Attachment Mama

Archive for the ‘AP & Self Care’ Category

A Mommy Time-Out

By Monica Cravotta | Published: Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Klimt, Sleeping Woman detail

I really admire parenting and education author Alfie Kohn and the way he challenges us as parents to reconsider our basic assumptions about how best to raise kind, considerate, polite human beings. You can find my quick-read summary of his book, Unconditional Parenting in the AP Book Snapshots section of this site.

Ever since I read this book, I’ve reconsidered “time outs” — the almost universally accepted parenting tool considered to be gentle behavior management. And alas, Alfie suggests we rethink what it means to manage, and thereby manipulate/control our children’s actions altogether.

This is no easy task.

When my second baby was born and I was out-of-my-mind tired from the triple high-need combination of a newborn, 2-year-old, and teenage step-daughter, I lost my patience a few times when I couldn’t master getting both girls to sleep at the same time in the afternoons. Twice I succumbed to a time-out for my toddler. Both were no more than 30 seconds in our large walk-in closet with me holding the door. I felt so awful both times knowing that she was in complete distress and, as Alfie points out, experiencing my withdrawal of love.

So I haven’t done a time out since and hope that my well of patience deepens for my second angel so she never has to experience that. I’ve succumbed to all kinds of “if you do this, you can have that” parenting moves — but I’ll save that for another post.

Tonight, I’m calling a Time Out for Me.

Not to withdraw love from anyone in my family. Not to indirectly punish anyone. But to simply love and care for myself. For the first time in 3 1/2 years, I’m going to sleep BY MYSELF. Just me, my favorite pillow, a big cozy blanket and my couch. Holy CROW. I hope the glass of wine I’m about to pour for myself will support my strong desire to experience 8 hours straight of uninterrupted sleep. But I will be thrilled if I score 6 hours before my now highly-conditioned, middle-of-the-night wake(s).

I looked in the mirror today and the frazzled hair, droopy red-eyes and puffed up cold-sore lip staring back at me said, “It’s time.”

Time for this Mama to get some serious rest.

Posted in AP & Self Care | 3 Comments

Gratitude Check Mamas How Do You Feel?

By Monica Cravotta | Published: Tuesday, March 30, 2010

We feel good! Oh We Feel So Good! UH!

Remember that cheer from high school? Or am I the only dork that still has that and others running through my head on occasion?

A few weeks back when I was feeling like Queen Grumperella, I opted to create a little Mama Bonding here around pet peeves that come with early parenting. And I have to admit, I truly enjoyed it and loved all the comments from you all.

I think it’s important for everyone, but particularly for women, to talk about and purge what’s not working in our lives to clear it out and make space for peace and creating the life we do want. Talk it out. Exercise it out. Meditate it out during the daily poo. Whatever mode of excretion works best for ya.

A few years ago before I had my girls, I participated in this yummy Goddess circle one evening in which we all took paper and scribbled down everything about our lives that we couldn’t stand, mostly lies about ourselves that we no longer wanted to buy into.

We debated whether to burn them or transform them — and opted for the latter. I shredded my paper into 100 pieces and made the art you see here.

I tend to learn lessons over and over again. Like learning that running significantly alters my state of mind — in a good way. It’s ridiculous how many times over the last 20+ years that I’ve said, “Oh yeah! I forgot about this!” And the lesson that I re-learned when going down the pet-peeve path recently is that when I focus on what’s wrong, my inner complaints tend to feed off of each other and pretty quickly all I see is what’s not working, what’s not not fun, what’s annoying, etc. No bueno!

Thankfully I’ve gotten much better at cracking this little pattern in recent years with more self-awareness and a few tricks up my sleeve for redirecting thought patterns.

It’s all about finding the balance between the healthy expression of anger, sadness and disappointment and setting yourself up to move quickly from the purge into a new set of questions. Sound familiar? I know I’ve mentioned the idea of “Changing the Question” as an emotional coping mechanism several times here before.

What would make running this errand fun? What can I do to have my children and husband consistently experience my Love? How could I change my daily schedule to incorporate the me-time I need for my well-being? What is perfect about my life right now? What am I learning? What am I grateful for?

And this brings me to the topic du jour. Gratitude.

Please join me in making a list of everything you feel grateful for in your life. This is an insightful part of the Power of Intention guided journaling exercise that I’ve come to love in recent months. I haven’t committed time to it in the last few weeks and am inspired to kick start it again knowing how much more powerful focusing on what you want can be versus what you don’t. Have any of you given the Power of Intention journaling a try? Curious to hear if it has impacted others in any way.

I’ll start the Gratitude list and welcome everyone to add their blessings through the comment section.

I am so grateful for:

My family — every member. My husband, my sweet girls, my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law and niece and nephew and everyone on my husband’s side. I am so lucky to have this family.
My friends — near and far, old and new, I love each one dearly.
My home.
Our sweet housemate who is helping us so much with dinners and breakfasts and cleaning our kitchen and sitting with our girls one evening a week so we can go on dates. What a gift.
Our amazing nanny. We are so lucky to have someone so grounded, gentle, smart, creative and conscious about what children need emotionally to step in for us in caring for our angels while we work.
The project work that I received last month and all future work that will come my way in perfect time
Sweet Songs coming to life. My next post will give you all an update.

Posted in AP & Self Care | 4 Comments

Remember the Airline Oxygen Mask Instructions

By Monica Cravotta | Published: Sunday, February 21, 2010

breathe easier image

The first time I referenced the oxygen mask metaphor was during my first job out of college with Teach for America. I had so much young, bleeding-heart passion for doing my part to foster social change in public education and all that remains unfair about it. I rocked (or thought I did) during the six week summer training program and with naive hubris requested a middle school assignment. I scored a particularly challenging gig. And soon after I began the school year, my overwhelm spiraled into severe anxiety and the inability to sleep at all for six weeks — and eventually the inability to do much of anything — let alone teach.

