ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

ha my post about commercials was actually an xpost with euler

usually as long as we make the boundaries clear ('we're only going to watch one episode, then we're turning it off'), she's not too grouchy about it.

yeah setting a routine seems to be the most helpful. we let Veronica watch an hour or so in the mornings on Saturday/Sunday (lately it's been all Octonauts), or sometimes we'll rent something specifically for her to watch instead. but no TV during the week. if something happens and the routine gets messed up she can get sort of pissy about it, but it's not a big deal.

I can't wait to watch Star Trek with my kid. Then maybe the shield.

I've still never seen a Lord of the Rings movie. At this point, I'll wait until Beeps is 11 or something and we can watch it together, laugh at the awful CGI.

lol Jeff

I mean I know how cranky I feel when I watch TV or play video games for too long -- something about the combination of stimulation and inactivity. So I can see it having that effect on toddlers.

yea that's true, same here

If $850 is the cheap end, how do low income families cope?? I don't know what prices are like where we live but $850 would mean I'd def have to quit work.

This is what happened when my Mom had twins.. she stopped working. No way she could afford two babies in daycare (& she was a single mother fairly soon after the birth..)

I just heard a feminist author on NPR talking about how it was more common for women to drop out of the workforce after the second child rather than the first (might have just been anecdotal, not sure), and it kind of makes sense why when you think about childcare costs.

this whole daycare thing ($110 a week, but that's for just 2 days out of the 5) wouldn't be hitting me with the same level of stress if i wasnt already trying to figure out how to magically pull $5500 out of mid air to pay for childbirth at the moment.

holy shit, I knew you guys had to pay out the nose but that is insanity. I'm so sorry :( xp

we've watched some OST w Veronica, she digs it. she also watched Star Wars, but has apparently forgotten a huge portion of it and hasn't expressed interest in the other films.

so, in your face George Lucas

one of the most fucked up things about it is that no one tells you beforehand, as with any medical care. Medical costs/billings are a crazy part of our crazy system. A few months ago my whole family wound up in the ER with what turned out to just be really bad stomach flu. All that happened was we spent a few hours in the ER and H and I got IV's (K did not). We got a total of six different bills for six different confusing sets of services that officially cost a total of like $9,000 -- we only had to pay our "co-pays" via insurance which was a fraction of that but still an absurd amount of money for what we actually got.

And it's not like anyone said to us "The tests will cost x, the IV will cost y" -- they just bring you in and charge you later.

yeah i made a lot of attempt to get any straight answer out of our insurance provider ahead of time, and you can guess how well that went. also, having the baby born with his own personal deductible is a nice way to amp up the blindsiding.

lol ouch

Jesus. I guess this partially explains the rise of midwives and home births.. and makes me feel even sadder about abortion restrictions :(

We're in the process of talking with the insurance company to try to get an idea of what our out of pocket costs are going to be. What worries me is the medical necessity review that happens after you've already received the services wherein the insurance company looks at anything that isn't 100% by the book and determines whether it was medically necessary and thus whether they will pay for it. Precertification is no guarantee of payment, either. Bah.

Stupid country.

Carl if I could, I'd totally sham-marriage you for the rest of your pregnancy. :(

<3

I would like my child to be born with a Canadian citizenship option!

my eldest (2yo) basically demands non-stop attention + interaction and will only settle down w/ the tv so we probably indulge her more than she should - especially since her sister was born. she was really into adventure time for a while (my mother thinks it's perverse that i let her watch it but i figured a-it was better than dora, b-children's stories have traditionally dealt w/ sometimes dark + adult content, c-anything really grown-up i figured would go over her head, d-i enjoyed watching it with her) - we even got her a b-mo t-shirt which she loves. but now she's into dora, which is the worst. i asked her if she'd rather watch dora or adventure time and she said dora sadly. however my wife was watching st:tng while nursing + 2yo caught some of that and now that's her favorite show; i asked her if she'd rather watch dora or star trek and she said star trek. i put on dora tho. :/

dora is an abomination

our 2 yr old hasn't gotten attached to dora yet though i know she's seen it at my parents'. the only tv we actively put on for her is: bugs bunny (and other looney tunes) on sat. morning and that's as much for me as for her, and occasionally a disney movie. she has been given gifts of brave, cinderella and tangled. but sesame street classics just showed up on netflix streaming and she really enjoyed that even though she kept asking where elmo was.

yeah I love watching old Disney/Looney Tunes stuff with V

What's wrong Dora?

