It's Wednesday, the day when we talk marriage! I introduce a topic, and then you follow up either by commenting or by writing your own post and then linking up!
Okay, on Wifey Wednesday we often get rather "intimate", so to speak, because I think it's important to have a safe place where we can talk about sex in a Christian environment. If you all are having issues, I really don't want you googling it and ending up at some porn site or some site that will tell you to watch porn! So I think it's best to be open and honest, since God created it, after all.
And here's an interesting study I came across recently: 25% of people reported being too tired to have sex. That doesn't surprise me, actually. In fact, I'm surprised it's not higher. I remember when the children were little, and didn't sleep, and I was so desperate to get at least 6 hours a night (even if it was broken up), that sex was far down on my priority list. It didn't mean we weren't intimate; it's just that I was far more attuned to my need for sleep than I was my need for sex.
So let's talk about that today: what do you do when you're exhausted and you have no time for sex?
I don't actually think the sex part is the key to solving this dilemma. I think it's the tired part. How do you get to the point where you are actually available to yourself and to your husband, both with time and energy? So many things demand our attention and our energy during the day that it's just difficult to be available at night.
We all have internal batteries that need to be replenished. And too often we drain them, but we do nothing to recharge. So if you want to feel alert with your hubby:
1. Recharge Your Batteries Appropriately. You know the things that drain you: talking to certain people, housework, running around after kids, paid work, chauffeuring, scheduling, all the things that go into a normal life. These things aren't necessarily bad, but you need to figure out what also charges you.
Much of this is based on personality. Some people are real extraverts, and they won't be charged unless they get a lot of time to actually talk to people. If you need it, you don't have to feel ashamed of it. Just schedule in some time everyday to talk with a friend, or go out for coffee after dinner with her. If you're an introvert, and you need time alone, tell your husband this, and ask if he can do the bedtime routine so that you can have a bubble bath. In other words, be realistic about what you need.
If you don't need time alone to feel invigorated, but you need time outside, then take a jog. But don't feel guilty for taking time away from the kids! They can stand to be with their dad for a while, and he'll be happier if you're available to him later.
2. Find Someone to Watch the Kids. Hopefully your husband will cooperate, especially when he realizes that he's getting something out of the deal! But if he won't, take the intiative to get some help. Find a teenager in your neighbourhood to watch the children for two hours after school a few times a week so you can get some time to yourself. Don't just use the time to do errands that won't replenish you; put a priority on doing what you need to do to feel awake. Or ask your mother or your sister to watch the children for a while. Find someone to be your ally!
3. Snatch Time to Rejuvenate. Don't let yourself come last in your list of priorities. Schedule time in now, during the day, for you to rejuvenate, whether it means taking a jog, doing a craft, having a bubble bath, or just praying. When you do have free time, use it for you, don't only fill it up with more "things" that you really should get done. The most important thing to get done, after all, is to pay attention to your marriage.
4. Keep the Long Term in View. It's easier to spend time on yourself when you see the benefit in it. You know your marriage is important, but realistically how much time do you dedicate to nurturing it? Do you only pay attention to all the "things" you can do for your family, rather than just being there for your husband? He needs you, not just clean laundry. And when you feel connected to your husband, you also feel more energetic and more excited to get that housework done later!
5. Say No to Overcommitment. We all know this, but do we do it? What is making you too busy today? Is it your church? Your children's schedule? Your hobbies? Whatever it is that is causing you to stop thinking about your husband and start thinking about other things needs to stop. We all need downtime. Make sure you have some.
6. Practice the art of compartmentalization. Men are wonderful at keeping things in their place. They're not as distracted nearly as much as we are because they're not naturally trying to multi-task. We do. We multitask naturally, all the time. And believe me, sex is not a good time for multitasking! You should not be writing grocery lists in your head while you're being intimate. You should not be planning vacations while he's kissing you. When you're with your husband, practice being with him. Concentrate on what he's saying. Concentrate on how he feels. And above all, stop thinking!
