ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

hahah

After making mashed sweet potatoes and mashed avocados and August not really liking either, we tried store bought green peas and she loved it. How did you gets get your kids to like homemade baby food or did they just like it?

evie has her first piece of popular music she's into. she walks around singing "nu-nu-number...CRAAAAAAZY! nu-nu-number...CRAAAAAAZY!" ad infinitum. I guess they've been playing "call me maybe" at day care.

― congratulations (n/a), Saturday, November 3, 2012 8:11 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbf, this is what the inside of my head sounds like some days

xp: we had no luck in getting abby to eat veggie baby food at all, so we just stuck with fruits and yogurt for a long time. I'd occasionally get her to eat a bite of guacamole or refried beans or something. It was frustrating for a long time. Sometimes she'd refuse everything we tried to give her.

"How did you gets get your kids to like homemade baby food or did they just like it?"

We just quit and went with jar food. Nothing was more distressing than making it (which is fairly labor intensive) and having them refuse it or spit it out.

She seems to be all about the texture. Anything remotely lumpy she will spit out. That means any teenie, tiny lump. She likes soupysmooth jar food, peas even...and a banana that was beaten until it was no longer a banana.

maybe sieving/straining the homemade purees would help? potato ricer might help too maybe? idk. It's been years since I had to make babyfood, lol

her preferences may change as she gets more teeth - K had teeth early and is up to 8 of them already, and she really likes getting to pick up and gnaw on tiny squares of bread, pear slivers, etc., and doesn't mind soft foods that have texture.

Separation anxiety is kind of fascinating.

Twice a week my mother-in-law has been watching K for about 4-5 hours, while my wife is at class and I'm at work. K basically learned to handle this just fine and totally loves my mother-in-law. The other day, we had to have my father-in-law (who K also seems to love) watch her instead. She was apparently fine for the first few hours, but then something kicked in and she just kept crying. When I came home from work I heard her screaming from the bedroom, so I ran in, still in my coat and covered with snow. I picked her up from my perplexed father-in-law, (doing my best not to get snow on her), and she almost immediately calmed down. So then I went in the other room and put her down on her mat for a sec so I could take of my coat, and she INSTANTLY started SCREAMING again. So I took off my coat and picked her up again and just carried her around for like 5-10 minutes, and pretty soon she was completely happy, no problem at all.

It seems as though she has *figured out* that grandma being there with her = mommy and daddy are coming back, but she hadn't learned yet that grandpa being there = mommy and daddy are coming back, so when a few hours passed with grandpa, she started to lose faith, so much so that even when I was back, putting her down again made her think I was going to leave.

;_;

Yeah she looked so heartbroken when I put her down. It broke my heart too. But the good thing is that if my father-in-law does this a couple more times she will probably get used to the idea.

Awww being a baby is hard :(

and it's the kind of crying where you're like 'You're right! It is REALLY sad."

sometimes i think that being a child is a continuous process of growing further and further apart from your parents - you begin literally inside one of your parents, then you're in their bed, then you move to a crib, then your own room, you start noticing things by yourself, making your own judgements, going to school, becoming embarrassed by your parents, going to college and moving away. the process starts on day 1.

aw

sorry if that sounds depressing, i actually don't think it is at all! if you love something, take it to day-care, etc

There's this funny nebbishy partner at my work with college-aged kids who once said "You know that book The Giving Tree? That's what it's like. That's exactly what it's like."

lol "if you love something, take it to day-care, etc" should be the new board descrip
we're having issues w/ discipline/consequences/etc with out 3 year old. gotten into the habit of always saying "if you don't do this [usually tiny thing like washing her hands], you won't get this [something she wants to do/eat]", just this relationship of threat that seems like a bummer.