I love TCM and will call August to watch the singing and dancing numbers in musicals. She loves to dance along. She has watched parts of black and white films with me. Because we stay busy we can't watch anything for long. I want her to learn to watch black and white films. I have met too many people my age and younger who don't like black and white films and just lose patience or tune out or something. We had a black and white TV until I was 6 or 7, grandparents had the color tv.

Echo many complaints here on both insane healthcare costs and complete lack of transparency in process. Knowing what your out of pocket max is a huge help in all this, but sometimes even finding that info (unless you are super organized and have received and kept the insurance pamphlets) isn't easy.

BCBS has a decent website to figure all this out, but there are still plenty of gotchas. My work also offers benefits analysts to help with the more tricky issues, or they can provide a health care advocate to assist as well. Still, can be a pain in the ass.

xps i know a good number of kids who like star trek -- what's up with that? is there something about the show that kids particuarly like? (btw i'm no trekkie but i definitely enjoy st:tng)

I understand theoretically what an out of pocket max is and what a deductible is, but what I can't quite reconcile is how they are two different things. They are basically both (seemingly arbitrary) amounts of what the insured has to pay out of pocket before the insurance company starts covering the full (or larger percentage, depending on how crappy your plan is) amounts. So why not just put them together and call them a deductible? "Out of pocket max" just feels like the insurance company's end-run around ever letting any insured person fully use their benefits.

I actually kept a BCBS rep on the phone with me (politely, I swear!) for like 30 minutes trying to get her to explain this but you can probably guess how that went.

Also while I am extremely grateful for the benefits analyst and healthcare advocate that Jeff and I have access to through his employer, it rankles me that such people even need to exist to make sure that the people who are buying a product actually get the fair benefit of the product that they paid for. Like, imagine that you needed a consumer advocate at the register of the grocery store to make sure you weren't charged arbitrary prices for goods or randomly denied permission to purchase something?

re: Star Trek - TOS looks like a kid's show (all those saturated bright colors!) and TNG is full of aliens and based on a fundamentally optimistic view of humanity, all of which I think would appeal to kids (the latter is absolutely a large part of the appeal to me).

Our kid will be forbidden to watch TOD.

TOS too.

The only time I ever watched Star Trek was when I was four, and looking back, I'm pretty sure I did so only because there were no such thing as The Wiggles back then.

this is kind of alarming

The CDC, however, reports that fewer women in high-risk categories, such as teenagers or unmarried women

Teenagers, okay, but "unmarried women" are in a high-risk category? That is either a very weird statistic or a very weird way of expressing it.

singleton full-term births

reactionary skepticism stuff:

* expressing differences in terms of percentages is not very useful - "10 times more likely" could be from a .0001 chance to a .001 chance
* the american journal of obstetrics and gynecology and New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center might not be totally unbiased when it comes to home birthing

but i don't really have a dog in this fight

yea i don't either, i mean, we pretty quickly ruled out a home-birth after briefly considering it, but i also felt somewhat skeptical of the study for those very reasons.

no more births on the way for me, so me neither - but that survey seems pretty broad and I'm not sure how the study could have been more objective

yeah "10 times more likely" sets off all of my statistician/philosophy of science alarm bells immediately whenever i see these sorts of things

So we specifically asked Nanny #2 not to take K to her own apartment (she lives in our building and did this with the kids she used to watch), and today I called and she was at her apartment -- hard to explain but I basically got it out of her. And K was napping in the stroller, which means not in her bed where she should be napping, even though there was no reason not to bring her back to our apartment and put her in the bed. She also claimed K fell asleep in the park, which is bullshit - never has happened, and makes me think she was just hanging out in the park with keren sitting in the stroller, because she didn't want to run after her. So angry right now.

Maybe K being in the apartment is not the end of the world, but the trust thing is really important. And also if she's in her apartment, that means other people are there, people who we don't know, etc.

What the hell?

yea that sucks hurting

ugh man so sorry for you.

having seen nannies in action I would never trust my kid to one

it's a shame, this one seemed at first like she had this great rapport with K, and there was much more talking and singing and whatnot going on, but if we can't trust her then what use is all that

this is really convincing me to just put her in daycare the second she turns 2

we're gonna have to come up with some arrangement for a few hours here and there but my first inclination is to lean on other parents we know or someone referred through our preschool co-op. feel like every nanny I see out in public is doing a shitty, half-assed job.

feel like every nanny I see out in public is doing a shitty, half-assed job.

totally sucks for all us parents but there is a part of me feels, like, who can blame them? the fact that J is my own flesh-and-blood son gives me, oh, i don't know, 75% more patience than i'd ever have with someone else's kids? even as J's actual dad i could still use more patience.

though i'm not discounting any frustration you should rightly feel. it totally sucks.