ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

The most important thing is to set the new rules sometime before he goes to bed, when he's calm and understands. Remind him a couple of times before you take him to bed. He will try to get back to the old situation, but you have to keep in mind your ideal of reading him a bedtime story and leaving him. Our bedtime rituals (excluding reading time) hardly ever last for more than five minutes.

its strange because he kind of did change overnight. used to be difficult to put him down, then all the sudden he was asking to go to his crib right away. he'd talk and sing to himself for a few minutes and then doze off. a couple weeks ago he asked for my hand and I gave it to him, so he's been doing it ever since

tbh I'm not sure what he gets and what he doesn't get. I think he understands more than he lets on.

like, if I say "I'll read a book to you and then I'm going to leave", I don't think he yet understands that

We used to have the ten minute rule: if our oldest cried for more than ten minutes on end, we went to check on her.

yeah this is the part that confuses me sometimes, b/c I've heard that doing this teaches the child that they get what they want if they cry long enough. but you don't wanna leave 'em in there forever.

you can also tell him that you are leaving but that you will come back and check on him. 2 1/2 is not too young to understand that concept. we've done that with our boys in the past and it helps calm their anxiety about us leaving quite a bit

I think being able to talk/communicate their needs is a real big part of it. Once they learn they can express themselves/be understood verbally then they have less of an emotional need to lash out. So getting them to talk about their feelings and understand that they're being heard is a big help.

yeah, I've found that to be the case too. Like, when my son (29 months) starts flipping out we tell him to use his words and tell us what's wrong. When we want him to do something he's not ready to do, he now sits down and says "I want to be alone" We leave him be for about 20 seconds at which point he usually says "I feel better now" and is ready to move on. I think he learned some self control from that "Calm-Down Time" book. Of course sometimes communication is stuff like Me: "I want you to put your toys away." Him: "No. I don't want to. Daddy can do it."

I tell our more frequent tantrumer that I can't do anything to help him if he screams at me. About 50% of the time he will calm down and tell me what he wants (usually to watch/hear the Big Bang Theory theme song, which is surprisingly easy to memorize via osmosis, I've discovered)

my wife said that worked - just say something like "I'm going to go pee pee" (he understands that since we're trying to potty train him), and then just don't come back, unless he starts crying I guess. didn't work for me though.

one thing I should mention, we just had #2, and though he's been very good with the little one, he's definitely been looking for our attention way more since she was born

another thing I should mention, he's growing up bi-lingual. or at least we're trying to have him grow up that way. so his speech is a bit delayed.

Being bilingual shouldn't be a problem for understanding you.

A new baby in the house does shake things up sometimes, but it usually settles pretty quickly if you make sure to give the oldest some quality time, for example during the hours when the baby is sleeping.

well, seems to have worked so far

I tell him, "ok, good night..." and walk away after a few minutes. He starts fussing after 30 seconds or so but gives up and falls asleep a minute or two later. So, hey.

Awesome, man.

just putting this story here for the parents, just wondering if you have opinions. i have some.

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/news/a43466/mom-kids-followed-in-ikea/

sounds ridiculous to me

Her story reads like the biggest bunch of bullshit. For one thing, these guys were not sex traffickers. They were almost certainly serial killers.

they were clearly radical Islamic terrorists

Come on guys. They were ghosts and you know it.

https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/gta/2015/01/20/darwin-the-ikea-monkeys-former-owner-reportedly-living-with-two-new-monkeys/darwin-ikea.jpg.size.custom.crop.1086x678.jpg

Ghosts of her kids from the future, come back in time to warn them about their impending abduction by a sex trafficking ring.

what a coincidence that she was alarmed by reading an account of sex-trafficker stalking and then was sex traffikicker stalked herself

This harrowing dance apparently continued for the better part of an hour, so eventually, Toyos's mother made a bold move. "She made eye contact, very clearly letting them know that we saw them," Toyos wrote.

TAKEAN

"good luck" finding those guys in Ikea tbh

My mom and I decided to sit down and wait for them to move on. We had a gut feeling something was going on, but we hoped we were wrong and they would move on. So we sat in one of the little display rooms. For close to 30 minutes. And they sat too. They sat down on one of the couches on the display floor that faced us. That was when we knew our gut feeling was right and something was off. They sat the whole time we sat, and stood up right as we got up.

sorry but these are the WORST human traffickers

^^next Rob Schneider movie

"I always think, 'That could never happen to me,'" Toyos wrote, as a reminder. "But you guys, it did."

and here's why

SHOCKING: Two women and three children sit on an Ikea couch for thirty minutes near two men.

who looked at them, don't forget the looking at them part.

http://i.imgur.com/izWTd6G.jpg

hello
born may 21, a son

woohoo congratulations!!!

congrats! did u end up stayin in Japan or moving back to Canada?

also had did baby time travel back to our time from the future or what

Congratulations!!

thanks. and, march! it was march. still in tokyo, seemingly the most expensive city on the planet to give birth to and raise a child.

Congrats Dylannn!

Awwww. <3

can't bring myself to say "just pee in the frog's mouth!" to my son

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00YXFI0FK/ref=sxr_pa_click_within_right_1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=2957865802&pf_rd_r=XCJPYMZ763SXP8Q6FZW6&pd_rd_wg=SjAUG&pf_rd_s=desktop-rhs-carousels&pf_rd_t=301&pd_rd_w=VqC2o&pf_rd_i=potty%2Bseat%2Bbjorn&pd_rd_r=12K0AEYJ668ZT6MBA980&th=1

'yeah! make that uvula spin!'

