“Where are we going?” I say.

“To the market.”

“Do you know how to get there?”

“Oh. Hmmm. Hang on.” She leans over, puts on the hazard lights. “I need to look at my map.” She takes the map from the door pocket, opens the map, flicks through the pages. “We need Parramatta Road,” she says.

Did I mention she’s two-and-a-half? Oh, and the park brake was firmly on and the keys were *not* in the car, which was in the driveway. It was so cute watching her try to reach the pedals.

I know they say that one day you have a baby and the next you have a toddler, but this seems a little ridiculous. I feel like I have a fully formed child, not a toddler.

I’ve gone from a two-year-old girl who was breastfed, wore nappies, signed when she was happy and threw tantrums when she wasn’t and was mostly transported in the Ergo to a child who is weaned, takes herself to the potty without even talking to us (pulls her own undies down, sits down, does her business, wipes, pulls her undies up, washes her hands… the whole shebang), talks up a storm, even to the point of saying “Mama, I’m very frustrated with you right now” and who walked a kilometer through bushland on the weekend. I blinked and this happened. What on earth is next?

She’s making up stories and talking with imaginary friends. She’s imitating Totoro and trying to grow trees from acorns by stretching her arms up high. She’s pinching my cheeks and saying “gorgeous girl”.

Most amazingly, ever since we implemented the final stage in the No Cry Sleep Solution and went for the Toddler Bedtime List, she’s going to sleep without either of us in the room (in the phase before this, we read to her, then turned the light out and sat next to her while she fell asleep, sometimes patting her or holding her hand if she asked. That’s another post, though…)

She is the highlight of my life at the moment. I love her to bits. Her giggle is infectious. I just love watching her grow up but I want to stretch time a little because I know it’ll be only too soon before she’s really in that car with L plates on the back and then we’re in trouble.

This morning began in a different city. I’m moving for a job and the job involves travel, so I’m weaning. There are other reasons too… She woke up at six, as she often does and demanded her Mama milk. I happened to be sleeping next to her (our bed was already packed) so I rolled over, lifted my shirt and she helped herself. When she was done, she declared “other side” and climbed over me, lifted the other side of my shirt and helped herself again while my partner snuggled in behind me. My daughter finished up — she doesn’t even say “all done” any more — and declared it was time for food. I knew that if my plan worked, this was the last time I would breastfeed, ever, and I was feeling a little teary. I reminded her that there was no Mama milk in Sydney because she was a big girl now, and asked her if she wanted to say goodbye. She said, “Bye bye, milks” and kissed my right breast. She said “I kissed it!” and I cried a little. My partner wrapped his arms around me and kissed me on the cheek and we all got up for breakfast, and the hectic preparation for an early plane.

She had an earlyish nap in Grandma’s car on the way back from the airport on this side, and then we ran her ragged this afternoon. I made sure she had enough dinner, made sure the bath was lovely, and gave her the warm horchata that we’ve discussed is what big girls drink at bedtime (at least, those with dairy allergies!). When she asked for more food at 8pm, I gave her one of her favourites to make sure she’d eat enough.

In bed at 8.30, about 45 minutes later than normal (I figured that’s what a feed and all the prep around it might take), she asked for Mama milk. I took a deep breath and reminded her we were in Sydney, and there was no Mama milk any more because she was a big girl. I waited for all hell to break loose. Instead, she seemed to think about it it for a second, and then asked “Book?” as if checking that no other part of the routine was gone. “Of course,” I said. “Which ones?” She chose two (and not the two I would have expected), we read them, rang Daddy and Uncle Jack back home to say goodnight. By this time it was 9pm, when she’d usually be asleep already. She said she needed to go to the toilet; we duly trooped over to the potty. Back in bed, I tucked her in, kissed her goodnight, turned out the light and sat down to pat her. She asked for “More Mama milk” which is a standard last-minute “I’m falling asleep and I want to stall” thing and I replied again, “No, honey, you’re a big girl now” and lo and behold, she was snoring within 10 minutes.

