Crying it out.

So I’m sitting in my darkened bedroom working on sleep training my 6 month old.  I won’t lie, its tough.  I’m listening to the poor little child cry about 6 feet away from me.  It feels wrong.  But I know it works and it will be better for everyone once she learns to go to sleep without my help.  I’m past the point of exhaustion and the sleepless nights are really starting to take a toll on whats left of my sanity.  And the little bit of sanity must be preserved at all costs.  Its midnight and I’m sipping a glass of wine and eating cheese and crackers in an attempt to make this a little more bearable.  Some of you might ask why I don’t leave the room, but its easier for me this way, I need to be here, to be this close to her.  When I leave the room but can still hear her the torture is worse.  Some of you might disagree with this method but we did it with my older daughter and it worked really quickly and very well.  She is a great, well an ok sleeper, now and has no obvious ill effects from the approximately 2 hours we left her to cry over the period of 3 nights.

But this little experiment in child rearing got me thinking….how many other things will I do for my daughters’ benefit that will be horribly painful for her and me?  I mean when you have a child you expect sleepless night and dirty diapers but who knew it could be this painful to do something that will ultimately benefit her so much.  I guess that is where the old saying “its going to hurt me more than its going to hurt you” came from? Old sayings usually ring true at some point, otherwise they wouldn’t still be around.

Anyway I don’t have a huge point here except to complain about how bad this sucks.

And just for you opponents of crying it out, I do go comfort her every few minutes and the minute I’m there she calms right down.  She has been fed and changed and is not ill.  She just needs mommy to walk her to sleep every time she wakes up.  Every. Single. Time.

Music. American Idol?

So I’ve just gotten my youngest daughter to bed and while I was waiting to make sure she was really down for the night or just faking it (she is apparently faking it by the way, I’ve been interrupted 3 times while trying to write this.), I started watching American Idol which I had recorded on the DVR.  I’ve watched this show off and on for several years and tonight while watching Casey James perform it really got me thinking about the wonderful power of music.  Now, I do not have a single musical bone in my body, except, perhaps an appreciation bone.  I love music.  I appreciate the power of it.  Some of my fondest memories are based on music, some of my worst memories can be evoked by a few notes of a single song.

I remember as a young girl sitting upstairs in my pink room with pink carpet, turning on my boom box and waiting, just waiting for that song that one song, you know the one.  The song that you feel like you could have written yourself, the song with just the right melody that strikes something, some chord deep inside you somewhere? These were years before the internet and instant music.  These were the years of FM only radio, no satellites beaming me music genres of my choice.  These were the impressionable years, shaped by a handful of mediocre-at best radio stations in South Dakota (yes South Dakota has radio stations).  And you might wait all afternoon for one song but if you heard it, THE song, it was all worth it.  And hopefully you had a blank tape in the cassette player so you could record it.

I also remember driving home from law school hours after I found out my sister was killed in a car accident and having a newly downloaded CD in the player and surviving that 7 hour drive in the blizzard with that music and maybe because of that music.  I think the album was roughly an hour long and I listened to it the entire drive home.  I was afraid to turn on the radio, it was if hearing voices from the outside world, live on the radio would have somehow made everything more real, it might have brought me out of my shock and I wasn’t ready for that yet.    If you’re curious, that CD was an Australian band called Powderfinger and the album was Vulture Street.  There is a lot I could write about that long drive, too much for tonight, but I’ll leave you with this; that album will be dear to me forever, although even now, 5.5 years later it evokes memories so painful that I cannot bear to listen to more than a few moments of any one song on it and yet somehow it will probably always be my favorite album ever.

So back to American Idol.  Something struck a chord, so to speak, in me with Casey James’ performance of Jealous Guy by John Lennon.  Can I pin point what it was exactly?  No.  The words to the song are extremely simple, my favorite line is “I’m shivering inside.”  I mean can’t you just feel the emotion behind that?  The first sentence into this performance my heart is aching, memories from my own past are flooding in and I’m there, I’m right there with the singer and the song writer.  That is what music is about I suppose,  evoking emotion.  Whether it was the words or the performance or Casey’s lovely hair, it brought me here to write about music, something I know very little about except that I love it.