ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

I would definitely NOT do this again for any reason other than family, that's for sure. I have a co-worker who has taken his 2 yr old to Ecuador and to the Balkans (staying in a different place each night for twelve days) and I just don't get why that's fun.

we have a name but i am holding back on publicly announcing it out of some sort of superstitious weirdness. its not bizarro fyi.

yeah don't tell ANYONE the name. someone will have a problem with it and pollute it for you.

uh oh, let the cat out of the bag, sorry Bizarro Superman Justen, best of luck to you

I forget if I mentioned this upthread, but we came close to choosing a name that would have made her initials ASS

My mother ditched a first name for my sister because the initials would have been HAG.

hee hee

so excited for the pending arrival of Bizarro Superman

Biz for short

sup soupy

Biz Soupie

hee hee

Man, so we are looking at apartments right now, and honestly a thing I find really hard about parenting is how many new considerations come into play besides what you would otherwise want for yourself. And it's hard to know where to draw the line, like, do you live in the cooler neighborhood with the ok school or the boring neighborhood with the best school. And do you prioritize the things that make your life more enjoyable in the old way or do you prioritize the conveniences that make your parenting life easier, e.g. parking, a dishwasher, more space, parks nearby, etc.

You were living without a dishwasher?

Anyone else disagree with their spouse on howoften to correct your child? Apparently I come off as too strict. My 9-year-old is in a bit of a phase where if he's not doing something dangerous, he's doing something annoying, and if he's not being annoying, he's being counterproductive. I guess I'm all too eager to tell him when his existence is bleeding over too much into mine or others. On three other hand, my wife will snap at him for stuff that I consider top be no big deal. Really wouldc likev to find a way to keep him under control without stifling him.

I think that is one of those unanswerables

I live with 2 kids and no dishwasher fwiw

Yeah, you're probably right about the unanswerable nature of that. It's just that I don't criticize him for the purpose of making him feel bad. I just want him to behave in a way that is beneficial to himself amd others. I've been pretty free-form with my parenting. This is once of those times when I wish I'd read some kind if book (and that my wife had read it too and that we agreed on its content).

do not get the "cooler" vs. "boring" neighborhood but would get "fun" vs. "boring" but imo "cool" is not necessarily fun

my pref is usually "make things better for me so that I will have the enthusiasm to help my kids have a good life" obv here I am supposing a privileged life already. bad schools do not make things better for me though

I don't know whether this should be in the "darndest things" thread, but is is related to discipline and how much is too much and why the hell don't they ever listen to me...

I was giving the girls a bath on Saturday morning. They were pretty out of control with the arguing and splashing and shrieking ("you deliberately put that flannel in my face", "get your foot out of my back", etc) - all the usual stuff that makes me think it's finally time to separate their bath-times. I was ineffectually snapping at them to cut it out but Pam wasn't having it and laid down the law. After she left and I'd got Lulu out, dry and dressed, I reinforced Pam's message of "bad behaviour = lost privileges" to Ava. Ava just stopped me dead - "this is NOT your conversation to have, Daddy."

In other words, I'm the goofy one who they jump all over, and Pam is the one who makes the rules.

lol, precocious kids seem to present their own discipline challenges

it's crazy when you try to teach them about something for a long time and they don't get it until suddenly it just clicks all at once. we've been working on letters to not much avail but this weekend all of a sudden she was naming letters off of signs. she gets confused on some (M/W, C/G, V/Y/W) but recognizes most of the rest. and while we were skyping with my parents she wrote a T, an E, and an O on her chalkboard. but i realized we never talk about small letters, only capital letters, so that will probably open up a whole new world of confusion.

Bossy little man and I read his alphabet book before bedtime. He'll point to an 'A' and instruct me to "saaay 'A'," which I do...

We'll get to 'L' and he's all "saayyy 'I'," and I'll say "*ahem*, 'L.'"

He'll pause for a second and go, "'L'. That's right! Great job, Daddy!"