My nephew had mad separation anxiety when he first started kindergarten -- but the teacher kept making my sister STAY with him. Which just seemed crazy. In the end she just said to the teacher 'This is ridiculous, I have to leave'. After a couple of days he was fine. (Irony is that my sister had HYSTERICAL anxiety the first week she started school - used to chase Dad's car down the street after he dropped us off, and I'd have to run after and hold her back. :( )

Yeah, I think for some kids with some things, a painful break is the ONLY way. In fact, sometimes a painful break is anti-traumatic, because the kid goes through the experience and comes out on the other end ok, coming to the realization that s/he will survive, that mom and dad will still love him/her, etc.

sometimes i think that being a child is a continuous process of growing further and further apart from your parents - you begin literally inside one of your parents, then you're in their bed, then you move to a crib, then your own room, you start noticing things by yourself, making your own judgements, going to school, becoming embarrassed by your parents, going to college and moving away. the process starts on day 1.

Yeah, this is otm. My own formulation of it a few years ago is that the most important part of parenting is teaching your kids how not to need you. In that regard, as much as I love Sarah and am proud of her, I think my wife and I may have have failed as parents.

we're having issues w/ discipline/consequences/etc with out 3 year old. gotten into the habit of always saying "if you don't do this [usually tiny thing like washing her hands], you won't get this [something she wants to do/eat]", just this relationship of threat that seems like a bummer.

this is basically my entire parenting life right now, it is lame. constantly either threatening time outs or offering a bribe just to get the most basic stuff done. frustrating. we're trying to figure out what to do about it.

they key is to make the threat something you're actually willing to follow through with if you need to, nothing worse than being like "we're NOT going to the museum if you don't (x)!" and then they're like FINE and you're like oh fuck

but yeah agreed, i hate those little circles as well

sometimes i think you need to step back and be like wait a minute, is it really that important? sometimes i can get sucked into a battle of wills where his recalcitrance has provoked me to hugely magnify the gravity of whatever the issue is

and i try to go back to the mantras:

- say yes as much as possible
- don't ask, tell

i know, dude, i succccck at the whole "don't ask, tell" thing even though i know it's better.
& yeah when the whole day is built around an activity, we can't be like "we're not doing this" because that just means sitting around. and also, with halloween, it was easy to fall into the "you won't do this? OK NO CANDY" thing. which seems not great too. i don't know, seems weird to bring food into the equation. she does seem to be into just pushing our buttons these days, seeing what kind of reaction she'll get -- like it's entertaining for her to see us try to come up with threats. lame-o!

i'm really trying to get away from food-based rewards or punishments because i already worry that she eats too much and i don't want to give her weird food issues. she's right at the 50th percentile for weight so i'm not worried about that but it seems like she's always asking for food, even after she's just eaten a meal. it wasn't that big a deal when she was happy with healthy snacks but now she just demands candy or teddy grahams and then flips out when we won't give them to her.

time outs are the main punishment but i hate to use them because it just drags out the screaming and crying.

sometimes i think you need to step back and be like wait a minute, is it really that important?

my issue with this is that almost none of it seems that important, i'd rather her just be happy. my default would just be letting everything slide. but i have to enforce some discipline/rules some time.

i threaten timeouts on the reg and i don't mind following through - the crying and hostility usually gives way pretty quickly to "i'm sorry" or actually a nap - both necessary, depending - so i don't feel bad about handing them out, they're practical rather than solely a punishment

So this is kind of amazing to me and probably boring to most, but K learned how to answer a question for the first time. My wife asks her (in Hebrew) "What does the dog say?" and she answers "Hav" (hebrew equivalent of "woof"). She doesn't respond the same way when my wife says other things about dogs, only that specific question. She also claps on request in either english or hebrew.

how do you clap in hebrew??

right to left?

converted the crib to a toddler bed yesterday which ended up being a dumb move. evie's normally a very solid sleepr but she was up from 1 a.m. to about 4 a.m., wouldn't sleep in her bed, wouldn't even sleep in our bed (once we gave up on trying to get her to sleep in her bed). didn't seem scared, just seemed wide awake and like she wanted to play/hang out - i think it was just the freedom of being able to get out of bed that was causing problems. can't convert it back to a crib, so we're stuck with the bed. trying to think of solutions - seeing if there are guard rails that can be installed? maybe some kind of canopy would create at least a psychological barrier to keep her in? i ended up calling in sick today because i was so exhausted.

