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Danielle Bean

Catholic Writer and Speaker

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Sleep Is For Wimps

February 9, 2016 by Danielle Filed Under: Babies, Momnipotent, Mothers 1 Comment

Dog.in.sleepTiny hands cupped my face.

“Mama, Mama,” I heard a voice whisper. “I need you.”

“Gah!” I responded.

To explain my somewhat inelegant response, I should tell you that it was about 2 a.m. when the tiny hands cupped my face and the small voice awakened me from a sound sleep.

The little person needed a change of sheets. And a drink of water. And a re-arranging of stuffed animal friends. And a tuck-in. And a kiss.

As I met these needs willingly and then made my way back to bed, I reflected on the fact that I no longer fight the battle of sleep the way I once did.

I remember pacing the halls of our tiny one-bedroom apartment with our first baby – a screeching, colicky newborn, and thinking to my exhausted self, “This makes no sense. Surely someone is going to step in here and make this right, because people need to sleep.”

But no one did step in, except for my husband on occasion. And if the ensuing years have taught me nothing else, they have quite surely taught me this much: Though you might occasionally get one, no parent has a right to expect a good night’s sleep.

Here are some other parenting sleep facts I have learned over the years. Mostly at 2 a.m.

Parents gain new sleep skills.

At a baby shower, it seems there is always some older mom ready to “shower” the pregnant newbie with helpful information, like how she would rather eat glass than ever experience labor again. These are the same women who relish warning innocent young couples that after their baby is born, they will “never sleep again.”

This is ridiculous. Of course they will sleep again. In fact, they will learn to catch their Z’s in all variety of new places – in the dentist chair, in the confessional, in the shower, and while standing at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes.

Never say never.

When it comes to parents sharing their bed with infants and toddlers, anything goes. Once upon a time, I rejected co-sleeping because I “just wanted to get some sleep.” In ensuing years, however, I found myself embracing co-sleeping because, once again, I “just wanted to get some sleep.”

I reserve the right to continue to reject and embrace co-sleeping as much as I need to, for this precise reason. As every parent should. When it comes to making family sleep decisions, you answer to no one but yourself and your spouse. And possibly your employer, if you operate heavy machinery.

It’s all about attitude.

I used to struggle and fight to get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep each night because I thought getting that much sleep was a “basic necessity.” As motherhood helped me readjust my definition of “basic necessity,” however, I lowered my standards just a bit.

Now, when I find myself awake with a fussy baby at 12 a.m., up with a nightmarish toddler at 2 a.m., and changing an older child’s sheets at 4 a.m., I crawl back into my bed at 4:30 thinking, “Maybe no one will need me for another 3 hours. This will be a glorious nap!”

And it is.

There are no guarantees.

Especially with babies, it can be tempting to think you can win the sleep lottery by stacking the odds in your favor. We parents think rational thoughts like, “If I don’t let the baby nap for too long today, he’ll sleep well tonight,” or “If she skips her morning nap, she’s bound to take an extra-long one this afternoon.”

It all looks good on paper, but don’t count on it. There’s this thing grandmas call being “overtired.” If a baby lacks proper rest, he’ll sometimes become over-stimulated and incapable of falling asleep or staying asleep for any length of time.

If your baby gets “overtired,” you might just find yourself standing over his crib screaming something logical like, “I haven’t showered for three weeks! You owe me a nap!”

No he doesn’t. No guarantees.

Nighttime can be nice.

There, I said it. Sometimes, even when my eyes ache with fatigue, some crazy part of me enjoys being awake in my house when no one else is.

For one thing, my living room never looks so fantastic as it does bathed in moonlight at 3 a.m. Dust bunnies, wall markings, un-mopped floors, and fingerprinted windows all blend in with the shadows.

A second bonus is the quiet. Sometimes, when I find myself alone with a wakeful child in the night, I sit still and let the silence run over my ears like a soothing balm. I watch the flames flicker through the window of the wood stove and bask in God’s presence right there, where He always is, beneath the noise.

I do wish every parent a good night’s sleep, but since none of us is likely to get that anytime soon, I wish each of us something even better – grace.

Grace is what keeps us keeping on when there’s nothing left in the tank. It’s what tells us the job we’re doing is important, even if it’s 3 a.m. and nobody remembers to say “thank you.” And it’s what makes me smile as I rock a feverish baby in the dead of the night and sing him the words of a Bon Jovi classic:

“Until I’m 6 feet under baby, I don’t need a bed. Gonna live while I’m alive, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

This is an old column of mine that originally appeared at InsideCatholic.

One Little Thing at a Time

November 30, 2015 by Danielle Filed Under: Babies, Big Kids, Homemaking, School 2 Comments

1280px-Ladybug_walk(This is an old column of mine that originally appeared at Inside Catholic. Just like yours, my life is still ridiculous, but some of the details are different from what is described here. The message still applies, though.)

