ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

Congrats, SM! November is an excellent month in which to be born.

congratulations!

Amazing Scik, congratulations!

congrasts, sm!

congrats, even.

how do y'all handle sleep stuff when you have a sick child?

J has an ear infection, horrible screaming wake-ups, and generally not responsive to our normal patting/singing/comforting to get him back down. things got so bad a few nights ago that my wife broke down and nursed him - something that we kind of set a rule against earlier in 2014 after 15 months of frequent night-waking to nurse. he finally started sleeping through the night a few months ago so we're kind of terrified about fucking that up. at the same time though, with this ear infection, we just want to go back to sleep and nursing seems to do the trick.

Congratulations dude

abandon all sleep ye who enter here

It's that whole thing about weighing up what's best for today against what's best for the years to come, isn't it? IMO, sick baby definitely means doing what's best for today - resolutions go out the window.

(Congrats, Smouthy)

ear infections = do whatever works. all bets are off.

yea that makes sense. hopefully when he's healthy again it won't be too hard to go back to our normal sleep schedule

also nursing is cool and babies totally dig it

how do y'all handle sleep stuff when you have a sick child?

Ayeeeee, yes, very feeling this at the moment. Ella has a cold, not too bad, but the constant runny nose means she can't breathe at night, and it reduces her to despair and rage, which of course means tears which means nose running even more, which means no sleep for us. I shouldn't complain because she usually goes to sleep at 7.30pm and stays that way until 6.30am, but this is no fun.

Re the poo talk, it's always surprising when undigested and identifiable bits of food (entire dried apricot, lentils, kidney beans) emerge in the nappy.

xp lol definitely, nursing is cool and babies dig it. J is 19 months and still nurses a lot, but for our own sanity and sleep when he turned 15 months we put a nursing ban in effect from 8pm (after my wife nurses him to sleep) until 5:30 or 6am (when J wakes up). it's what finally got him to sleep through the night, which is why we kind of freaked out when he got sick this most recent time and my wife started nursing him throughout the night to get him to go back to sleep.

I'm talking straight out of my ass here (but as this is the internet, I refuse to let that stop me) but I think giving your sick kid that extra bit of comfort is going to be a net good even if it sets back the progress of sleep training a little. It seems like sleep, like potty training, is a two steps forward, half-step back kind of process anyway. Plus the little guy's only 15 months.

Like basically he's 15 months and sick and being sick and nursing is a comforting thing he can understand and it will make him feel better, which is the immediate goal.

yea, that's why we ultimately "gave in" and just nursed him, it is a net good (he's 19 months btw, not 15, not much difference though). but memories of 6-7 wakings per night, nights of only 4-6 hours of sleep are pretty recent. so it's a little traumatizing when our nights start to replicate those patterns.

btw though it does seem like he's feeling better. last night he only woke up once. so we're not in bad shape now by any means.

Yay!

hahaha "only 4-6 hours of sleep"

I would have killed for 4 hours the past two nights

Jeff: Do you want to put something on TV?
Me: I don't think so. It's pretty late.

It was 9:10.

I put something on. Defiance.

lol <3

DJP, can you sleep in shifts? That's what we did in the early days.

So did we, then the boys realized "hey, there are two of us and we can both scream about wanting to be held AT THE SAME TIME"

just to clarify, when i say "4-6 hours of sleep" i mean an hour here, 45 minutes there, hour and 10 minutes there. spans of 45-90 minutes of awake time between. it may have totaled 4-6 hours of sleep but that's in a 12 hour span. we did 15 months of that shit.

but i know what you're saying DJP. the stuff i complain about now w/ a 19 month old, i would have killed for when J was younger.

when J was, say, 12 months and i'd hear other parents complaining that their kids slept through the night but woke up "sooo early" at 5:30am i wanted to shoot them. that would've been amazing to get J to do that. now that that is exactly what J is doing (when healthy) i find myself complaining about it now. "wish he could sleep til 7 goddamn it!"