Fuck, it never ends does it.

K has a cold again, which came right on the heels of us stopping (again) night feedings which had started again because we moved and she stopped sleeping through the night. Now she wakes up over and over from congestion. We try the snotsucker on her but it's a lot of pain and crying for very little effect, and she looks at us like we've betrayed her, although she seems to forget moments later.

I do think there are toddler bed rails fwiw.

In other news, we've discovered Baby Einstein, which, although I was against TV at this young an age, is really, really useful for about 20-30 minutes every evening in between nap and dinner when she gets too cranky to do anything else. The people who came up with this thing are entrepreneurial geniuses -- it has to be the most cheaply produced thing I've ever seen. It's basically digital video closeups of toys, stock nature footage, and public domain music.

nick -- ikea sells some really cool indoors tent-like things in their kids section. (i've looked at them longingly for myself even though i know it's kinda stupid. i love the idea of a sleep tent.) one of them looks kinda like a circus big top!

think my wife just got the circus big top for our daughter for xmas. just to play in. we're not converting the crib until she's threatening to climb out/fall out of it on the reg.

much better last night, she only got up once at 1:30 but got back in bed and fell back asleep right away. i don't know if it's because i used the ottoman as a makeshift guardrail or because i said i would make her pancakes if she stayed in her bed all night.

i need some way for her to know when she's allowed to get out of bed, especially because it's so dark in the morning.

p sure it was the pancakes

August is now seven months old and for a month has been going from sitting position to standing without holding on to anything. She has been sleeping with us but we will be trying to move her into her own bed. The other night she woke up and was doing her standing thing. Afraid she will tumble over us and onto the floor. We need a good, sturdy travel crib. We have a Graco playpen that she is growing to big to play in and has never liked to nap in it.

K actually doesn't support her weight very well yet, and the doctor recommended an evaluation. The city has a free program for early intervention (irrespective of income, I guess, because they didn't even ask), which is awesome, but it was strange having a city services person come over and go through the litany of forms and questions and the like. I couldn't really say it was invasive, since it was voluntary, yet I'm sure the people who come are trained to be looking for signs of neglect and abuse and the like, which didn't occur to me until after she came, so the whole thing was more uncomfortable than I thought. Anyway, there's probably no serious problem but I'd rather make sure there isn't one. H teaches special needs kids and sees in denial parents all the time, so I'm extra conscious about not being one, better safe than sorry, etc.

guys...I know the 3rd trimester ultrasound isn't super super accurate but
my son is 36 weeks now, still in my wife's belly...and he weighs almost 8 pounds already

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CJrsYX5NUs8/Ttx0LhsM8zI/AAAAAAAABNc/neVWqFL0NpY/s1600/giant_baby_one-1.jpeg

<3

pfft my baby could beat the shit out of that baby

Wow, Bison!

Hurting, did you know baby Einstein DVDs are free?

http://education-portal.com/articles/Baby_Einstein_Recall_Refunds_Offered_on_Educational_DVDs.html

We just watch them on youtube.

Believe me, it is immediately obvious that there is nothing especially educational/developmentally benefical about them, although I think they're mostly harmless in small doses.

We let August watch this cartoon called Baby Abuelita, bilingual show. It is only 18 minutes long and I use them sparingly now. There are only six episodes and I know them all by heart so....sparingly. It makes her so happy.

sylvie's pretty into angelina ballerina, which features the voice talents of dame judi dench. we use it pretty sparingly too, once or twice a week, but man, it is tempting to do it more. peace and quiet!

Aaaa-aaangelina ballerina!
A little star with big dreams!
Aaaaaaa-aaangelina baller-eeeeee-eee-na!
La la la la
la la la la
la la la la!

I can't get enough of that modulation on the la la la's.

I tried an ep of eebies on netflix. It was ok -- slow-paced and gave ideas for things you can do with your baby (water play activities e.g.), but K seemed to find it boring after 5 minutes.