ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

At least to make sure None of the Bullshit happens to them. xp to Dan

I really like this article, too - http://www.bostonreview.net/wonders/fausto-sterling-motor-development

Especially as a parent of a premature baby who is developing at her own speed, it's nice to be reminded that 1) it's all pretty arbitrary and 2) she'll get there.

It's taking a lot of will power not to say all the ways in which she is really close to her birth age developmental milestones because god forbid anybody think she's not the Lisa Simpson of six month olds or something.

It is a fact of American Life that I am thinking of strategies to teach them how to recognize and handle The Bullshit rather than ways to prevent it, because it is impossible to prevent it.

That makes me sad and I'm sorry. It also sounds exhausting.

tbf parenting is exhausting in general

Speaking of, how are the boys sleeping these days?

K gets physical therapy from the city which I only agreed to because it's free. She's behind in physical development apparently, enough so that she can get the free services. I was as well and it doesn't matter much to my life of sitting on my ass in an office chair, although it did make me kind of unhappy as a kid. It's taught me little games I can play with her to encourage physical activity and help her get stronger, so it doesn't seem like it does much harm, but there is a ridiculous amount of anxiety created about every developmental microphase.

xp: ha

One problem is that we keep forgetting to swaddle them; I think we need to wrap them up no later than 10 in order to start bringing their energy levels down. I swaddled them last night/this morning after their 2:00 AM feeding and was able to get both of them to sleep in their cribs on their Boppy pillows. This was the first time we'd been able to get either of them to sleep in the crib without completely losing their shit.

Yes! As someone with PLENTY of anxiety around parenthood I work very hard to avoid getting anxious about developmental microphases. We have conceded to two (the second one is this Wednesday) early intervention evaluations from the state. They come free with an extended NICU stay. She was fine for her adjusted age at three months, but they wanted to come back and six months actual and check on her then. As a first time parent without a whole lot of experience with babies, it is comforting to have four child development experts declare our baby to be fine.

xp That's good! Maybe this is the start of something beautiful. Ivy would nap longer on her boppy pillow than she would if I just put her flat in the crib.

Yeah, we only just got the Boppys a couple of weeks ago and I had the revelation that I could put them in the cribs over the weekend. I expect that to be a regular thing now.

Boppies make it a lot easier to hold them and if you are a negligent parent like me, you can put the pillows sideways on the couch and wedge the baby in there for a little bit so you can eat and watch TV.

oh we have already discovered the joy of wedging yr kid into a Boppy pillow

and when they're bigger you can upgrade to shoving them in a bumbo

omg I had Ivy in the bumbo yesterday and she pushed her legs out and arched her back right the fuck up out of that thing. I caught her before she went backwards into her head but it scared the shit out of me.

Which Country Shares Your Parenting Values
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/country-comes-parenting-values/

SHOCKER I got Sweden

lol i got south korea

Sweden for me.

Australia, but most of it was pretty arbitrary for me except for putting religious faith last.

a slightly reordered version got me new zealand

Yemen for me wtf

No hold on, that's the opposite. Australia or New Zealand for me too.

yeah same, I am the opposite of Yemen, or Colombia

My opposite was Pakistan.

I am Australia, the opposite of Pakistan.

I basically just did a nice little semi-random salad of perserverence/tolerance/imagination type values and pushed faith and obedience to the bottom.

hard-working free-spirit is what I have in mind

Imagine growing up in Yemen though. Obey, recite scripture; don't express yourself or tolerate others. And don't try very hard at any of it either.

Obvs the big flaw is that while some of the values are likely to be opposed (obedience vs. self-expression), others are likely to be complimentary, so putting them on a continuum makes no sense. Even "faith" is going to mean different things in different cultures and might be more compatible with liberal values in some than in others.

Top five: Tolerance, imagination, self-expression, responsibility, unselfishness. Obedience and religion at the bottom.

Basically go crazy but don't be an asshole, which I think sums up my goals pretty well.

Jeff said, and I agree, that if critical thinking had been an option I would have ranked that highly.

xps re Bumbos, we used to put our boy up on a chair so he could sit at the table with us, but one day he leaned out and the thing tipped right over and he had a horrible fall. Kids have got fractured skulls from same, we were actually pretty lucky. I still think they're great, but would never take it off the floor again.

Yikes.

Reminds me of how K's chubby little legs would just stick in the bumbo and you could pick her up and the bumbo would come with her, so cute. She's pretty svelte now though.

Similar Matches:
South Korea
Romania
Turkey

Opposite Matches:
Peru
Uruguay
Colombia

a little surprising since I am the son of a South American, but he emigrated to the USA so I suppose his values ≠ those who stayed behind

i remember when my wife was pregnant with J that i felt a little embarrassed about putting things like bumbos and boppies and brestfriends on a wish-list for our baby shower. i have no such embarrassment any more.

This whole "stay in the room with her when she goes to sleep (and when she wakes up in the middle of the night)" thing is leading to weird, disorienting sleep patterns for me. Sometimes I wake up on the mattress in her room in the morning still clothed. Sometimes I find my wife there, same. Last night I accidentally fell asleep at 8:30 pm there, woke up at 11:30pm, worked from then until 4:00am, then slept from then until 6:30am in my bed, at which point K woke up again, resulting in me staying with her another hour so I could get a little more sleep.

