching post every single week. But life as a single working parent is busy. So I commit to writing and hitting publish every week, whether or not it’s a great piece of writing. (It never is.) To my amazement, clients sometimes tell me my blog posts are helpful. Which is amazing! But most important of all, I am keeping my word to myself. That I get it done every week, no matter what. B- work for the win. I’ve been posting (almost) weekly for 3.5 years now. Pretty good for a B- worker. And I’d venture to guess that some of my posts might even be better than B- work. And my recent goal is now two blog posts a weeks, and I'm doing pretty well with that these last few weeks. Another way I’m doing B- work is with my eating and my exercise. In case you didn’t read my Valentine’s Day post (link), I’m pregnant. Twenty-six weeks along. It’s been a rough one. WAY more fatigue and nausea than with my previous pregnancies. Thankfully I am finally feeling much, much better, thanks to iron injections and pure "tincture of time." And so I, a lifelong exerciser and generally healthy eater, have taken many, many days off from both. It’s easy to beat myself up over it. Like, really really easy. I am not a person who says “all bets are off since I am pregnant.” But I am finally figuring out that that serves no one, least of all me and my habits. When we beat ourselves up, we inevitably do even worse. So i am striving for smaller wins. Eating one healthy meal at a time. Redefining “healthy.” (Right now, it looks like vegetables aren’t really going to happen, and neither is fish. Mac and cheese and PB&J are in the rotation. Reducing but not eliminating lime popsicles, the magical cure for nausea.) Attempting SUPER easy workouts. These decisions don’t make me feel great… but then I remember that beating myself up helps no one. No one ever took long lasting action from a place of self-disgust. Where do you find yourself beating yourself up? Can you imagine motivating yourself from a place of love and acceptance? As if you were motivating your child instead of yourself? Imagine your child learning to walk. You wouldn't criticize them for stumbling after 3 steps. You'd be cheering them on saying, "good work, you got this, get up and try again!" I promise you that setting the bar low doesn’t mean you won’t do great work. You will. It just makes it easier to start. If you have a goal you’d like to achieve, I can help. Set up a complimentary life coaching session and experience a transformation in just one hour, guaranteed.  I always advise my clients not to let their children sleep late on weekends and vacations, no matter how delicious it feels.
There’s accumulating evidence that the same is true for adults – that a consistent bedtime and morning wake time actually reduces the risk of heart disease. One study showed that varying your bedtime and the amount you sleep each night increases your risk of plaque in your arteries. The effect was especially pronounced in those whose sleep varied by more than 2 hours per night. Another study showed that adults with erratic sleep schedules had twice the risk of heart disease versus those who did not. A third study showed an increased risk of mood disorders as well as high blood pressure and high cholesterol. (As a former NICU nurse who worked overnights 3-4 times a week, I am not at all surprised to hear about the impact on mood. Going home at 8 am to sleep away a beautiful Saturday was certainly depressing. But this impacts even those with much less dramatic sleep schedules.) The American Heart Association now asks for sleep duration in calculating risk of cardiovascular disease. Apart from cardiovascular reasons, you will also feel better if you keep a regular sleep schedule, no matter how ludicrous that sounds. See, when you sleep late one day, you have social jet lag the next, which makes Monday morning that much more painful when it rolls around. So, see, parents, your young children are actually doing you a favor by waking you up early on weekends. You can repay the favor by waking them up early when they reach their adolescent years. If you'd love to get your whole family sleeping more reasonable hours, schedule a free consult today. You can feel amazing in 2 weeks or less, guaranteed.  Many of you know that I am a single parent by choice SMC. That is, I chose to have my two children on my own because I hadn’t found the right partner at the time I was ready to start my family.
Shortly before COVID started, I met a man who became my partner. I thought we were forever. We got engaged and scheduled a frozen embryo transfer (FET), after losing a pregnancy a year and a half prior. September 12, 2022, we went for that FET. September 16, 2022, my partner made an unpleasant comment to me before storming out of our house. A few hours later, to my shock as well as his, I sent him a WhatsApp message announcing that I was ending our relationship. The following day, September 17, 2022, I had a positive pregnancy test. Two months after that, I met my current partner. Someone who fills me with delight. It’s too soon to say how that love story will turn out. This love story is from my baby to myself. She made me, suddenly and sure heartedly, find my own internal wisdom. I’m so grateful for this tiny dancer inside me who taught me when it was time to leave. Who made me suddenly confident that I was worthy of so much more. I'm also so grateful to my life coach, the remarkable Sara Bybee Fisk, for teaching me so much about the work I needed to do on myself to be my best possible self in relationship with someone else as well as with my myself. Are you ready to find your own path to happiness? Schedule a complimentary life coaching session and experience a transformation in just one hour, guaranteed.  Once your child is no longer safely confined in a crib – and this includes children who are still sleeping in cribs but are able to climb out – you have to think strategically about safety.