Yesterday my 13-year-old kid fell off of his bike and fractured one of his vertebra. He's going to be ok. He's in a lot of pain, but mostly mobile. He needs to avoid strenuous activity for a month, which is going to be the worst part of it for him because he's very active.

He somehow managed to not hit his head when he landed, but if he had, he hadn't been wearing a helmet. The doctor warned us that with the force he hit the ground, a head injury would have been much more severe. We used to make him wear a helmet, but gave in because none of the other kids in the neighborhood wore one. I was excited that he was getting into bmx. I used to freestyle when I was younger and never wore helmets and managed to escape injury. So while we knew it was utterly fucking stupid to let him ride helmetless, we just got swept along.

So even though his back injury would not have been prevented by a helmet, it's been a hell of a wake-up call for me and my wife. Just wanted to put that out there for everybody.

fuck that's scary. so glad to hear he's basically ok.

yikes that is scary - glad he's (mostly, sort of) ok

Helmets are so neccesary! Hope yr boy recovers ok. A cuz of mine is only alive today cos he had a helmet on when he came off his bike head first into the road.

Best wishes, hows life, that sounds terrifying

Thanks guys.

Yeah, it was totally terrifying. He had miraculously been able to ride his bike home, thinking he just got the wind knocked out of him and some bad road rash. When he went to take his shirt off to go shower I guess it dislodged the bone fragment and he just melted down in tears - something I haven't seen him do from an injury since he was 6. So I threw him in the car and rushed him to the urgent care clinic and he's just screaming the whole time. I had to be calm and reassure him but the whole time I didn't know what was wrong - was there organ damage? Internal bleeding?

Crazy thing is, he swears he wasn't even doing some rad trick. I've watched him with his friends recently and I know the kind of stuff he tries, so I believe him. He says he just pulled up on the handlebars while going over a bump, overcompensated, and the bike went out from under him. Sometimes it's the simplest things that can lead to a bad accident.

That's horrifying and I'm glad he's okay or at least mendable. My most prominent scar is 30+ years old, from slipping and hitting my lip on my 70's hi-rise bike handlebars when I was just riding slowly and not doing any stunts.

We've been pretty strict about helmet use on his strider bike, to the point that sometimes he asks to wear it around the house for no reason. This one's easy to model because my wife and I always, always wear bike helmets based on a friend slowly losing her brother to a BMX head injury.

But then I think about skateboarding, which I loved and would have no problem with him getting into, where nobody wears a helmet except on vert ramps. I hit my head at least a couple of times falling off benches and jump ramps and it's just sheer luck that I didn't seriously injure myself, but I still would never think of wearing one while street skating.

Yeah, that's the crazy thing. No one wears them around here except little kids. I definitely made him when he was younger and I make my daughter wear one, but when he got old enough to ride around the neighborhood by himself, I'd often see him come back home with the helmet dangling off his handlebars until eventually he stopped taking it out altogether. There's even a law in our state, but cops don't even bother to enforce it.

Guys, guys, I have discovered the most amazing restaurant in the world -- Benihana! You get to sit for an hour plus meal, during much of which your children are distracted by a juggling clown chef making your food! And the food itself isn't completely terrible!

sounds like they should franchise

Yesterday my 13-year-old kid fell off of his bike and fractured one of his vertebra. He's going to be ok. He's in a lot of pain, but mostly mobile. He needs to avoid strenuous activity for a month, which is going to be the worst part of it for him because he's very active.

He somehow managed to not hit his head when he landed, but if he had, he hadn't been wearing a helmet. The doctor warned us that with the force he hit the ground, a head injury would have been much more severe. We used to make him wear a helmet, but gave in because none of the other kids in the neighborhood wore one. I was excited that he was getting into bmx. I used to freestyle when I was younger and never wore helmets and managed to escape injury. So while we knew it was utterly fucking stupid to let him ride helmetless, we just got swept along.

So even though his back injury would not have been prevented by a helmet, it's been a hell of a wake-up call for me and my wife. Just wanted to put that out there for everybody.

― how's life, Wednesday, May 3, 2017 3:07 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He recovered from this after about two weeks, by the way, and we've let him go back out on the bike as long as he wears a helmet. Of course twice since then he's come home crying about being the only kid to wear a helmet and how none of his 13-year-old friends had ever heard of anybody dying from not wearing a helmet. "You're taking away my freedom!" It's been fun, let me tell you. But at least his strife tells me he's wearing it.

Glad to hear hes recovered!

The arc-up reminds me of yesterday tho: bf had bouht a brand new big-boy bed for the youngest. All in flat pack parts of course so when they got home, he tells both boys they are going to help him put it together (I wasnt in a state to help much, my back's effed).

Older (12yo) kid threw an absolute shitfit, because he was being made to help his father and brother instead of spending time on the internet talking to his friends (which he'd been doing for HOURS at that point as it happens). FINE I WILL JUST HAVE TO GO WITHOUT SPEAKING TO MY BEST FRIEND IN ENGLAND WHO I NEVER GET TO TALK TO THEN he wailed dramatically (*this is complete bollocks he talks to this kid almost every effing day ad had been talking to him for hours just prior!).

Apparently having it pointed out to him that he should give helping his own family priority was "a fucking guilt trip" . I forsee the start of self-absorbed, selfish Teen Angst hoveing over the horizon and I am NOT looking forward to it. Its harder when it isnt your own kid for starters - I'm less attached, so I just get Really Fucking Annoyed. I'm worried as to how i'll deal with this shit.

😡