Chewymom

Part 2 of my series on GFI

So, I left off with things running smoothly. Two ds’s successfully breastfed for as long as I wanted to nurse, and I was just getting going with the toddler years. I had gotten my hands on a copy of what I believe was the first Toddler series. It wasn’t actually done by the Ezzos, but by a group of parents led by Dirk and Cheryl Williams.

I discovered pretty quickly into DS14’s toddler-hood that he learned differently than many toddlers. He was my first child, and I plugged away, determined to treat him just like any other child, and not having any older child of my own to compare him to. I’m thankful for that. I think being treated like everyone else has been good for him. I cannot tell you how many therapists through the years have told horror stories of the “handicapped brats” (their words) they had to work with–developmentally delayed children whose parents completely coddled them and expected nothing. Nonetheless, we could have been a bit more merciful with DS14, I’m sure.

One thing I noticed with DS14 was that he did not transfer information from one thing to another. My best example is that although he might learn that he was not allowed to touch one bookshelf, that did not mean he couldn’t touch another bookshelf. That meant a whole lot of training on our part, to be sure! But we worked hard, and DS14 was able to learn all about what not to touch and all.

We were careful to use the playpen faithfully, which was really handy when DS14’s therapist would come and I could just plop DS13 in there and have him play happily. We did most of the things recommended in the Toddler Series with gusto. And DS13, compliant toddler that he was, did great! I looked for opportunities to teach them to obey. I taught them to come up to the kitchen but stop short of coming in. They had good high chair manners, although I did not begin that at quite the early age suggested in PFP. As soon as the boys could talk, they learned to say, “yes, ma’am” (or something like that, in toddler-speak) when given an instruction.

After a few years, along came DS10. He was born, and during the first 6 weeks of his life, we sold a house and moved to another state where we stayed with my grandmother-in-law (is that what you call it??) for a few weeks while we looked for a house to rent. During that time, DS10 went from sleeping through the night (the old 8 hours by 6 weeks thing) to waking in the night. Out of respect for MawMaw, I went ahead and fed him. But boot camp started once we were in our own place again. So around 10 weeks, I began giving DS10 a paci at 4:00am when he would wake up (his last feeding had been at 10pm). This worked well, until we got sick of popping the paci back into his mouth. But thankfully around the time we went cold-turkey with the paci, he found his thumb. So all was good.

Around the time DS10 found his thumb (he was 4 months) I was surprised to discover that my milk supply had just dried up! Imagine that! I had successfully nursed two babies and even had an abundant supply! And now, no milk! I switched to bottles, and never gave it another thought, other than to make a note to myself never to move again with a newborn. Truly, that was stressful, and I am certain I wasn’t drinking enough water and all. Of course in hindsight (and by hindsight, I mean “way-post-Ezzo-hindsight” not “a-few-weeks-later-hindsight”) I question the wisdom of making a 10 week old baby go for 8 hours between feedings, especially when he’s waking up wanting to eat, and I question what that might signal to a woman’s body. (Maybe, “Baby doesn’t need food, so let’s dry up that milk, ok?”)

In spite of switching to a bottle, things were running along very smoothly. I had two well-behaved toddlers, a growing, happy baby, and life was good. I was frequently complented by therapists, my kids were cute, and I knew I was a pretty darned-good parent! I was one of those moms Gary talks about who could go into a restaurant for a meal and have people stop and complement me on my well-behaved children!

Along came the GFI area coordinators, whom my dh and a sister-in-law had known in the past. The wife, “S” apparently noticed my excellent parenting skills [cough] and asked me to meet with her and four other moms who were “serious about Ezzo.” This is as opposed to all the other riffraff out there who either didn’t know about Ezzo or were doing it half-heartedly (or worse–unsuccessfully!). I was feeling pretty good! These other people were all class coordinators. I knew we weren’t ready for that, but already I had shown myself to be useful on the OLD GFI compuserve forum and on the “newer” GFI forum. I was very confident in my parenting skills. I had two well-behaved pre-schoolers, and a baby who was thriving (bottle-fed) on a schedule. I doled out all kinds of parenting advice to my sisters-in-law, some of which actually was helpful! I had even emailed with Anne Marie.

GFI’s materials had given me the ability to be excellent at something, and I enjoyed the accolades I received as a parent. I loved GFI, and I decided the time was right to apply to become a contact mom. I was not confident with taking phone calls (I’m a natural blogger–gotta be able to edit!!) I decided that my niche could be taking calls from families with a child with special needs, and participating on-line. So I made that call and requested a contact mom application!

I’ll leave off here for now, but I hope you are seeing the amazing pride that was creeping in. Ok, it didn’t creep, it slammed me! Romans 12:3 was far, far from my mind: I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgement…. Christ was far from my mind, too, for that matter, even though I thought that everything I was doing was because of my Christianity. But as Philippians 2:5ff says: Have this mind among yourserlves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant…. And the unity Christ desires for His bride, the body? Seriously lacking. Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and humble mind. 1Peter 3:8. Come to think of it, not one of those attributes was true of me. But I was feeling very, very godly.

For part one of this series of blogs, please check here:
How I Got Involved with GFI

Stay tuned for:
Becoming a Contact Mom for GFI
Red flags
Disassociating from the Ezzos
How I parent now

Thanks for reading,

CM (that’s CHEWYMOM, not CONTACTMOM - lol!)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 4:00 am and is filed under GFI/Ezzo/Babywise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.