Parents often think that confining a child to their room once they are able to get out of bed independently is somehow “mean.” I couldn’t disagree more. If there is a fire – god forbid – in your house, you want to know FOR SURE that your child is contained in their room. Having a terrified preschooler wandering the halls in that scenario is incredibly dangerous. A much more likely scenario is that your child will leave their room and go looking for you, or go get some snacks, or go watch on a device. None of these are ideal from a safety or sleep perspective. As you may have read in my blog post a couple of weeks ago, children are likely to sleep better and longer when they do not have free reign of the house. Knowing there’s nowhere to go often leads children to sleep longer. Some children are patient, compliant little people who will wait for you until you open the door in the morning. If you have one of those, great! If not, consider a baby gate, door knob cover, Door Monkey or lock on the door. I promise you are not being mean. You are keeping your child safe and well-rested. You are still allowed to respond to their calls for attention. Keep a baby monitor in there if you like. Just make sure it’s up high and out of reach. Which reminds me: in case it wasn’t already, everything in the room still needs to be bolted to the wall. Dressers and bookshelves are especially dangerous. I also suggest removing all toys except for stuffies and books. Make the bedroom really boring. Any toys that must be kept in there should go in the closet, ideally locked or up high. We want the room to be as conducive to sleep as possible. You should continue using blackout curtains and white noise. And in case I wasn’t clear above, your child should always sleep with their door closed, and so should you. For fire safety reasons. And also because you don’t your child monitoring your every move around the house, staying up late while you anxiously tiptoe around. Just start out with the rule that everyone sleeps with their doors closed. It’s much easier to start off right than fix a problem later. If you’d like help corralling your Little Wanderer back to their room for better sleep, schedule a free consult and see how you can achieve your goals in two weeks or less, guaranteed. PS If you have a question you’d like to see answered in a blog post, please email your question to [email protected] I’d be happy to address it and I am sure lots of other parents have the same question as you!  Remember how we were all making New Year’s Resolutions (or themes) just a few short weeks ago? Feels like ancient history, right?
I’m coming back to exercise after nearly a week off due to a horrible throat infection -- and after a couple of months of health issues that have been sapping my energy -- so while I am normally a religious exerciser, I am suddenly feeling a huge dread of working out. It’s so hard to get started and so easy to find excuses after a week off. I mean really, what’s one more day??? I’m proud to say that today I did finally take the plunge and my mood is soooooo much better as a result. That was my driving reason to start – I was just so cross without my daily dose of endorphins. My children, unfortunately, bear the brunt of that. Which isn't fair to them. But feeling grumpy like that isn't really fair to me, either. Not when there's a (relatively) easy solution. If you are not a frequent exerciser, I get it. The days are so short and so filled already. I’ve got a couple of life coaching tips for you today to help you over the hurdle to starting: "dread sprints" and “ridiculously easy goals.” The concept behind dread sprints is that if you know you are going to do something you really don’t want to do, you might as well get it over with first thing so you don’t spend all day dreading it. (Glennon Doyle calls this “worst thing, first thing.”) Let’s say you have to go to the post office today to mail a package. This is the sort of task I would totally dread. You could either get it done at 9 am, when the post office opens (and when there’s no line, I might add), and spend your day feeling deliciously accomplished, or you could wait until 5 pm, close to when it closes (and there’s much more of a line), and spend an additional 8 hours dreading the task you have already committed to doing. That’s an additional 8 hours of unnecessary suffering. Wouldn’t you rather get the dread over with and enjoy a day of delicious accomplishment? (Credit: Brooke Castillo at the Life Coach School.) The other idea comes from life coach Martha Beck, in a book I read many years ago, called the Four Day Win. Ridiculously easy goals set the barrier to success so easy you can’t justify not achieving them. For someone who wants to start exercising, a ridiculously easy goal might look like putting on your walking shoes and walking one block. Or some other distance that takes a ridiculously short amount of time. Two to five minutes. An amount of time so short and so easy that you can’t come up with a reasonable excuse to avoid it. (If you can come up with an excuse to avoid it, make your goal simply putting on your walking shoes. Go step outside onto your front step. Breathe deeply three times. Come back inside. That’s it.) For one of my clients who wanted to organize her life, we started with her ridiculously easy goal of just clearing off the kitchen table and wiping it down after every meal. Another client – who wanted to lose weight – made her goal having a clear kitchen counter every night after dinner. This small feeling of accomplishment fueled her energy to attack other, more ambitious, goals. Beck recommends taking 3 weeks of fulfilling your ridiculously easy goal before making it harder. Personally, I don’t necessarily have a set timeline… I think you just keep achieving your ridiculously easy goal until you feel the desire to make a slightly more ambitious goal. Take it as fast or as slow as you want. When in doubt, make your goal easier. As for me, I made my ridiculously easy goal a little different, since I have a decades-long history as a person who exercises. So my goal for right now is 30 minutes a day of exercise BUT at as low of an intensity as is necessary to get me across the finish line while still feeling good. I don’t break a sweat. I barely even breathe hard. But no matter. I am moving my body, and that’s what counts. If you find that your brain tries to discredit your win, correct that pesky brain immediately. That "perfect is the enemy of good" mindset keeps us from ever trying to reach our goals. Our brains think it's safer to not even try than to try imperfectly. Our brains are dead wrong about this. And then I record my accomplishment in my exercise spreadsheet, because I am a data nerd and seeing all those little cells filled in with workouts is a lovely dopamine hit to my toddler brain. If you want help achieving your own (not so ridiculously easy) goals, I can help. No matter what the goal. Schedule a complimentary life coaching session (scroll down past sleep coaching to life coaching) and experience the transformation.  “hi Abby, happy new year. I hope you are well. I am enjoying your email series.
