ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

not even "kind of," shit has been hard. i know when it is a three-day weekend and i am eager to get back to work and away from the house that things are getting hard. i was sick last week, on my birthday, on this beautiful memorial day weekend with sublime weather, and we had to cancel plans to host our best friends and their two kids who we haven't seen in over a year. then my 2-year-old gets sick and is just this sweaty cranky ball of drool and free-flowing mucus who wakes up all night. also i was holding our 2-month on our front steps and i get up and lose my balance and lose my grip on the baby and tumble into the shrubs and the baby now has this 4-inch long deep scratch on on his forehead. my wife is reading about autism nonstop and we tried to have sex for the first time since the baby was born and she just starts bawling from all the stress about planning school and services for our toddler, and of course she is now worried about the risk for our 2-month old too. the days are hot and so long and i just can't wait to go to sleep at the end of the day but of course "sleep" means "wake up every 1-2 hours because at least one child is crying and needs help"

also being sick and tired and exhausted has brought up all my own shit re: anxiety & depression which usually goes away this time of the year -- feb/march is usually the dregs and may is almost manic happiness but not this year, somehow the nice weather makes it worse because i feel like i'm not present for it you know?

yikes that's rough

we had our own issues but they were against the backdrop of a mini college reunion at a resort in New Hampshire which lessened a lot of the sting

marcos that's so hard. How's your support system?

thank you guys

carl the support system is there i just need to draw from it, something that has been an ongoing learning process for me for a long time, sometimes i am pretty good about reaching out for support and other times i struggle. it is part of the reason i was so looking forward to hanging out with our good friends who also have little kids, it will be so nice to get the kids in bed and just enjoy a beer or a bourbon with them and talk about how it is so draining to be a young parent sometimes.

having two little ones is soooooo hard. & sex can bring out weirdness because it's what got you into this trouble in the first case (maybe that's better with adoptions etc?)

oof sorry to hear that marcos.

parenting is about endurance

yea it totally is. i think i forgot too how hard the first few months of a baby's life are wrt sleep. it took J almost 15 months before he was sleeping through the night, hopefully F won't take that long but in any case i am eager for regular sleep. consistent sleep deprivation fucks with you

Both twins have another respiratory thing (YAY *sob*) which is making them super irritable and unable to sleep; the only way we can calm them down is through touching them, and even then there's a lot of thrashing and kicking. The only saving grace is that we haven't had to hospitalize them again, although I think we would actually get more sleep if we did.

Sorry marcos. Having two kids is hard.

I'm sorry marcos, I remember how awful and defeated and depressed I felt for a long time early on and that was just one kid.

the support system is there i just need to draw from it, something that has been an ongoing learning process for me for a long time

This is a big thing for us too, having people offer to help but feeling weird about asking, etc. My wife is going out of town this week for a couple days, which will be the first time I'm totally alone and at some point I'm going to have to will myself to summon the neighbors (who are expecting twins and eager for practice) if I need to take an hour off.

I think new parents are well within their rights to brazenly demand assistance from nearby family members, which we definitely did early on

ouch marcos
I have no experience with two but would expect that having a 2-month old as well is probably the 'worst' point i.e. it will hopefully only get better from here?

it def gets better/easier (or rather, you swap out one set of hard things for a different set of hard things, that are hard in a different way)

on another, funnier note (I didn't witness this so I have no photo documentation fwiw) apparently this morning when my 2yo Judah's playmate buddy came over to visit the first thing Judah did was a) take out and show him the Kraftwerk record we were listening to the other day (Man-Machine) and then b) insist that my wife put it on the stereo and then c) made everybody (Judah, playmate, playmate's mom and sister, my wife) do "the Robot"

lol

my kids swear so well in French now, it's amazing. they say really really horrible things & I'm like "yes! great job!"

haha merde

yeah way worse stuff than that. & now I find myself saying these things too. I gotta be careful. evidently the teachers in school cuss too. what a country.

I got told off for swearing in French class after my parents' friend - essentially my French grandad - taught me a few mots. I thought they were expressions of minor irritation :-/

Marcos, you have my full sympathy. I have no idea how parents of two cope; one has nearly finished me.

my kid is addicted to bouncing. He goes in the jumperoo for a few minutes a day and crashes that thing around like you wouldn't believe. Then if you stand him up on your lap he tries to bounce. And when he's lying down. Or being carried around. He's a bounceaholic.

Ivy got frustrated and bit herself today at daycare, and then she bit another kid. :( Five and a half teeth and she's biting people with them. Sigh.