Here's the truth: often we think we're exhausted when the issue is we just have too much on our plate, and thus too much constantly going through our brains. Turn off the constant noise in your brain telling you to do more, and turn on that part of your brain telling you to slow down, and practice being in the moment. You'll find you're less tired, and much more in the mood than when you're always focusing on all the things you "should" be doing.
The biggest "should" in your life is about your marriage. You should be enjoying your husband. Are you? If not, learn to! Make it a priority. And turn everything else off!
Now, what advice do you have for us today? Have you ever had to confront your fantasies and throw them aside? How did you do it? Or do you have something else to tell us? Write your own Wifey Wednesday post that links back to here, and then leave the link of THAT POST in the Mcklinky below. Thanks!
Want more intimacy tips on how to get in the mood? Listen to Sheila's audio download, Honey, I Don't Have a Headache Tonight! Filled with lots of laughs and practical tips to boost your marriage! Download it now!
As many of you know, we don’t have a television. But we do have the internet! And we recently found, to our joy, that you can watch episodes of Supernanny on YouTube! So every homeschooling lunch, my girls and I have been watching a new episode. It’s great fun!
In general, I think the show is very positive. In each episode, the nanny, Jo, shows the parents two things (because I think that’s all you have time for): how to get the kids to go to bed, and how to use the “Naughty Chair” (or naughty room, or naughty stair). She goes into great detail on the bedtime routine, which we used long before we watched Supernanny, and which worked. We started when the girls were babies, and by the time they were a year old they went to bed easily and always have. But here’s the routine:
1. Cuddle, read story, bath, pray, say good night to them. Leave them in their own room. 2. If they come out, hug them, tell them it’s time for bed, and take them back to their room. 3. If they come out a second time, say “It’s bedtime”, and take them back again. Do not say anything else. 4. If they come out again, say nothing, but take them by the hand and put them back in bed. 5. Repeat until they’re asleep.
And on the show, the kids are asleep within an hour, even if it used to take several hours to get kids to sleep. And that’s been my experience, too. It really does work. Kids just need to know you’re serious.
It’s the Naughty Chair I have more issues with. It’s the only real discipline technique she uses (likely because it’s only an hour long show, so you can only show one thing). The routine goes like this:
1. Issue a warning. 2. If the child continues the behaviour, put them in the time out place, where they must stay for a minute per year of age. Tell them in a deep, authoritative voice (different from your normal tone) why they are there, and what they must think about. 3. If the child leaves the area, take them by the hand firmly and put them back, reinforcing why they are there. 4. At the end of the time out, they must apologize and then you hug them.
It sounds good in theory, but if you have a child who refuses to stay on the chair, or in the corner, then it’s still something that takes an hour or so. I never spanked my kids, but I watch this show and often think, “a spanking would be a lot faster”. Because allowing that child to get off of the chair and scream at you is still allowing them to be disrespectful.
What do the rest of you think?
Last night, when I was out for a walk with my hubby, we were talking about this in general, and we mentioned two things.
First, when our children were little, we didn’t use time outs that much. We only used them for tantrums or for absolute disrespect, which was actually quite rare. Instead, we tended to take away toys, or dessert, or other privileges (but toys was the big thing), because usually the reason they were being disciplined had something to do with a toy. They weren’t sharing, or they were grabbing it from another child, or they were hitting someone with it. It’s more immediate, and it’s more effective, I find.
I just think you need a combination of techniques for different infractions. The main thing is this: don’t get in an argument about it. Just do it. And do it immediately. We watched so many families on the show let things go by just by yelling at the kids or telling them that’s wrong, but then not doing anything about it. A child doesn’t care if you’ve told them they’ve done wrong without any consequence, but we magically think that if we express disapproval, that’s the same thing as disciplining. It’s not.