Ugh I'm still messed up. I fall asleep, sometimes still in work clothes, in different parts of the house every night

Xpost way up thread: I can honestly say I've cried on the 3 hour drive to and from Memphis multiple times in the last decade. I'm not the greatest roadtrip companion. Being a passenger is terrifying.

9 month checkup today - super healthy, kicking ass in cognitive and motor skills stuff, 70% weight to height ratio, but Michael is way at the bottom/off the charts low on height and weight for his age. Logically I realize that's a totally arbitrary and unimportant thing, but it weirds me out a little.

Evie was at the bottom of the weight charts until she started solid food, then she plumped up fast.

Ivy is a shorty, too. Even for her due date, as opposed to her birthdate, she's on the short end of things. I totally understand being weirded out about it, despite intellectually knowing that it is a totally arbitrary and unimportant thing. At Ivy's early development intervention eval on Wednesday, she tested on the low end of her acceptable range, particularly with passing things from hand to hand and grabbing her toes. Again, logically, no big deal but there's always this nagging worry that something is wrong. Then last night when I was out with coworkers, she started rolling over on her own. So my mantra is basically "She'll get there." And if I start to really question something, I ask myself if I would love her any less if she ended up being short or needing physical or occupational therapy or had a diagnosed delay of some sort, and the answer is a resounding FUCK NO. So that's been a helpful thing for me to remember, too.

so the other day V remarked how she saw two birds standing on each other and bobbing up and down = I guess it's time for "How Babies Are Made" (oddly she was not particularly interested in this question when her little brother was made). Have been wondering how to broach this. My wife was of the opinion that we should wait until she starts asking questions but I was kind of of the opinion that she might never ask and what then? Better to give her actual information than her be too shy to ask or unquestioningly absorb whatever nonsense the other little morons in her class will tell her. I seem to recall being around 6 or 7 when the basics of reproduction were imparted to me (although it was of course a bit longer before I understood the actual details). Anyone got any experience to chime in with re: the sex ed

i say be honest, practical, sincere and no-nonsense about it and you can't go wrong. i probably wouldn't just bring it up out of the blue though.

I am reminded of something our preschool teacher once said when there was a parent clamoring about how he wanted to tell his 4yo (and, most irritatingly, any other children in earshot) about reproduction and she pointed out that if you tell them when they're that young, they're just going to immediately experiment with sticking things in their genitals/sticking their genitals in things, so its best to wait until they have some self-control/self-awareness of their bodies. (I hated this dad for other reasons, to be fair, but I was pretty pissed that he thought it was his perogative to impart this information to other people's children without their knowledge/permission). Anyways, V's 6 1/2 now so I think she's probably past that particular milestone but you never know.

I never asked and thankfully my parents never told me.

My memory of it is that my parents started with this vague, partial explanation of what sex was that I only found more mystifying. I didn't really *get* it until I actually took sex ed in school (6th grade?)

I am really just seeking validation here but is it okay to just archive emails without responding to them when they have been sitting in my inbox for a month? It is the tail end of a conversation with a cousin of mine whom I like a lot but am not very close to, and it's my turn to respond but I don't really have anything else to say.

(Asking here because my ability to respond to chatty personal email has gone down the toilet since I went back to work and I'm just tired all the time and pine for the olden days of inbox zero.)

yes

So once your child starts walking and talking they pull you into social situations you'd rather skip, right?

I'm a shy introvert, strangers cause me anxiety unless I feel they are open and friendly. The type that just sit there, posturing, taking themselves all too seriously just send me in the opposite direction. August brought me into their circle yesterday at the farmers market and I was horrified.

She took a very light weight, small, plastic ball and threw it over the head of a girl who was 8 or 9 years old. The girl cried like, well, a baby. I went with August to retrieve the ball and we apologized to the girl who was being held by her older sister who was maybe 12. Then I noticed we were in a den of the types I am not comfortable with. They were all sitting there, languidly under the tree and staring. August went up to their dog, tried to play with their much younger child and the whole time I am silently freaking out, perspiring and heart thumping. I want to just get out of there. They were not friendly, didn't look happy, seemed annoyed. UGHGRRRRR! All my sweetly delivered exit lines to August were really calm and controlled but behind them was a shit load of anger and anxiety. Once we got out of there, I had to just leave.

Two or three new families recently moved into my apartment complex. They all seem to know each other or be related to each other. There are at least three kids, one about 2 years old, one about 4-5, and one 6. It's mostly good because Evie is really excited to have other kids her age around, and when they're all playing in the backyard, they seem to get along pretty well and play well with each other. But there are two weird/annoying aspects:
* The parents let the kids run around by themselves while they mostly stay in their apartments, very rarely popping out onto their porches to see what's going on. We don't let Evie play outside by herself so me and/or Sarah are always around, so we end up being the default parents, trying to make sure squabbles get resolved and no one gets hurt. A few times they've opened up the gate and gone out into the alley, which is not a safe place for young kids. Generally it's not that big a deal but I don't want to be responsible for other people's kids.
* More troublesome is that the 4-5-year-old has no boundaries about other apartments. He's tried to go into our apartment a few times, and yesterday he opened the screen door and walked into our neighbor's apartment, and I know there are no kids in there and he has no connection to that neighbor. Another person in the complex said he's walked into her place before too. It's annoying and also obviously unsafe, but I don't really want to have a big confrontation with his parents about it.

Add this in to the weird old guy who lives in the building next door who constantly talks about what an angel Evie is and how he watches us when we're outside on his security cameras and gave Evie candy through the fence yesterday, and I'm ready to look for a new apartment.