Labels

I've read all the parenting books so, believe me, I know labels are bad. If you tell your child, "I am so proud of how hard you worked on that math problem!" he will learn to value perseverance whereas if you tell him, "You are so good at math!" he will expect it to come easy and will quit as soon as he encounters difficulty. If your kid has a behavior problem and you tell him, "You are a bad boy!" then he will identify with that and continue to be bad. See? Labels are bad.

I promise I won't tell B but I really need to know how to label him. I am supremely confident that I cannot label him as a "good sleeper" but I really can't tell if he is a "bad sleeper" or an "abysmal sleeper." It's really not that I need to put my son in a box, I need to put my own suffering in a box. There is absolutely no intrinsic reward to staying up all night so I need words and labels to keep me going. I would like a badge to wear on my girl scout sash that says I am surviving this so that the world will know my suffering.

I would happily trade the badge for a box or two of Samoas

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I am firmly and perhaps delusionally (not a word) convinced that lots of moms lie about their baby's sleeping habits. I have heard more than one woman actually say, "Oh yeah my kid sleeps through the night, I just have to replace his binky a couple times". Umm your kid is not sleeping through the night if he is waking you up a couple of times. I don't really understand why anyone would feel the need to lie about this to others or to themselves, and I don't particularly care except that it makes it harder for me to stack my kid up against theirs and satisfy my own need for a label.

Basically, I think that B is in the "abysmal sleeping" category but I might think that because everyone else is lying. Am I really suffering more than most or is everyone else just suffering silently while I am whining?

"Words hurt, Mom."

I also need to know how much of the recent sleeping troubles can be blamed on the emergence of B's first tooth. Is there hope this will get better? Until the next tooth anyways? If I had to guess the answer is no, there is no hope. There will always be something. I think I'm going to start documenting his nights here so that I can somehow use this all against him later.

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