The second thing that occurred to me is that in many families, life has become so chaotic that the only conversations that parents have with their children have to do with logistics: who has to go where when, who has to pick up what toys, who has to stop hitting their brother, who has to be quiet, who has to get ready for bed, who has to stop crying and eat their food. Everything is about telling a child what to do.
You could easily be with a child all day, and never really talk to them. Words are coming out of your mouth constantly, and words are coming out of the child’s mouth, but it’s as if you are always at loggerheads. You’re always telling them what to do, and yet you never really have fun together.
In every family we’ve watched so far, the children have called the mother some variant of “poopy head”. My children would never have DREAMED of calling me that. I never experienced that in the least. And I think one of the reasons is that my daughters and I had FUN together. We always did. Certainly I told them that it was time to get dressed, or to get their breakfast, but in general, we always did fun things together everyday. I wasn't great at getting down on the floor and playing dolls or Barbies. My husband was much better at actually playing with them. But I'd read books, or set up crafts, or most of all, take them out for walks, or to the playground, or to a play group. And we'd sing and talk the whole way. We had a relationship.
When you have a close relationship with your kids, and they know you love them, they have less reason to act up to get your attention. There's more goodwill, and they're less likely to be disrespectful.
That's why I think that while discipline is important, learning how to have fun again as a family is just as vital. Learning how to talk around the table at dinner, or how to go outside and engage your children. It can be hard, because we adults usually don't enjoy doing what children want to do, so we find it boring. But you can concentrate on the things you do well, like going for walks (hey, it gets exercise!), running around a park, singing, reading books, playing airplane with them up on your feet while you're lying on the floor, and things like that. Laugh with your kids everyday. Laughter covers over a multitude of sins.
Many families are out of control because they have allowed the children to take the reins in the home. And then they spend their lives responding to the kids' behaviour by yelling and ordering the kids around, and all fun is sapped out of their lives. We need balance back. If your children are out of control, learn to discipline immediately and effectively. Don't just tell your kids they're wrong; do something. Speak in a deeper voice so they know you're serious. But then start having fun again, too. Play with your children. Enjoy your children. And you just may remember why you had them in the first place!
What do you think? Any observations on Supernanny? How do you handle time outs, and do you find them effective? Let me know!
A little over a week ago I wrote a post on the difficulties I've been having with nightmares. I so appreciate all the comments many of you made! I think my nightmares have been multi-faceted. I have been speaking a lot lately, and I think I've been under a bit of attack. But I also think just plain fear is rearing its ugly head.
Today I want to do a follow-up which I think relates to all of us, whether or not we've had nightmares.
I mentioned in that post that I didn't think the dreams I had had anything to do with me, because they were just ridiculous. But it was still disturbing. And I really did believe that. But one dream that I remember the best seems to actually be relevant in retrospect, though I didn't think so at the time. In it, a friend of mine (it doesn't matter which one; I don't want her to freak out reading this) had three of her children die in an accident, leaving only one.
Throughout the dream, she was trying to cope with having only one child. But the weird thing is that my friend only has three children to begin with, not four. So in the dream she told me that she had had one she had forgot to tell me about.
Anyway, I cried throughout the dream nonstop about these kids, and for my friend having only one. And I had a conversation with her about whether it would matter if it had been another child who was left, and she said it wouldn't have made a difference.
Stupid dream, I know. But I woke up believing it had absolutely nothing to do with me. Then, last week, I was sitting in a meeting that had nothing to do with this either, and it hit me. If one of my children dies, I'll have three gone and only one left. But I normally think of myself as only having three children (just like the friend my brain chose for the dream), not two, because one of my children who died was a miscarriage. So the dream represented my fears exactly. And the reason I dreamt about my friend losing her children instead of me was that with my friend, the child who is left is generic. If it had been a dream about me, I would have had to have a specific one of my girls die, and then it would have been about that specific girl, rather than about my fears in general.
So I guess the truth is that I'm afraid one of my girls will die. Not either in particular, but one.