I think there were fewer tears than usual. Maybe we’re both ready for this.

Now I just have to get through the rest of the week and I’ll be ready to start my new job on Monday.

There are a couple of things I want to say about breastfeeding to two years old. I loved it. I only found it a burden in the past few weeks, when she started playing with my other nipple while she fed and I know that’s something I could easily have fixed with a nursing necklace if I was really determined. There’s a joy and simplicity in this act — if I’d stopped earlier, I never would have had the pleasure of hearing her say “Mama milk”, of hearing her say, “Bye bye, milk!” one morning as I put a T-shirt on; I would never have seen her pretend to breastfeed her dolls; I would not have been asked to breastfeed her baby doll, her toy rabbit, her toy turtle and her monster truck and various times in our relationship; I wouldn’t have seen her generosity in offering the breast to Fluffy the bunny first, then taking her turn; I wouldn’t have had the ease of comforting her during injections, of helping equalise her ear pressure during take-off and landing, of calming her after a bad fall. I’m so glad I got to donate milk to a friend who couldn’t produce enough herself and I’ll always feel like I have a special connection with her son because of that.

I would have liked to continue until she was ready to stop. At the same time, she has allergies and I’m frustrated that every time someone accidentally feeds me the wrong thing, she suffers. It was starting to be unpleasant for me at times, and I didn’t want to grow to resent it. We made it to our goal of two years because WHO says that’s the recommended minimum time for complementary feeding. We went further because it felt good. And now we’re starting a new life in a new town. I’m not the mother of a toddler any more. I’m the mother of a little girl. And okay, now I’m starting to tear up again.

Harper is coping with it all okay, but it’s still a challenge for her. We’ve let her help pack her room and she’s been saying “Harper get in the box! Go to Sindey! See Grandma!” for a few weeks now. She’s even got the pronunciation of Sydney and Greenpeace down pat now.

She’s cranky and a bit scared. She’s a bit clingy. She wants reassurances that we’ll all make it to the new location, but she’s clear on the idea that there are trucks taking the boxes away and that Mama and Harper are getting on a plane in a week.

I don’t know what we’d be doing if Grandma wasn’t at the other end of this. That’s who she’s looking forward to, even as the suspicion that she’s going to be leaving her beloved Uncle Jack starts to settle in. We also wouldn’t have anywhere to stay.

I figure the craziness will be enough that this might be an okay time to wean her, because the new job requires occasional travel and she is over two now. My partner will have to go back to being a full-time Dad for a while until we get childcare sorted out again.

With all that said, I’m trying to follow her lead. We had a lovely weekend and farewell in the park, where she charmed everyone as usual. We held our Mabon (Autumn equinox) ritual, ate food together under the trees, lit candles and spoke about balance. Tonight, she didn’t want to come inside — I’m guessing the almost-packed-up house is just getting to be a bit much. So, I asked her if she wanted to eat dinner outside again. We ended up having a chicken pilaf picnic in the driveway, followed by a little fussing over teeth cleaning, more packing in her room and then her asking to brush my hair. That was really lovely.

If nothing else, this journey is always surprising.

We first heard about unconditional parenting on an attachment parents community on LiveJournal. Shortly after that, I tracked down and read Alfie Kohn’s “Five reasons to stop saying good job”. I still haven’t actually read the book he’s written. This was enough for me. With a mammoth effort, I started resisting my seemingly innate impulse to praise every minor effort my daughter made. I slipped frequently in those first weeks.

For those of you who are reeling with horror right about now, we’re not talking about some flat world with no love or affect. We’re talking about removing the drone of “good job” and the awful implications of “good girl” and “good boy” (that there can be a bad girl and a bad boy and that your actions make you one or the other, forever). My niece (let’s pretend her name is Jessie), when she was only three, did something — I can’t remember what — and then in a tiny voice said, “Jessie’s a naughty girl”. It was heartbreaking.