Little shit.

hahaha

"That was a test!"

had our second birthing class of 4 last night and unlike the first one it was super stressful and weird (this was basically the nitty gritty natural birth vs 11 different drug aided birth options one) and afterwards thx to being stressed out k and i got into some bizzare parenting expectations debate that went way later than it should have and both felt like jerks. good times! 32 weeks fyi

its very hard to strike a balance between wanting to keep your kids media consumption under control and coming off as a well-digging barn-raising luddite, this is my experience.

this is v hard. we are two ppl who love the internet and ben likes any screen that he can get his eyes on and we're like NO BABY YOUR BRAIN CANT UNDERSTAND JUMP CUTS

also, what natural birthing class are you doing? we did bradley method and we hired our teacher as a doula, we loved her.

There's nothing wrong with a good barn-raising. Good food, good music, and a barn: what's not to like?

its not really a specific natural birthing class, i just think that nowadays all birthing classes sort of turn into that because everyone imagines that they will have a natural birth, or that they are supposed to do so.

also raising the barn sucks because it's outside of my wifi range so my spotify playlists dont work.

a funny tidbit though, we asked the nurse that runs it how often the natural birth plan people she has dealt with end up going in for the epidural, and she sorta paused and then mumbled "eh probably 70-80%"

yeah my anecdotal experience fits that -- I hear much more often "We wanted to do natural but wound up..." rather than "we did natural"

there were 4 couples in our class. two couples had natural births, 1 did not, other unknown but probably not bc they were pills. #anecdata

This nurses's anecdotal experience reflects that walking onto L&D with a 5-page birth plan, doula and yoga ball thingy is the most surefire way to guarantee a 72-hour labor that ends in a c-section.

or not doing those things and just making a normal attempt at having natural birth, which is what happened to us

or going to a separate natural birth center and winding up needing to go to the hospital anyway, which happened to two couples we know

birth, it is unpredictable

i.e. I don't think being a caricature/strawman is the primary cause of natural birth not working out

No, but I think unrealistic expectations of what you can reasonably plan for can certainly contribute.

I don't think so

one good point she also made is that if you hit the point where labor has taken long enough that you are too tired to walk around and squat and do tub sits and w/e and are just going to end up lying in the birthing bed anyway being miserable, there's really no reason not to do the epidural.

hmm dunno about that. but it's a complicated issue.

actually nevermind, i agree with that point.

birth, it is unpredictable

having gone through two now (which were wildly different from one another), I am reminded of my dad's favorite saying "if you want to make God laugh, make a plan"

fwiw 1st = planned for a no drugs/no epidural natural birth, ended up with 36-hrs of labor + pitocin + epidural, which ended in a c-section anyway
2nd = planned for vbac, had 12 hr labor + epidural and everything went fine

wife was gonna go nat on #1 but yeah after pitocin & long labor with crashing blood sugar, went epidural & no c section
with #2 went for epidural right away
with #3 baby just kinda fell out, no drugs taken cos no time, guess the house got kinda bigger along the way if you know what I mean

lol

in london it's pretty cool, an NHS midwife team comes to your house if you want them to! baby #1 was at hospital, 14 hrs of labor, eventual epidural, ventouse, whole 9 yds. baby #2 was at home, 6 hrs from start to finish with no pain relief stronger than paracetemol (tylenol/acetominophen). after he was born, a sort of chief midwife came by, not sure why, maybe just to check on her flock, and sed, basically, with 1st babies, who the hell knows what's going to happen. i think i've mentioned her before, she was rad, showed me the placenta and its different parts (information which, like almost everything else that day, only exists as a tremendous blur)

My wife's water broke without labor starting. We waited about 24 hours and then started pitocin, and then when that didn't work we pretty much had to go with a c-section -- by that time I was so tired and anxious that the doula told me "don't faint!" (without a touch of humor) when I was on the way into the operating room. I had never actually been in a surgery room before, and the whole sensation was very surreal. I remember avoiding seeing my wife opened up, and I remember that I accidentally dropped my iphone and asked the doctor to pick it up and take a picture of us with the baby, and I think I felt more bewildered than anything else from the exhastion and nerves, even though I knew I was "supposed" to feel joy at that moment. Maybe a live birth is more "joyful" but maybe not.

Anyway, K loves the "fuzzy" chick in her farm animals book, and has now taken to calling me "fuzzy" which is THE sweetest thing