I was 23 years old. And I remember saying to one of my friends who was teaching with me at the same inner-city Houston school (and is still one of my closest friends today): “There’s a solid reason the airlines instruct adults to put their oxygen mask on first, and then assist their child. If you pass out from lack of oxygen, you can’t help your child do anything. I can’t teach these kids when I am struggling to help myself.”

The decision to leave the job was agonizing and the aftermath solidly demoralizing. And yet my heart at the time felt clear that my presence in the classroom was contradicting the mission that I signed up for to provide excellent education for under-privileged children.

Now, fifteen years later with success in another career, I’m in a fairly chronic sleep-deprived state once again — but much less severe, and thankfully not because of all-night-long anxiety attacks. Yes, we’ve “night-weaned” our baby, but that doesn’t mean she’s sleeping through the night. My wakings now alternate between hearing the baby waking, crying briefly and my husband shushing her back to sleep, and my toddler waking me to request a trip to the bathroom or some water. It’s getting easier each week and I know there is also magical parent-child closeness to be relished during this chapter of life.

Yet the self-care struggle remains. As I strive to provide consistent loving care for my girls while frequently neglecting myself, I’m reminded of the airline oxygen mask instructions and the poignant applicability of this metaphor to these intense early years of parenting. (more…)

Posted in AP & Self Care | 5 Comments

Living the Dream – We Love Our New Housemate!

By Monica Cravotta | Published: Thursday, February 11, 2010

Here’s the bizarre dichotomous nature of my life right now. On the one hand, I’m fully living the stress of this recession as my husband and I scramble to figure out how to live off of 10% of the income we had three years ago.

On the other hand, I’ve never been more rich than I am right now. I’ve never felt more alive or inspired to create; I have never been more fully expressed (I love writing my bloggity blog!), and I have never felt more gratitude for everything I have: My family, my health, my connections with others. Pure sweetness and true wealth in my book.

And — HOLY POWER OF INTENTION — we have a live-in cook!!

Amazing! Sometimes I still can’t believe it. I can play with my girls and/or exercise while someone else prepares a home-cooked healthy meal and after dinner I can either work or participate in our bed-time routine and someone else cleans the kitchen. What?? Is this for real?? (more…)

Posted in AP & Self Care, Breastfeeding, Co-Sleeping, Nutrition | 3 Comments

Our New Wild Card Approach to Self Care

By Monica Cravotta | Published: Monday, February 1, 2010

Three years of ridiculously bad sleep, a laughable exercise routine, a high dose of economic stress and a solid propensity for weekly binges on either chocolate chip cookies or Annie’s mac and cheese or a basket of tater tots at Dog Almighty……um yeah, I’m not exactly the poster child for Self Care that I strive to be. Yes, I balance my occasional mac and cheese binge with frequent visits to Casa de Luz thanks to a trade my husband worked out with the owner, and I prepare plenty of healthy meals for my family — but all together I haven’t felt great about the big picture of our lifestyle.

Reading my Self Care posts, you may have gotten the impression that I’m the queen at manifesting all things good and healthy for myself and my family. (Ha!) Health and well-being is certainly my number one priority right now. I’ve been striving for it and certainly writing about it a lot — but quite honestly — our diet and exercise routine (or lack thereof) hasn’t come close to what I believe is necessary for disease prevention and longevity. Living through the last month of my entire family so unhappily sick helped me get clear on our need to change something about the way we live.

Our one fabulous bit of progress has been on the sleep front. Our new approach to the family bed? Divide and conquer. Our littlest, now 16 months, has turned a corner and can happily sleep seven or eight hours with her Daddy. YES! (this “yes” really deserves eighteen exclamation points to give you the full idea of my feelings on the subject). She may wake once or twice, but she immediately falls back to sleep. And I feel OK about it, because she’s still being responded to with sensitivity and love. This is a life changer. Had I continued to sleep with her, she would still be nursing every two to three hours and I would officially be The Crazy Cravotta Lady. So, it’s Daddy and sweet baby in one bed; me and sweet toddler in another. What about the husband-wife thing, you ask? We’re working on some creative solutions in that department.

Now. To the truly healthy lifestyle and self-care question. My husband and I have been saying we’ve got to figure out how to work exercise back into our schedule for months and it just hasn’t been happening. And I’ve been worried that when I’m back to work 8-5 and anxious to get home and see my girls, the probability of fitting in exercise could be even more challenging.

And then I got this wild card idea while setting intentions for the New Year. What if we rented out our guest room to someone as a trade? Maybe someone studying to be chef that would love free rent in exchange for grocery shopping, preparing meals for us five days/week and cleaning up the kitchen afterward? That would free up as much as 2 hours/day for me on those days! Time that I could take the girls out in the jogging stroller and knock out a run, get some special time with them at the neighborhood park, and come home to a healthy, home-cooked meal.

So we went for it. Posted an ad on Craig’s List earlier this month. And Voilà! Would you believe the dream we put out there was a dream come true for someone else? A young, delightful woman who wants to change careers and become a chef moved to Austin last week to pursue her passion for cooking. She told a friend that she really hoped to find a family here that she could live with and cook for to get practice toward her dream profession. And she’s starting cooking school with the Natural Epicurean in May.

She moves in tomorrow.

February 1st, 2010 marks the beginning of a new chapter in our life and our mission to take better care of ourselves while caring for our sweet angels. We hope and give thanks for this little experiment being a positive experience for all of us. Power of Intention rocks!