My life is ridiculous. Do I need to tell you this, or can you reach that conclusion all on your own when I tell you that I am a homeschooling mother of eight who also works from home?

Some days, the different roles I play meld seamlessly together.

“Of course I can do this!” I find myself thinking as I take a phone call from the pediatrician while the toddler plays peacefully with poster paints, the 11-year-old memorizes prepositions, the 15-year-old completes her algebra, and the 10-year-old whips up a fresh batch of banana muffins. “Who couldn’t do this?”

But other days? Other days, my seamlessly melding roles collide. They crash, smash, and burn.

I’ll never forget the time I was on the phone with a work colleague – one whom I had just met and hoped to impress with my “professionalism” – when I heard a knock on my bedroom door. One rule I have to keep me sane is that if I am on the phone for work, I can lock my door and that means NO BUGGING MOM.

I knew that the insistent knock meant something important was going on, so mid-conversation, I took a deep breath and opened the door.

There stood my oldest son with one hand over his nose. Blood dripped through his fingers, ran down his arm, and formed a small puddle on the floor at his feet.

“Do you understand what I am saying?” I remember the man on the phone asking me then, “Because I’m not sure at all that you do.”

I mumbled something about a bleeding boy and hung up the phone.

I am not exactly proud to report that the cause of the furiously bleeding face was another one of my sons. An argument over a ball game had turned violent. Younger brother’s fist managed to hit a lucky spot on older brother’s nose where there happened to be a willing vein. To me, the worst part of the whole messy incident was the fact that they were supposed to be working on a geography quiz.

I still talk to the colleague from that interrupted phone call sometimes, and to this day I suspect he believes I am a brainless loon. And he’s probably right about that. But it’s not my fault. It’s the bloody children.

When people on the outside ask what daily life looks like in my home, I think many of them picture me working in a pristine office with a mountain view while my children recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sit in neat rows of desks in our classroom.

We do have a classroom. But like many rooms in houses that belong to men who build, it is unfinished. It has no floor yet, and it is the current home of my washing machine and my husband’s weight bench. It also features a sizable collection of half-empty paint cans. Because we will need them someday.

My husband sometimes has the older children sit in the classroom for math lectures, but they need to kick empty laundry detergent bottles out of the way and brush aside saw dust from the nearby circular saw (did I not mention the saw? The one my husband keeps in there for trimming firewood?) before they can sit down. On the weight bench.

Welcome to our home school. We do and learn all kinds of things all over the house. And the process is not always pretty.

I don’t pretend to be the only person on the planet with a crazy life, though. I know plenty of people who, in my estimation, live even crazier lives than mine. I have nutty friends who have reached double digits in their child count. I know wild women who work outside the home. I know crazy moms who care for aging parents or homeschool children with multiple disabilities.

I think we’re all crazy in some way. Many of us, in our own hidden worlds, are taking on daunting tasks and tremendous responsibilities.

I can’t do all of this, I am sometimes tempted to think – particularly on days where my various roles and responsibilities seem to be in conflict with each other. But what I fail to see at those times is that no one is asking me to “do all of that.” Not all at once, anyway.

I think about this sometimes as I wipe down the tiles in my kitchen. I long ago stopped pulling out a mop to clean this spot that needs cleaning at least once a day. It’s just more efficient to get down on my hands and knees with a damp cloth and wipe the floor by hand. One tile at a time.

Cleaning an entire sticky floor can seem like a daunting job, I always notice, but anyone can wipe one square foot of tile at a time. If I keep working, all those tiles eventually add up to a clean floor.

“Faithfulness in little things is a big thing,” St. John Chrysostom reminds us.

I need to remind myself more often that one small thing at a time is all God ever asks me to do. All the little things – spilled juice, phone calls, grammar lessons, e-mail replies, laundry piles, baseball games and other fun games (learn more about them here), Band-Aids, and sticky tiles – add up to God’s great big will for me every day.

One thing at a time. I think I can do that. And you can, too.

Of Saints and Sinners

November 2, 2015 by Danielle Filed Under: Babies, Columns, Special Days 1 Comment

MIIG95AF1WI was a teenager when he died. We went to visit him one last time when I was about 14 years old. Nobody said it was “one last time” – not to me, anyway. They said we would be taking some short trips to Canada – just a few of us kids at a time – to see our grandfather.

It was their eyes, their tone, and their hushed late-night conversations that said “one last time.”

And it was the last time. I can’t remember the circumstances under which I learned that Grandpapa had finally lost his battle with cancer, but I do remember that my parents, eight siblings, and I packed some suitcases, a giant blue cooler, and ourselves into our Chevy Celebrity station wagon for an impromptu road trip to Quebec to attend his funeral.