It makes sense that this is going through my head a lot, because I've spent the last week editing video and audio of a conference I gave which was quite emotional, when I dealt with the whole question of what we do when tragedy strikes. When it comes down to it, is God enough? Will you be able to focus on the hope of heaven, or will you let tragedy destroy you? I've spoken about it a ton lately, but polishing the video and audio and getting it ready to ship out to people just had those words going round and round in my head, at the same time as the anniversary of my son's death came along.
So here's my question for all of us: how do we handle that paralyzing fear? One response, of course, is to put our children in a bubble so that nothing can possibly hurt them. That's a dumb thing to do, because it limits their life. How can you live a big life, or live for what God has dreamed for them, if they're stuck in a bubble? If they are prohibited from having important formative experiences, including experiences which will help them mature and take on responsibility, then how can they accomplish what God has for them? So bubbles are exactly the wrong thing to do. They don't protect our children; they limit them.
To me it's not a parenting issue as much as a trust issue. I almost daily have to go to God and ask Him to help me live my life for Him, and not for my family. I love my family, but I have to hold them with an open hand, knowing that they are His first. And if anything does happen to them, they are still His, as am I. And this life is but a short beginning to our real life, which will be in heaven.
I know that, but the thought of being without them still stops your heart cold, sometimes, doesn't it? There really is not solution except to keep going to God in prayer, and to keep falling in love with Him, so that He will always be enough to carry you. Most likely nothing will happen to our loved ones. Statistics say that they'll be fine. But it's still hard when so much of our hearts are wrapped up in our kids.
So let me just ask you today: what are you living for? Are you living for your kids, or do you see them as gifts from God where you are the steward? Can you raise them towards independence, and encourage them to fly, because they're in His hands, and not just yours? And can you remember that God is enough?
Those are heavy questions. They may cause some tears. But I think all mothers need to deal with them and get them straight before God. He is big enough to cast all of our fears on, so let's do it!
I'm not talking about kids' nightmares, either. I'm talking about my nightmares.
I know dreams could potentially mean something, and we're supposed to analyze them, etc. But to tell you the truth I forget 99% of them as soon as I wake up, anyway. But vague impressions linger, and I have not been sleeping well lately because I've been having so many nightmares recently.
I don't normally have nightmares, and as far as I know nothing is really bugging me. I had a bit of a meltdown last Friday on the anniversary of my son's death, but other than that I'm fine, and the nightmares have been going back at least a month. I know a lot of them have to do with kids dying (not necessarily my own kids, could be friends' kids), or with accidents, or affairs, or all kinds of horrible things. And I'm truly not worried about anybody when I'm awake.
It's a strange thing.
My husband and I had a period of about six months right after we moved into our new house when we fought worse than we had throughout our marriage. It was really, really bad. Then one night, without telling me, Keith march around the house and prayed in every room. And after that the fights stopped. I really think there was something spiritual left over inside the house from whomever lived here last. If you don't believe in that sort of thing, forgive me, but I do, and I can tell you the difference was black and white (and Keith didn't tell me about this for about a year afterwards).
So I don't think my nightmares are from anything like that, because it's been taken care of. I'd just really like to be able to sleep well again, and it's starting to really get to me.
Have any of you ever had similar experiences? I'd love to know what you did!
Last night I went to sleep when my children did. It was only 9:30, but I was tired.
My husband was on call last night, too, (he's a pediatrician), and I swear his pager went off every hour. It was definitely not the best sleep for me, let alone for him (he had to go in for two hours in the middle of the night).
Then this morning I didn't get up until 8, which is late for me. And it got me thinking: if I hadn't gone to sleep early, I'd be in even worse shape. My body obviously needed the sleep. So why do we scrimp on sleep so much?
I think it's because we want to have fun. Once the kids go to bed, we really want some time to ourselves, even if we are tired. So we stay up way too late.
The pioneers used to get tons of sleep. They'd go to bed with the sun, and up with the sun, and often they slept eleven hours a day in the winter, even the adults. That doesn't sound like such a bad idea to me. But now that we have electric lights and televisions, staying up until midnight is normal for most of us.