We have a new challenge with Gabe. He has learned to climb out of the crib. I don’t feel it’s safe transitioning to a toddler bed because then he can wander around all the time and I also don’t feel safe leaving him for bedtime and he is on a bedtime strike most nights. I thought about pushing his bedtime later but that’s not good for his rest. He also still shares a room with his 6 year old sister who goes to bed later than him. What do we do with this toddler behavior? This wasn’t an issue with my daughter as far as I can remember. Thank you” I love this question because so many parents come to me after things have gone terribly wrong with the transition out of the crib. Oftentimes, after the transition, parents find themselves sitting in their child’s bedroom for long periods of time at bedtime, or even lying down with them at bedtime and multiple times throughout the night. It’s so much easier to prevent problems than it is to fix them… though don’t despair if you are already at the place of needing to fix them! My first piece of advice is: climbing out of the crib doesn’t have to mean the end of the crib! Try talking to your child, sternly, first. Explain to them that it’s not safe to climb out of the crib. With my older – and very compliant – child, I explained that if she continued to climb, I would have to take her crib away to keep her safe and this would make her very sad. To my amazement, this actually worked! So definitely try that. Just because a child can climb out the crib doesn’t mean they definitely will. Similarly, just because they can climb out of the crib doesn’t mean that you should move them. I generally counsel parents not to move their children to an open bed before age 3-4 years old unless they are engaging in seriously dangerous behavior. (My friend Amy’s daughter Eleanor taught her two year old brother, Leo, how to stand on top of the bars of the crib and then take flying leaps into the crib. This was a case for getting rid of the crib immediately!) Oh, and one more thing on this point – a new baby arriving at your house is not a reason to move your toddler to an open bed! Trust me, the last thing you need with a newborn at home is a toddler wandering the halls. Use a pack n play or borrowed second crib for the new baby until the older child is fully ready for a new bed. When you do decide the time is right to make the switch, please don’t use the words “big kid bed.” Most toddlers and preschoolers have some serious ambivalence about growing up. Sometimes they want to, other times, they want nothing more than to crawl back into the womb. Using the language of “big kid” is too much pressure. If you are able to continue using your child’s crib and just take the side off to convert it to a toddler bed, great, do that. That will feel nice and cozy to your child (hopefully). If you are moving to a toddler bed, put the new bed next to the crib and leave the crib set up for a few extra days. If you plan to move straight to a twin bed, I suggest putting your toddler’s crib mattress on the floor next to the crib first and let them make a gradual adjustment. Let them sleep on the crib mattress if they want to. If your child decides they want to go back to the crib for a few days, that’s fine. Let them. In the meantime, keep the twin bed in the room and use it for bedtime stories. That is a nice way to build pleasant, low-pressure associations with the bed. I promise they won’t want to sleep in the crib forever. In my next post I’ll talk about safety and thinking about turning your child’s room into a giant crib, once they are out of the actual crib. PS If you have a question you’d like to see answered in a blog post, please email your question to [email protected] I’d be happy to address it and I am sure lots of other parents have the same question as you! PPS And if you are struggling with a nighttime wanderer, you are not alone! Schedule a free sleep consultation and we'll get you sorted out in two weeks or less, guaranteed. |
AuthorAbby Wolfson is a pediatric nurse practitioner, certified child sleep consultant and certified life coach for parents. She divides her time between Brooklyn, NY and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Archives
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