One of my earliest memories of Grandpapa was when, on one of his visits to us at our home in New Hampshire, he brought me a gift. He always brought us gifts, but this one was particularly memorable. It was a bright red leather purse.

Despite the colorful image of Donald Duck on the front flap, I recognized immediately that this purse was no plaything. This was a lady’s purse. That very afternoon, I carried it, lady-like, on a walk around the block with my Grandpapa. My bobby-socked feet in buckle shoes pounded the pavement and my lady purse swung at my side as I kept up with Grandpapa’s longer strides.

I thought of that walk three days ago as I wrote my grandfather’s name in the Book of Remembrance at the start of my parish’s All Souls Day Mass.

When I first learned about the communion of saints in grade school CCD classes, I envisioned the souls in purgatory and heaven as largely nameless, faceless folks with whom I was somehow, inexplicably, spiritually connected. But now that I count Grandpapa and other real-life friends and family members among them, our communion has become more tangible and real.

In the communion of saints, we discover that God, like any good parent, encourages His children to work hard and to help one another. My prayers and my sacrifices on behalf of those in purgatory can bring them closer to God. Likewise, the intercessions of those in heaven can be a real help to me as I aim toward heaven. These aren’t nameless faces. These are real souls with whom we share memories, history, and DNA.

Years ago, when I became a mother for the first time, I realized that my children are concretely connected to all souls, too.

My first child was a colicky infant, and the months after she was born were like a parental boot camp for my husband and me. Each night, I spent the hours between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. pacing the floors of our tiny apartment with a purple-faced, screeching infant in my arms.

On one of those nights, after I had paced enough floors, run the vacuum enough times, and sung enough lullabies, she finally fell asleep. Gingerly, I placed her in her crib, tiptoed away, and collapsed with exhaustion on my own bed. Before the kinks had even begun to work their way out of my back, however, I heard her cry again.

It was just a whimper really, but it was the kind of whimper a colicky baby makes when she’s about to cause a royal fuss. A mom knows these things. In my desperation and exhaustion, I could manage only a simple prayer. “God, no.”

And then I fell into sleep. Sound sleep. Drooling sleep. Dreaming sleep.

In my dream, the baby was still crying. Bleary-eyed and plodding, I made my way to her, but found her crib empty and silent. I looked up and saw someone seated in a rocking chair in a dimly lit corner of the room.

It was Grandpapa, with Baby Kateri in his arms. Her pink bundled body was perched on his sturdy forearm and her tiny head rested on his shoulder. At last, she slept.

Grandpapa rocked her gently without noticing me at first, but when I drew close, he turned toward me. His eyes smiled at me with such gentle love and understanding that I felt bathed in warmth and light. I watched the two of them rock in that glowing corner of the room and basked in the peace my grandfather had brought to me in my motherhood.

My oldest daughter never knew my Grandpapa, but he surely knows her. I am confident that he knows her and loves her well.

(This is an old column of mine that originally appeared at Inside Catholic.)

Boy Meets Fish

August 18, 2010 by Danielle Filed Under: Babies, Photos

It’s a Bean family tradition to stop for a seafood dinner after we spend a summer day at the beach. Past years have found me here in this very spot, nursing sandy, cranky babies. But this year, THIS was my baby. And he just enjoyed the fish. And then his dinner.

That makes me both happy and sad at the same time. In a way, I suppose, that only a mother could understand.

IMG_1329

Bragging

June 28, 2009 by Danielle Filed Under: Babies

Look what I got to do!

I’m pretty sure either one of these cuties would have fit in my suitcase. Maybe even both of them. Not that I considered doing that or anything.

I’m just pointing out that they probably would have fit.

If I were the adorable-baby-stealing kind.

Which I’m totally not.

Really.

I hardly even thought about it.

Here He Goes

February 23, 2009 by Danielle Filed Under: Babies, Photos

img_5445

What with all the cabin fever going around here, I’ve begun instituting “Enforced Outdoors” time every day.

So here’s one more look at my Daniel in his manly magenta snow pants. He lasted about 5 minutes outside today before he burst into tears and returned inside.

Fresh snow or no fresh snow, it was only about 20 degrees with a fierce wind blowing.

Oh well. At least getting him dressed and then dealing with warming him up and hanging his stuff to dry afterwards gave us something to do for part of the afternoon.

We tried. And tomorrow, we shall try again.

Do your best, February. We shall try again.

Awwwww …

February 18, 2009 by Danielle Filed Under: Babies

Go see Daniel’s sweetie.

Baby!

January 19, 2009 by Danielle Filed Under: Babies

He’s here! Come meet Arwen’s sweet little darling!

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