Jake Orton is going to be a big brother! Since Kristy is expecting a baby girl in 3 weeks we had a Baby Shower last night. Glancing around the room made me feel old as these cute young moms are filling their homes with kids and our home has emptied out!
Some moms were talking about "ferberizing" their babies and I had to ask about the lingo! Apparently, ferberizing is a method of getting babies to sleep through the night by extending their cries in small increments each night. The technique was supposedly invented by by Dr. Richard Ferber who calls the "baby training" a healthy approach to teach infants to self soothe.
It sounds like Dr. Ferber is a new Berry Brazelton or Dr. Spock for this generation . Listening to the queries among the young moms about pregnancy, breast feeding, parenting, etc. reminded me of an essay by Anna Quindlen. Quindlen is a Pulitzer prize winning columnist and novelist who I love to read. And, I enjoy her writing the most when it's about home and family. I love the quote below:
"Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything.
One child responds to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome.
To a new parent, the ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself." -Anna Quindlen
