Green Options

A new site called What’s On My Food just launched this week. It is a godsend for moms everywhere who are concerned about pesticides in our and our babies’ food, not to mention water systems and the air. Did you know that the average American child gets five plus servings of pesticides in their food and water daily? Did you know that Atrazine, a potent [...]

I’m alive!!!! I didn’t think I would make it, but I did!
Exhausted Mom by Halfmoon Jewelry, Flickr, under a Creative Commons license

I have an eleven month old little girl named Emerson who, in spite of the nurses at the hospital saying “you’ve got a sleeper”, turned out to not be much of a sleeper.  There are worse stories, but mine is a good example of mixing mom’s intuition, dad’s motivation, and a great deal of research to figure out the best path to sanity.
Our Story
Month 1
Emerson started as a fairly typical baby. She slept for two hours at a time around the clock, waking only to latch on for her fill. I co-slept with her in our bed and my husband slept in an extra room so that he could get enough sleep to deal with life (don’t worry, we slipped nookie in here and there). She almost never cried the entire first month of her life. I thought the situation was quite blissful, particularly because I took the age old advice of “sleep when your baby sleeps” to heart. Clearly something in the mommy brain prepares us for waking up to feed a baby every two hours…but only up to a point.

Got a restless little sleeper? A baby who just seems uncomfortable most of the time? I’m no doctor but I’m a mom who survived a baby with colic and reflux. Yup, sleepless nights for what seemed like an eternity, feeling helpless looking at my baby girl writhing around in pain/discomfort, teetering on the edge of insanity as I started back to work.
If only someone had told me…
After four months of Emerson being up every 1-2 hours at night, and taking short, restless naps, and not sleeping comfortably anywhere—with me, in a moses basket, in her crib—I was at the end of my rope. Our pediatrician’s “She’s just not a good sleeper” response was not enough for me—clearly something was wrong. She was in pain! I googled “infant restless sleep” and bought every sleep book in existence to find an answer. I finally found it in Dr Sears’s The Baby Sleep Book.

Editor’s Note: Allison Wolff is the Founder of Vibrant Planet, a company that provides strategy and communications for companies and nonprofits focused on social and environmental innovation. She was also lead strategist and writer at Stone Yamashita Partners and former Director of Marketing for Netflix. This is her first contribution to GO Media.

I am the mother of a 9 month old little girl named Emerson. I struggled for years—almost to the point of having the age window close on me—with the question of whether or not to have a kid because of planet’s likely dismal future. Emerson is a “we didn’t try not to get pregnant” baby and, because she dropped into my womb with only one unprotected “oops”, I tell myself that she was fated to be here given all the trials and tribulations my other 40 year old friends have gone through to have children. A friend who is a climate scientist/astrologist/string theorist convinced me that she is likely one of the planet saving souls who has been waiting to arrive on Earth.

Since I found out I was pregnant, I have struggled deeply with what kind of mom I ideally want to be versus what is realistic given a number of difficult, well…realities. I grapple with everything from sleep and food introduction philosophies to vaccinations and what products to buy or accept from friends as gifts (i.e. I have been very particular about what I allow to enter my daughter’s mouth). I can’t wait until I have to start thinking about discipline and potty training.