I just don't think it's good for us. I get so grumpy when I'm tired, and by two in the afternoon I'm really lethargic. I've always needed a lot of sleep. Even today, eight hours often doesn't cut it. I need a good nine hours to feel like myself, which means I should be going to bed by 10:30 every night, though I don't. My youngest daughter doesn't need that much sleep. She never has. As a baby she only slept 9 hours over the entire day, including naps. I was absolutely exhausted. But she wasn't. She was happy as a clam. At one point I actually made a chart of how much she slept in a week, and when, and took it into my doctor and said, "You have to make her sleep! This is ridiculous!" But there was nothing my doctor could do, and Katie got rid of her naps in the day pretty early and put in her nine and a half hours at night. So that was okay.
I know some parents who deal with the sleep issue by just putting their children to bed at 7. That way they have the evening to themselves. But their kids get up at 5:30 or 6, and I simply could not handle that. I always put my kids to bed a little late, like 9, just so they'd sleep until 7.
But this sleep problem is a big one for us, because we also need couple time, don't we? And that's hard to have while the kids are awake. So as the kids have gotten older, we've instituted the "you have to be in your room at 9" rule, even if they're not sleeping, just so that we can be on our own.
Tonight I'm going to go to bed early again. I'm off to speak at a conference this weekend, and I don't want to start the weekend exhausted. But I wish I'd just get into the habit of sleeping well all the time!
What about you? What do you do about sleep? And how do your kids sleep? Let's talk about it!
I've been giving the books that I've authored away left, right and center lately (just blog roll me on your blog for a chance to win a book at the end of the month!), but I think it's time to give away something that I didn't write.
Because I'm an author and my husband is a pediatrician we are given tons of books. Just tons. And I never know what to do with a lot of them. Some end up in our church library, but I've decided to start giving others away.
So the current giveaway is for Ann Douglas' book: Sleep Solutions for your Baby and Toddler. All you have to do to win is sign up to receive my parenting column by email every week! Someone who signs up in the month of October is going to win it!
Do you have issues with getting your baby (or babies) to sleep through the night? I know I did. We got into a really bad habit where Rebecca could only sleep if I breastfed her. So if she woke up in the middle of the night she needed me to come feed her so she could fall asleep again. Unfortunately, that didn't do a whole lot for my own sleep!
I wrote about this in a column a few years ago, and I think I'll pull it out now and let you read it. Here you go:
If somebody came into your bedroom in the middle of the night and flicked on the light and stole your pillow, would you be able to get back to sleep? Probably not, with all the commotion of calling the police and searching for intruders, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make right now. No, most of us wouldn’t be able to sleep because our “sleep cues” are gone. Babies are exactly the same. They need certain conditions to sleep, too, conditions that we teach them, even if we don’t realize it. These are the conditions that we taught our youngest daughter Katie:
First, Katie needed to be nursed to sleep while rocking in a rocking chair. Then, when it looked like she was in a deep sleep, she had to be lifted without any change in the angle of her body, even if this required the parent (in this case, the one with mammary glands) to throw her back out as she rose from the chair. Then, said mother had to frantically call “Keith, Keith, get in here!”, in order to summon the other parent (the one without mammary glands), to rearrange the blankets and lower the crib rail (since the mother forgot to do this before she started nursing). Everything thus readied, the mother would attempt the perfect transfer without changing the angle of the baby’s body.
If any of these conditions were not met—and, in many cases, even if they were—this baby would cry. In this case, what this baby needed was to be transferred to the swing. Once she was again in a deep sleep, you could pick her up and transfer her to the crib (once again whispering frantically for the other parent to get the blankets ready). This was a much more dangerous transfer, because it necessitated changing the angle of the baby’s body, which usually woke her up, sending you back to step one (nurse her in a rocking chair). Because this was our nightly ritual—and our middle of the night ritual—Katie could get to sleep no other way.