What we wanted to replace it with, ideally, was a narrative of the world our daughter was growing up in. For one thing, this would give her access to a variety of descriptions to understand her abilities and actions. We said, “You put the blue block on the red block! Which block would you like now?” and “You turned the light on! And you turned it off! You did it by yourself!” and while we were at it, we said, “Oh look, you’ve spilled your water. Now we’ll have to mop it up!” rather than “Silly girl! Your water is everywhere!”

I’m more likely these days to say, “that was clever” or “you’re very strong” because it’s so very tough not to fall into these patterns. When my mother came to visit, I couldn’t help but notice that she said “good girl” about eight times in 15 minutes. I only noticed this because I’d stopped saying it. During our trip to the US, I noticed that everybody says “good job” constantly. It becomes a litany. If the child only ever hears these two words, how will they have nuance to describe their lives?

I deliberately chose an ungraded undergraduate degree for myself because I knew that I am someone who will perform for raw scores if they are available rather than exploring and experimenting which I will do given the freedom. I thought I would underperform and not challenge myself if all I had to do was sit an exam and get above 80%. It’s a lot harder to get detailed critiques from a teacher where they have been drawn into your work, where you have made them think and question and engage with what you are attempting.

That’s what I’m aiming for with my daughter. I want her to aim higher than “good job”. I definitely want her to understand that none of her actions make her good or bad, no matter how “well” she “behaves” or how often she scratches my face because she didn’t get what she wanted. I want her to engage me and for me to engage her. She generally tries to scratch me when I’m falling down on that latter one, when I’m not on my game.

And don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame our favourite audiologist one bit for saying “good girl” a few too many times. In this culture, there are parents who would see her as cold if she didn’t.

At our daughter’s 18 month check-up, the nurse asked if there was anything that concerned me. I said that I was a bit worried about her speech development, thinking, “Oh, this is silly! Different children speak at different points…” The nurse asked if she’d had a lot of colds over the winter (she and her Dad caught every cold there was to catch) and then suggested a quick visit to the audiologist, just to set our minds at ease.

A few weeks later, we had our appointment and headed off to see the lovely Liz at Yarra Health. She looked into H’s ears and said she definitely saw middle ear infection, but we needed to look into it more to see if there was hearing loss. She explained that the machine we were about to use tested the echo inside the middle ear, which needed for there to be air in there, not just liquid, and that we should see a peak on the screen. She did the test. We saw a flat, flat line, with a tiny blip. Our daughter’s hearing was pretty seriously impaired.

Liz told us she didn’t really need to do the next test to tell us there was hearing loss that was significant, but that it would tell us more specifically where the loss was. She conditioned our girl with a loud noise off to the side and a puppet (she worked that one out quickly — she’s a smart cookie) and then ratcheted the sound right down. H’s head only turned once the sound got back up to 25db, on both sides, a loss of about 40%. She thought the liquid inside the eardrum was probably “like concrete”.

Our next move, apparently, was a trip to an ear, nose and throat specialist. Our referral to a great surgeon at the Royal Melbourne Children’s Hospital was useless: there weren’t any appointments for about three months, unless we wanted to go private. Our complication was two-fold: we were flying to the US about six weeks later and we didn’t have private health insurance (because we live in a country where you can mostly rely on the awesome public system). We called around until we found a private surgeon who could see us before we flew. Our main question was whether she could fly with her ears the way they were. His advice was no, we risked a burst eardrum mid-air, which sounded like misery for the whole family.

His recommendation was for simple surgery to insert grommets, relieving the pressure in the eardrum and allowing the liquid inside to drain. So we called the grandparents and asked for a loan and booked in for the private surgery after all. Not my favourite moment: general anaesthetic for a 19 month old, no matter how short, is awful. I held her in my arms while they put the gas mask over her face and told her to breathe in. Her eyes slowly rolled back and she started to snore and then she was completely limp. They took her from me and the next time I saw her, in recovery, she was screaming in a nurse’s arms, frantic to know where Mama was. Thank god for “extended” breastfeeding; I was able to give her instant comfort in the form of Mama’s milk.