The object lesson here is that there's never enough sleep.

yr never gonna get any sympathy from parents of multiples (no offense schwantz) cuz whatever you're dealing with with your one kid they are dealing with x whatever

having 2 little kids is more than twice as hard as having one little kid, though I don't know how that would work with twins since they are offering more or less the same kind of nuttiness so you can optimize yourself emotionally to deal with that. when you have say 2 under the age of 3 then the older one is doing 3 yr old shenanigans while the baby is doing baby things. take that one to heart /axl

Anyone got any tips for stress-free car travel? We made it 15 minutes into the journey to my parents' house before Fox started screaming, proper fat tears rolling down his tiny red face. We're currently pulled into a side road in Clapham, comfort feeding him. We still have about an hour's driving to go. ;_;

oof

can someone sit next to him and distract him?

turn the carseat forward. My friend suggested this, and I was like "experts say its 4x safer," and she was like "yeah, but are you really safer if you're constantly reaching back, distracted by screaming, etc.?"

Other than that, the iPad has kind of come in handy although I feel guilty about her watching videos too much. How old is the little one Madchen?

xp btw what I mean is, a lot of babies hate facing backwards and are happier forwards, if that wasn't clear. But it's also just a thing of getting them used to the car over time imo.

Already, in the back seat with him, I'm afraid, and the car seat can't be fitted to face forwards. I'm using all the distracting toys at my disposal, plus a mirror on the headrest. He won't take a dummy or a bottle either, though we're working on that. Three months old today, happy birthday little dude.

Poor guy. Poor you and stet, too! I've got nothing to offer but my sympathies.

Those fat tears are killers, though, aren't they? Woof.

Congratulations, SM!

I think it's actually worse for Stet because he's driving. We're on our way again and I'm using the Baby Vision app on Fox, which is like drugs but I can bear the guilt because he is now asleep hurrah!

Success!

Car seats and driving, UGH! When August was a baby-baby and a nursing fiend, I couldn't drive alone. I did a few times and it was a disaster because she would star crying and I had to pull over, park and feed. Sometimes that was impossible due to construction. Heartbreaking wailing for an hour.

I usually rode in the back seat with her or would scramble back there and nurse her, rear facing car seat worked out great for this. Front facing and she still demanded nursing but it was near impossible. Didn't make a difference.

Because it's supposed to be safer she is still rear facing but now the problem is her wiggling out of the straps and basically one step away from getting out of the thing. I really don't want to turn it around but it isn't safe not being in the damn thing.

Thanks all. Still a little abstract to us at this point! Looking forward to vomit / shit / sleep deprivation / penury.

I swear Ivy just outgrew all of her 3-6 month clothes in the span of two days. As in they fit fine on Wednesday and were too small on Friday. Also it's crazy when stuff that I've put aside because it looks huge suddenly fits her and in a couple of cases is a little snug already.

That always amazed me.

we had to drive 3 hours to visit my wife's folks this weekend, J was miserable. he's always hated the car. everyone said "oh it'll get better" but it hasn't and he'll be 2 in the fall. it's brutal, just hours of misery.

I'm 35 and I still haven't gotten over hating the car.

Wait, 34. Maybe 35 is my year.

Molly was a nightmare in the car too. Aidan was in an extended rear facing seat until 3.5 and I thought molly would be happier in that as it was higher and she could see out, but no. The only thing that made it better was front facing, much as I did't want to turn her, it was definitely safer as I couldn't concentrate on driving when she was screaming. Ah, the memories of driving up the M1 with her screaming most of the way. Aidan actually managed to sleep through the screaming but he's always loved the car and it always used to send him to sleep.

Congrats SM!

yall are making me feel pretty lucky atm (although that will change oh yes). michael just turned 9 mos, goes to bed at 9, mumbles and complains for an hour, sleeps straight through to 8:30 am (there are occasional exceptions but not many.) loves his backwards car seat - only had one car meltdown but of course that was on a long drive on christmas eve during the worst blizzard in a year with a shit ton of terrible blizzards. i thought i was going to die. teething sucks, and his milk intake is astounding, fortunately hes accepted one (and only one) brand of formula since mom literally cant keep up even with work pumping etc. down with real food, unless its butternut squash, which has been such an instant "fuck. you. dad." that i just stopped trying.

wrt the car seat, that softy flexible mirror you can hang on the backseat headrest is a LIFESAVER. little peeps can look at themselves, see you, you can see them in the rearview w/o turning around, tell when they are crashing out etc. i think its more for the mental health of the parents honestly, but christ we need it amirite.