One day we smartened up. We read a book (Solve your Child’s Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber) that said that babies need to be taught how to go to sleep by themselves. They need to be put in their crib while still awake, both at set nap times and set bedtimes, so that they get used to putting themselves to sleep. Otherwise, you’re teaching your baby to need you to fall asleep, and whenever they wake in the middle of the night they’ll call for you again. Reading this was like that revelation at the end of Planet of the Apes, when the main character surveys the desolation and collapses in grief and despair as he realizes, “We did this to ourselves!”.
With a renewed sense of resolve, we embraced this marvellous new plan. In principle. Until we tried it. If we thought we had heard screaming before, it was nothing compared to what we heard afterwards.
But we weren’t as heartless as it may sound. Part of this plan returning to the child’s room every few minutes, to reassure your baby that you still love him or her. Then you must leave again. In our case, this was usually accomplished by my husband carrying me from the room as he hissed “you promised we would go by the book for a week”, and I struggled to get back to my baby.
Thus banished from her room, I would rock back and forth on my bed, like characters in a movie who have been in solitary confinement and have gone stark raving mad, as I listened to my baby cry. I had earplugs in my ears, and I would stare at my clock, mumbling, “I can go in again in three minutes and twenty seconds, in three minutes and nineteen seconds…”
But the amazing thing was, Katie learned to sleep. She only cried for twenty minutes that first night, and only a few minutes the next few nights after that. And she started taking naps, too, once we made them at regular times. And once she started to sleep, she started to smile. So did I. And we haven’t stopped.
Unfortunately I don't have the book I mentioned in the column to give away, but this one has the same sort of philosophy. So what do you think? Are you desperate for your baby to sleep? Just sign up for my newsletter during the month of October, and maybe you can win! And then maybe you can sleep!
I love my husband. I really do. He's my best friend.
We even sleep in a double bed because I like to curl up right beside him. No queen or king size for us! Last time we went to buy bedroom furniture they guy at the store commented, "wow, you must really like each other." And we do.
But I don't like it when he snores. Now I snore too, sometimes, but he can sleep through snoring. I can't.
It used to be a lot worse before he lost some weight, but now, when he's overtired, he can snore a lot, and then I can't sleep.
So last night I bailed and slept in the guest room until 3:00, and then snuck back into our room and spent the rest of the night there. I really don't like the guest room very much.
I wish I could sleep with snoring, but I can't. I am just never going to get used to it. I can't sleep in dormitory settings with a whole bunch of women, either, because someone inevitably will be snoring. When I've been in those places I just haven't slept, even if it's been for a week. It is terrible.
So I suppose I should be grateful we have a guest room. But I'm still tired this morning!
Here's the intro to an article for Marriage Partnership I wrote on this subject a couple of years ago:
Heather threw off the covers in frustration and propelled herself out of bed. For the last 45 minutes she had repeatedly shoved her husband, Rick, to roll him over and stop his snoring. Her efforts had met with temporary success, but as soon as she would fall asleep again, his snoring would wake her. In defeat, she grabbed her pillow, yanked the blanket off of Rick with a smug smile, and trudged bleary-eyed downstairs to begin another night on the couch.
When we marry, we dream of contentedly drifting off in each others’ arms. Yet numerous culprits conspire to rob us of this bliss. Snoring is by far the most common, affecting close to 30% of all marriages. Other people flail their legs in their sleep, leaving their beloveds black and blue. Still others work staggered hours, or are repeatedly paged throughout the night. And then there are the little ones, flailers extraordinaire, whom one parent, much to the chagrin of the other, may insist share the bed. Few things disturb sleep more than the presence of a two-year-old.
Every night, for countless couples like Heather and Rick, the sleep wars begin anew. Yet unlike traditional marriage conflicts, one side of this war often doesn’t even realize the battle is waging. Oblivious to the havoc they’re causing, they doze peacefully as their spouses fume.
You can read the rest here. And I hope you got more sleep than I did!
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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