She recovered well from the immediate physical effects of surgery. The day afterwards, she was joyfully signing “bird! bird!” every few seconds because she could hear them again. A few days afterwards, she was already saying Mama more often, and starting to try other words. Two weeks later, we were on a plane.

The change since then is phenomenal. She says “boo” and “shoe” properly now. She has also added “two” and just to diverge from the rhyme, “zebra”, “flower”, “vulture”, “book” complete with the ‘k’ on the end (that one’s new today). She’s been saying “papa” for “pasta” since about two days after the operation. It seems there’s a new word every day. She said her own name today, complete with the aspirated H at the front today. She says “Mama’s dchone” for “Mama’s phone”. She said “My dadda shoes” and pointed at his shoes. The funniest one so far sounded a hell of a lot like, “Mama, Dadda di a far”. Considering he’d just made a loud noise of a certain type, that was accurate too.

Our follow-up with the audiologist in tomorrow, eight weeks since the first appointment, if I recall correctly. Let’s see what the science says… As far as the Mama’s concerned though, it’s all good.

Language, its acquisition and its effects are of particular interest to me. Both my undergraduate degree and my Masters are in Communications. I have to confess that I watched my little 8-month-old girl in front of the mirror with avid interest, marking the day she began to identify the image in the glass as herself, and joking to her that she now had access to the Symbolic and would master the idea of language any day now. (See Lacan’s mirror stage theory.) It’s hard to measure whether that was indeed the moment when she started to “get” what we were trying to do with the signs…

Certainly, by February, when she was a little over one, I noticed she had representation down pat — she’d worked out that a picture of a cat was also a cat. Utterly fascinating. She’d been signing “cat” for a little while now whenever she saw our moggy but had started doing it for representations of cats in books and for the strange cat-thing my mother bought us (sorry, Mum, but it is a bit odd).

Then, she started signing “dog” too, which I find amazing because a) we don’t have one, b) the first time she saw the sign was early January at a friend’s place and she was terrified of the dog and c) her Dad hadn’t been doing the sign, only me, so it’s been weekends only. Even more impressive, she did the sign when a dog she couldn’t even see *barked*. I checked it a few times and she definitely knew what it was. And apparently, her greater use of signs at this age will have a direct correlation to the variety in her lexicon when she’s older.

Some words get accompanying vocalisation — daddy, always. For some, the vocalisation was there for a while (“ah da” for all done, for example) but it’s disappeared again in favour of the sign on its own. She’s got all the consonants she’s “supposed” to have at this age: m n p b t d w plus k and g which aren’t supposed to be common until two years. (She’s definitely got ‘k’ — did I mention the incessant use of ‘car’?). I’ve seen other info that suggests ‘sh’ comes even later and yet our daughter is using ‘shoe’ (sometimes pronounced ‘sha’) as her second favourite word.

She knows many words — she will point to most of her body parts now when you name them, she will take your hand when asked, will take an item and put it in the bin or give it to daddy when asked — two very different ideas that she doesn’t mix up, she can answer the question “who am I?” by signing “mama” back to me. Apparently, she’s learning 10–15 words a day and apparently only one of those words is accounted for by direct instruction (see all the theories of how language acquisition works). The rest are picked up by context… She’s been running around the house saying takatakataka for a couple of weeks now and I couldn’t for the life of me work out what it was she was trying to say. Then we realised that when daddy tries to teach her how to drum on the edge of the table, he uses tabla language to keep time — “dun-taka-taka, dun-taka-taka”. Today’s babble was “dubbabuddadubbabudda”. Effectively, she’s just singing to herself…

What’s absolutely fascinating me is that she invents signs and words as she needs them. We didn’t teach her a sign for tickle — she’s invented it. Today, she signed something that looked like the “love” sign we say to her at night but also rocked side to side as she did it. I took it to mean “cuddle” because it was similar to how she cuddles her bunny. This kind of need for communication resulting in emergent signing gives us a window into how language arises at all (and is most amazingly documented in Nicaraguan Sign Language, which was invented organically by a generation of Deaf kids in the 1970s).

