Have you seen this woman?
If so, please buy her an excellent cup of coffee and tell her I sent you.
Hello and welcome to the Smartmouth Mombie portion of the sleep solutions for your baby, toddler and preschooler Blog Book Tour. I am absolutely thrilled to be hosting part of this celebration of Ann Douglas' terrific book.
A little background:
On April 21, 2001 at about 12:00PM a second pink line let me know that The Boy was on his way. And, with my tradition of starting as I mean to finish, by 8:00PM I was in the bookstore buying a pregnancy book. That book? The Mother of All Pregnancy Books by Ann Douglas. How could you possible resist a book by someone with a sense of humour like that?
The book was fantastic, it laid out everything you needed to know without being hard or judgemental or being at all scary. And the best part was how Ann's warmth and personality just shone through the pages. I felt like I had a friend to turn to whenever pregnancy started to do my head in. It was so great that I bought the Mother of All Baby Books and The Mother of All Toddler Books.
Then last year sometime, I found The Mother of All Blogs and became an even bigger fan of Ann Douglas and her friendly, open and sincere invitation to all mothers to learn more, and feel better. I jumped at the chance to be on her panel of mothers for the sleep solutions book (and as a Mombie I was more than qualified!). See what I mean about her, she doesn't speak from on high, she doesn't just relate a few stories from other mothers, she put together a PANEL! So while doing other research and doing the actual writing, she also had to read the questionnaires that she sent out to well over a hundred moms (with a few dads chiming in too)*. That's a crazy and wonderful thing to take on when preparing a book, but it gives her work a unique flavour and really makes you feel like you are not in this alone, that somewhere out there, Amanda, or Jennifer or Marcia is struggling along with you.
When I received my copy last spring, I literally jumped up and down in the hallway. I was almost too excited to open the envelope. Not only was I going to have a book signed by Ann Douglas, but I was going to have a book signed by Ann Douglas that I might actually be quoted it (and I was a couple of times!). And sleep solutions for you baby, toddler and preschooler did not disappoint, it was just as fantastic as her other books.
Sleep is a hot topic amongst parents (Mistress of the Obvious strikes again!), and most people have some hard and fast rules as to how to get a baby to sleep well and if your doesn't when you are just plain wrong. Or worse, you are a bad parent who lets your baby run you. In the course of The Boy's babyhood, I heard it all, but the consensus was that I was just not stepping up to the plate and taking charge. The problem was that I was too wimpy. And this was from ordinary people, I can't imagine the flak I would have taken if I had consulted the more heavy-handed, self-described experts in the field.
Well, those heavy-handed experts can clear the damn field**, because Ann is here and she's listening to US. She lays out the science of sleep, the ways to cope with lack of sleep, the popular methods for sleep training, and all with a gentle sense of humour, and an definite understanding that her audience is made of real parents (and by extension real kids) with real feelings and real lives. Other experts seem to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, and they seem to think that parents are lab researchers, clinically trying to produce optimal sleep conditions.
The Boy didn't sleep through the night until he was 2.5 years old, and The Little Guy is still struggling (and I'm struggling along with him) but the information in Ann's book has helped me deal logically with the issues instead of getting caught up in blaming myself for creating this situation (which I did NOT). And following some of her advice about routines and naps has improved things a lot (now if TLG would just get the rest of his teeth and start eating more actual big kid food***, things would improve even more.)
You know that saying about how it takes a village to raise a child? And how with busy lives, and families far apart, the village fails us sometimes nowadays? Well, a lot of us are building our own villages, our own support networks, through books and blogs and email. And every village needs a wise woman, one who lays out our options, and doesn't so much give advice but leads us to find what works for us. In my village, that woman is Ann Douglas.
*The list is in the book, but I don't have long to write and I don't want to spend my time counting.
**Mary Sheedy Kurcinka (author of Sleepless in America) is not heavy handed, so she can stay but the rest can go home. Kurcinka's book has a lot of interesting material in it, but she doesn't cover the breadth of information that Ann does. Ann is really giving you all the options, Kurcinka less so. It's a good book all the same, though.
*** Ann also has a book about that, which I will be picking up shortly. Mealtime Solutions for Your Baby, Toddler and Preschooler: The Ultimate No-Worry Approach for Each Age and Stage
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