Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman Read Free Book Online Page B

has his dimples. If anything’s in doubt, it’s her maternity. My fair-haired, fair-eyed genes seem to have lost to his swarthy Mediterranean ones in a first-round knockout.
    But at about two months old, Bean has a metamorphosis. Her hair turns blond, and her brown eyes morph improbably into blue. Our little Mediterranean baby suddenly looks like a Swede.
    Technically, Bean is American. (She can request French citizenship when she’s older.) But I suspect that her French will surpass mine within a few months. I’m not sure whether we’re going to raise a little American girl or a little French one. We might not have a choice.

Chapter 3
    doing her nights
     
    A few weeks after we bring Bean home, neighbors on our little courtyard Nhe tdh="0 begin asking, “Is she doing her nights?” (
Elle fait ses nuits
?)
    This is the first time I hear the French formulation of “Is she sleeping through the night?” At first I find it comforting. If they’re
her
nights, then she’ll inevitably claim them. Whereas if they’re just
the
nights, she might not.
    But I soon find the question irritating. Of course she’s not “doing her nights.” She’s two months old (and then three months, and then four). Everyone knows that tiny babies sleep badly. I know a few Americans who—by sheer luck—have babies that age who go down at nine P.M. and wake up at seven. But most parents I know don’t get an uninterrupted night’s sleep until their kids are around a year old. Heck, I know four-year-olds who still wander into their parents’ rooms at night.
    My Anglophone friends and family appreciate this. They tend to ask the more open-ended question, “How is she sleeping?” And even that isn’t really a request for information; it’s a chance for the exhausted parents to vent.
    For us, babies are automatically associated with sleep deprivation. A headline in the British
Daily Mail
declares: “Parents of Newborns Miss Out on SIX MONTHS Worth of Sleep in Their Child’s First Two Years,” citing a study commissioned by a bed company. The article seems credible to readers. “Sadly this is true,” one comments. “Our one year old daughter hasn’t slept a single night in twelve months, and if we have four hours sleep it’s a good night.” A poll by the National Sleep Foundation in the United States found that 46 percent of toddlers
wake up during the night, but just 11 percent of parents believed that their child had a sleep problem. A toddler’s T-shirt I see in Ft. Lauderdale says simply, “Party tonight at my crib 3 A.M .”
    My English-speaking friends tend to view their kids as having unique sleep needs, which they just have to accommodate. I’m walking around Paris with a British friend of mine one day when her toddler son climbs into her arms, reaches under her shirt to clutch her breast, then falls asleep. My friend is clearly embarrassed that I’ve witnessed this ritual, but she whispers that it’s the only way he can nap. She carries him around in this position for the next forty-five minutes.
    Simon and I had of course chosen a sleep strategy. Ours was premised on the idea that it’s critical to keep a baby awake after she feeds. Once Bean is born, we go to enormous effort to do this. As far as I can tell, it has no effect.
    Eventually, we ditch this theory and try other ones. We keep Bean in the daylight all day and in the dark at night. We bathe her at the same time each evening and try to stretch out the time between her feeds. For a few days I eat almost nothing but crackers and Brie, after someone tells me that fatty food will thicken my breast milk. A New Yorker who stops by says she read that we should make loud whooshing sounds to mimic the sounds in the womb. We whoosh obediently for hours.
    Nothing seems to make a difference. At three months old, Bean still wakes up several times a night. We have a long ritua S a ">Nl in which I nurse her back to sleep, then hold her for fifteen more minutes so that