And then that leads to the next part of this: apart from the technical basics of how the child acquires the building blocks of this language, the consonants, vowels, plosives, fricatives, the grammar, syntax, vocabulary… apart from all that, language shapes our ability to understand our world and ourselves. It structures subjectivity. Here’s Homi Bhabha on the topic:

“The demand of identification — that is, to be for an Other — entails the representation of the subject in the differentiating order of otherness. Identification … is always the return of an image of identity that bears the mark of splitting in the Other place from which it comes. For Fanon, like Lacan, the primary moments of such a repetition of the self lie in the desire of the look and the limits of language.”

And so this is where I hesitate at my demands to repeat after me, to say “mama” “properly”, to be for me. I am aware of the responsibility of how language frames possibility every time someone says “good girl” to her. But that’s another post and I can hear her babbling to herself when she should be asleep.

It sometimes seems that the entire first year is racing towards the six key milestones culminating in walking unassisted. And then the second year everyone asks, “Is she talking yet?”. What seems to be missed are all the everyday actions she’s learning that we need to survive on our own in this world. The rate at which she’s learning is stunning.

Let’s see if I can just start with some of the things I’ve suddenly realised she knows how to do without really noticing when we taught her:

• When undressing her for the toilet, she holds on to something and then she lifts her legs one at a time to help us get her pants off.
• She will go find her shoes, bring them to us, sit down and have them put on, then goes to the door and points until we let her out. She will then push the screen door open, walk to the step, carefully navigate to the wall and hold onto the wall to help her balance while she steps down.
• She holds her own toothbrush and tries to clean her teeth. She also tries to brush her hair.
• If we stand her on her step-stool in front of the sink, and run the water for her, she puts her hands under the water, then rubs her hand on the soap, rubs her hands together, waits for us to run the water again, flicks the water off and then gets off the stool and dries her hands on the towel (I think her Dad taught her this one while I wasn’t there, but it’s still a pattern she now repeats and knows).
• If we go to a park now, she knows how to launch herself from the top of a slide and loves it and she wants to swing on the big swings.
• She knows about buttons and switches — she can turn lights on and off and has figured out that pushing the Walk request button on the street needs your whole hand.
• She understands about context — some of her signs now mean different things in different places, like patting a lap means “I want to get onto your lap” whereas patting a bed means “time to lie down”.
• She has started using the “all done” sign to mean “no” as well, and you can now ask her a series of questions to try and elucidate what she wants.
• She can build a tower of blocks that goes about six blocks high, predictably. She can manage eight blocks from time to time.
• She high-fives, fist-bumps and can do “slip me some fin, noggin!” (from Finding Nemo, a small hiccup on our road to avoid merchandise, methinks) but is yet to utter “Dude!”. (Okay, these, we’ve taught her.)
• She can climb up and down from the couch and our bed.
• She uniformly holds books the right way up now. (This one was subtle. I’m not sure exactly when it started.)
• She can drink from an open cup, although she needs to be reminded to use both hands from time to time.
• She can close doors and lids and knows that’s what you do with them. She is constantly closing the front door if we leave it open by accident. She puts rubbish in the bin and slides the lid closed. If she notices we haven’t closed the lid, she will close it for us.
• And lastly? She has worked out how to turn on my iPhone and launch an app. Talk about an intuitive interface! When she first started trying to slide that non-existent slider, I was amused. When she succeeded, and almost updated my Facebook status with dnfjfknj I realised it was time to put in a code lock. As it is, she punches numbers until it tells her “wrong passcode” and then hits “emergency call” because she knows that goes to a screen that’s more fun…

In rare instances, you get to watch the learning process first hand. In the bath the other day, I turned the taps off. After a while, I had washed her hands and they were soapy. She stood up and went over to the faucet. She held her hands under it but I didn’t want to wash her hands that way when there was a full bath. She tried pressing the faucet. She looked under it to see where the water came from. She patted underneath it. She frowned and might have been remembering what it was I’d done because next thing she tried was turning the cold tap on!

