I am not a dog...

And thus cannot be trained---contrary to popular belief (or at least my SIL's belief).

I'll preface this by saying, I could be totally being oversensitive with this...but, it's my blog :-)

My SIL has children...sweet, fairly normal children. Of both sexes and of various ages. She's not totally removed from the world of little ones. She loves to offer to give advice (and she does give great hand me downs!) but she doesn't actually give the advice. She just makes comments and pats herself on the back.

Just yesterday, I heard about how her children don't give overstimulated, go to bed by seven and basically just rock (well...that last one is true...I do love them!). But, then she made a comment about how LM has me trained! TRAINED--like I'm a dog. 

First of all---I really don't think a 3 month old is capable of purposeful manipulation to get what he wants. I do believe that he is beginning--BEGINNING--to make cause/effect relationships between things. But, I don't think that his current inability to nap longer than 20 minutes anywhere but on one of us/in the carrier is because he has figured out that he can train us to do this. I lay him down in his crib or PNP for probably 75% of his naps. You all know that naps something we've been struggling with...awake time and all.  He falls right asleep...he just wakes up after 20 min or so, happy as a clam.  He'll do this consistently during the day..unless he's napping on us. He used to even nap well in his swing...but now he doesn't. This is not him training us...this is just something we're going through at the moment.

I don't think this is all that odd considering he couldn't sleep flat on his back without choking etc for the first two months. He's only recently been sleeping flat on his back AND in his crib. I think we've made A LOT of progress in the last month. We're down to waking to eat once a night, we're slowly going to bed earlier and waking up at a consistent time (consistently early!).

I also think that pretty soon he's going to be moving and grooving and not want to snuggle as much...I want to enjoy these naps. In fact, it's something several other moms have told me that they miss! I'm conscious of the fact that in two months he starts daycare and we've got to make some progress in napping. BUT we've got 2 months. I'm not going to miss out on something special with my LM (or make TH miss out on this special time) because I'm worried HE won't be "trained" in time. I'm going to keep working on developing a smooth routine and that's that.

I know that everyone loves to give unsolicited advice---some useful, some hopelessly outdated--but what really grates on me is comments that are meant to show your superiority as a mother. This is not mommy wars...this is not a competition.  This is my baby and he's going to be different because he's MINE (ok..OURS).

I would love for my SIL to give me advice and help me figure out my problems/struggles...but it seems that all I get are comments that make her feel better about being a mom and make me feel worse. 

And for the record...LM took an hour and a half nap in his PNP today--which last time I checked, isn't sleeping on me...so clearly we're working through a phase.

Trained my a**.