They say you need to do something 1000 times before you learn it. As adults, we look at that and groan; it seems like endless, boring repetition and it seems almost impossible. Watching a toddler practise putting a shirt on with Mama’s help, and then lifting their own arm, and then starting to get their arm into the hole on their own with the ultimate conclusion that they too will one day put a shirt on with no help, it’s just obvious. 1000 times? At twice a day, that’s only a year and a half. I’m confident! Let’s go!

As adults, most of us have lost this simple fascination with practise, with continuous improvement. We expect to learn everything instantly or at least quickly. A colleague recently refused to join the rest of us at a work outing to an ice rink, saying she’d tried it a couple of times and was hopeless at it. It takes months of practise to get walking right the first time. Why do we think we can learn a new way to do that in two days?

If nothing else, parenting is teaching me more patience than I ever imagined I had. More than that though, it’s teaching me the joy of learning again. Oh yeah, that’s something else my daughter does now: applauds every time she achieves a goal she’s set herself.

As with many of these growth spurts, it all seems to happen at once. One minute you’re happily playing peek-a-boo with your mostly stationary child, the next there’s been a firmware upgrade and you’re playing clapping games while your child stands in front of you unsupported, then sits down, turns around, and wanders off when bored.

In our case, the marriage of hand co-ordination and linguistic comprehension has meant that in the last two weeks alone, our daughter has started to clap with intent in response to “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands” rather than the random and occasional thing it was before; to wave “bye bye” when someone says it; to sign “mama” in Auslan in response to “Where’s Mama?” or “Say ‘Mama’”; the sign “all done” and say “ah dah” as she does it; to sign “up” even more clearly now accompanied with (at least once) a long, drawn out “aaaaaahhhhhhp”; and to communicate fairly consistently when she needs to poo (unfortunately, we used the grunt-and-ssss method of encouragement for elimination communication, so “I need to go” is “unnnnghhhh”; I’m working on changing that to “poo” or the sign for it).

Intent is an amazing thing. We’re trying the “No cry sleep solution”, as I mentioned last post and the bed time routines are going well. Although she’s only slept through the night once, she is sleeping longer and I’m seeing marked improvement in how quickly and happily she’s going to sleep — I’m not holding a crying baby at 8.30pm who is only just going to sleep; instead I’m patting a restless one who woke up again after a 40 minute sleep-cycle and is trying to learn how to get herself back into the next one. We’ve always had a book before bed (from when she was a week old) but we didn’t have the longer wind-down we clearly needed and now have.

Tonight was a break-through. After dinner, I took our daughter into the lounge room, turned off the main light and sat down for some quiet play. She stood up, went to the table, took one of her books out from under something else, looked at it and put it on the floor, then took a second book that had been under that, looked at it and brought it to me. She then sat down in my lap and waited expectantly. She asked me to read to her and she chose the book she wanted. That’s kind of amazing. What’s more, it’s like saying, “Mama, I’m tired now. Can we skip the playing bit and go to the reading bit?”

As for me, well, I didn’t miss the first two steps unaided and work is pretty fulfilling. I love the way my girl lights up when her Daddy says he loves her and I can’t imagine a better place to be right now. Well… I have some projects I’d like to get started on, but I have this family that’s more important right now.

And a little girl’s birthday party to organise.

I was going to write this article about the scientific arguments against “cry it out” or “controlled crying” (and I will get around to that article) but I realised I’m too tired and the nagging cough is getting to me. Instead, you get a top-of-the-head rant about health and priorities. To some extent, it’s about why we’re even talking about cry-it-out and sleep issues and why I want to compare the “sleep whisperer” book (Save our Sleep) with Elizabeth Pantley’s No Cry Sleep Solution which I’m reading now. But that’s for next time.

At work today, I met another one of those annoying parents who tells you that their four-month-old is sleeping through the night and has been since they were six weeks old. I don’t dare ask if their child sleeps in another room, has been crying it out or whatever. I trust that there are some children who magically do that. Mine isn’t one of them. I’m thrilled because, instead of waking four and five times a night, she’s currently only waking twice a night.

I was amazed to read in Pantley’s book that “sleeping through the night” actually refers to sleeping for five hours or more in a stretch. My darling does that happily, so long as it’s from 8pm until 3am. Try and give her that “dream feed” that Tizzie Hall talks about and you’ve set her up to wake at 12am, 2am and 4am.

So what am I like after 10 months without a single solid night’s sleep? I’m run down. I’m simply not functioning at the top of my game.

Let me give you the quick re-cap:

I started co-sleeping in the hospital ward, which enticed one nurse to comment, “Oh, that’s what the black women do!” (sorry, readers, but Australia can be amazingly backward at times; our African immigrants are quite recent, and I assume she was referring to the Somalian women who are some of the newest members of our community.) These wakeups were quiet and delightful.

Back home, we co-slept and baby woke every other hour. I slept when he slept and it all went as well as could be expected. I was amazed at my resilience and felt quite rested.

At six weeks, bub was going to sleep mostly as desired, but only with a tight regimen of swaddling, swaying and thumb-sucking (ours, not hers) thanks to Harvey Karp’s Baby Bliss. Some nights were very, very tough.

At around three months, as predicted, things started to get a little more manageable. We still had the incredibly alert baby who would watch a person with an unnerving unbroken stare so long as they kept talking to her. She still took 45 minute naps — none of this two hour stuff for her.

At five months, we decided she would move from our bed into a cradle next to our bed as a transition to her own cot in another room, on the basis of various books mentioning that permanent sleep cycles start around this point. My partner built a cradle that would rock and sleep went smoothly until the six month growth spurt.

From then until now, it feels like we’ve permanently been entering or exiting a growth spurt. We ratchet up to five wake/feed/sleep cycles a night and then down to two then back up to four and so on. And I’ve become very used to it.

We’ve decided we need to do something about it for two reasons. The first is that about a month ago, our little angel outgrew the cradle beside our bed, so now she *has* to transfer to her crib or sleep with us again. We’d like her to sleep in her crib because although I might sleep well when she’s snuggled in bed with us, her Dad doesn’t. The second is that she’s started getting cranky and difficult for him during the day and screaming rather than take a nap — and it’s a vicious cycle.

Some of our changes are already paying off: he’s lying down with her in our bed for daytime naps and she’s sleeping up to two hours sometimes for one nap and having two naps most days.

We started out with feeding her to sleep in her room, laying her down in her cot and then bringing her in to sleep with us when she first woke up. As that’s been working, I’m now feeding to sleep but in her room, laying her down in her crib, feeding her in there again for the first wake-up and then bringing her to us for the second wake-up. We’re making little adjustments based on instinct, negotiation, things we’ve read online and Pantley’s book that we bought three days ago. Suffice to say, last night she only woke at 3am.

The weird thing, though, is how I’m responding to the extra sleep. The 3am wake-up is harder to recover from when I get there after five hours of sleep. Last night was the third night recently where both she and my man are fast asleep and I’m restlessly checking Facebook on my iPhone in the dark.

Of course, nothing is predictable with a baby. She just woke at 10.11pm and I’ve fed her. She’s back asleep in her cot. Who knows, tonight could be another four wake-ups night. If it is, at least most of them I won’t need to get up for.

For those who are going to weigh in about how my daughter will rebel and that girls just like pink or that just wait, she’ll want it when she dresses herself… a) hmmm, funny, I never did and b) I’m not banning the colour from the house, just refusing this bizarre world in which pink is the only colour girls can wear. A few months ago, my little girl had grown into some clothing we’d been given and I reluctantly dressed her in it. Her first pink stuff. Stripey hot pink and orange pants (they look better than that sounds) and a hot pink jacket from someone else. Surprisingly, it looked good. And then I took her out into a world where every other little girl was wearing pink and remembered why I have a problem with it. Have you been into a mainstream clothing shop for babies recently?

It’s about limiting her options. Already. It’s about telling her she can’t have the rainbow. I want to raise a girl who believes she can do and be anything, just like the posters said on the trains when I was growing up. I fear that I’m living in a strange retro world where feminism didn’t happen, despite the fact that I’m working and my partner is not the only man at playgroup, so clearly it did. However, as the slogan goes, I’ll be a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy and we ain’t there yet.

I’m not quite as intense as the Swedish couple who are concealing their child’s gender from anyone who isn’t changing the nappies. I do however understand where they’re coming from. I gave my child a gender-neutral name, partly because I had heard about a study where people were less likely to hire a person based solely on whether their name sounded male or female. I wanted my first interaction with my baby to be non-gendered (it didn’t turn out that way because of an anaesthetist who spilled the beans, but the intention was there!). If this sounds like overkill, then you might be someone who has never been uncomfortable with your gender.

I remember reading in Sandy Stone‘s book about her gender transition that some psychiatrist insisted she wasn’t serious about transitioning when she turned up to a session wearing pants. She had to point out the window at the vast majority of cisgendered women out there dressed exactly as she was. And yet today, we have exactly the same double standards about what “femininity” is. When Caster Semenya won a race by too great a margin for a “woman”, she was subjected to a raft of sex tests (and let’s not get confused: it was her sex and not her gender that was in question; her gender identity was clearly female or she wouldn’t have been entering a women’s race). That’s all odd and challenging but when it got offensive was when YOU magazine gave her a makeover: apparently, you’re “really” a woman when you wear make-up and a dress.

Some will say that the Semenya case demonstrates clearly that there are differences between “men” and “women”, that even the small amount of extra testosterone from internal testes gave Semenya an advantage. Well, sure. No one is denying that certain biological characteristics lead to certain practical outcomes on average but these tiny differences, in relative strength, speed, stamina, what-have-you are blown out of proportion through a lifetime of socialisation.

Recent studies have shown that when parents thought they were dealing with girls, they were more likely to describe the child as happy and socially engaged and more likely to underestimate the child’s physical abilities — even when the child was actually a boy they’d been told was a girl. As Sharon Begley explains, in her review of Lise Eliot’s book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, “Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens.”

I can only imagine that such perceptions lead to a long-term distortion of minor differences, as girls are interacted with as if they are more social, thus becoming more social, and as their physical activity is limited for fear they will hurt themselves and they slowly internalise the message that they are not as competent. When we measure “innate” sex differences in adults, it is the result of this long-term conditioning we are measuring. Begley again: “How we perceive children — sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains.” (It’s worth reading the whole article; Begley succinctly summarises Eliot’s findings. There’s also an interview over at Salon with Eliot which isn’t as good as it could have been.)

The other book doing the rounds at the moment is Nurtureshock by sociologists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. I’ll leave the bulk of my thoughts on this book for another post but one interesting idea from it relates to how we over-reward our children for underachievement and how that actually undermines self-esteem. I question the phrases we use: how often in a day do you say “good girl” or “good boy” when what you really mean is “brave girl” or “clever boy”? And how often are we, through this, disguising the different things we praise boys and girls for? One alternative approach is Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting. Another book I haven’t actually had time to read, I understand the concept to be that you eschew all criticism and praise and instead just reflect back to the child what they did: “hey, you rolled over by yourself — now you can reach your toy. Hey, you knocked over the milk — now, we’ll have to clean it up.”

While we had trouble doing this consistently, we have done our best to switch to describing our daughter’s actions and affects. It’s amazing how often I now think hard to work out why I think something is praiseworthy — was she adventurous? canny? strong? Would I think those things were praiseworthy in a boy or would I expect them?

I care about this because I want my daughter to grow up confident and capable. I want her to be free from the debilitating disease of self-doubt that seems to afflict almost every woman I know, no matter how competent or high-powered. I worry that she will be one of the few girls in her generation to have those attributes and once again, I worry that my efforts to help her be a strong individual will mark her out as different in a society that colour-codes every toy, every item of clothing and even the pages of the catalogs, just in case we were to mistake a practical toy that encouraged spatial play as suitable for our girl, when obviously, she should be playing with the pink cleaning cart clearly marked “girls only” on the packaging.