Evie keeps complaining that her friends at school don't believe her about things. These are the things they don't believe:

1. That fairies are real. Evie visited some kind of "fairy garden" in Virginia and this convinced her that fairies are real. Her friends say that the tooth fairy is real but not other fairies.
2. That she has "the allergies" (she has self-diagnosed with allergies and keeps bugging us to take her to the doctor so she can get allergy medicine, which we are ignoring because she has manifested no sign of allergies)

She has a loose tooth now and was really excited but then she sighed and said her friends probably wouldn't believe that she has a loose tooth.

A French friend in college used "putain" as her expression of minor irritation. I later dropped that one into casual conversation with some American kids who had taken a French class and they were pretty scandalized.

"putain" is used as an expression of minor irritation, yes.

our current fav around the house is "je m'en battre les couilles" : it means "I don't give a fuck", but literally it's more hilarious: like "I hit my own balls". my son watched a kid with bad French say "battre les couilles" to a girl recently, and she glared at him and said, no, I'll do it for you.

Marcos are you dealing with Autism on top of all this?

yea, J was diagnosed a couple months ago

That's a rough schedule in itself. It gets easier though. My parenting mantra: 'this too shall pass'.

We need sleep help.

Desperately.

Nora's never been good but she's regressed and regressed and now wakes every hour at night and won't settle unless she gets boob. It's destroying Emma and me.

Wtf do we do? We're baby-led and gentle as a rule and everything else is going so well, but this is horrific.

Em won't countenance cry-it-out. I can't see any alternative.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

I've got nothing as tonight is the first night in as long as I can remember that the kid went down at his usual time and hasn't woken up crying every hour for the first three hours. I've checked on him twice already as I simply can't believe this.

Nick, you must both be in shreds. How old is Nora now? We have friends whose 16-month-old is now able to sleep 2.5 hours at a time but for ages it was every hour as you describe. They found the No Cry Sleep Solution helpful to an extent. Other parents we know went away for a week and the dad just cuddled the baby through the night to get her used to no night feeds. It's not exactly the attached parenting, on-demand way, but she was never left to cry it out.

F has never really taken to the bottle so I've had to do all the night feeds, but it's usually just one and never more than three these days. And about one glorious night in 100 he'll sleep right through.

Plus if he wakes before 2am, Stet is almost always able to cuddle/dance him back to sleep.

Oh Nick that sounds awful. She's around 6 months iirc? Mine has had a horrendous few days and been quite up and down since ~4 months but nothing that bad and tbh nothing I can really complain about. Anyway a few ppl have said things settle a bit around 6mo and as he approaches that, the last few nights have been really good. So fingers crossed?

Do you think she actually needs feeding when she wakes or could you try cuddling back to sleep? I guess if boob does the job no-one wants to be up for hours trying an alternative.
Have you started solids?

yeah we just we went with boob + cosleeping as things hit the kinda point you're talking about. at least then no one had to get out of bed.

Another thing some friends found helpful was background white noise, to help the transition from one sleep phase to the next.

(Should have said, the friends who did 'cuddle-it-out' were at 10 months and the mum was about to return to work. They'd been baby-led until then.)

i'll post more on monday but we had a really rough time getting J to sleep through the night and we tried a lot of different things and weren't successful until he was 15 months or so. two quick things come to mind - 1) getting the non-nursing partner (if you guys are breastfeeding, I can't speak otherwise) to do the night care will help break the baby's association w/ nighttime and nursing; and 2) cry-it-out does not have to be savage and brutal, there are gradual ways of doing it that are effective and still involve soothing and comforting, and it is very important to keep in mind that a couple of intense nights of cry-it-out or similar methods are on the whole significantly less brutal than months and months of ineffective night training that bring both baby and parents to tears. We were very anti-cry-it-out for months but retrospectively realized that a well-timed cry-it-out would have resulted in substantially less crying overall.

My only suggestion is cosleeping. Ivy usually starts in her crib and then ends up in bed, where she sleeps pretty soundly so it's the best way for us all to get sleep.

That is brutal though. I'm sorry you're dealing with this.

Yeah we (well, Madchen) hit a wall with F waking frequently and demanding boob. We had tried me giving him a bottle but he just wasn't having it.

I read the no-cry sleep solution and to be honest we had learned a lot of it from other places. But the key point was "they don't need milk at this point; they're just in a habit they can't break by themselves".

So I gritted my teeth and got set to dance him and cuddle him until he stopped crying and went back to sleep. I was all ready for this to take hours but in the end, to my very great surprise, it took about 15 mins before he stopped the fierce crying and just went to sleep. Only lasted an hour, but then I just danced him again and over a few nights he got the message.

Still doesn't sleep through, but I can usually get him back to sleep relatively quickly by myself now. That lets us sleep in shifts, I take responsibility for getting him back to sleep from 10.30-3 and M from 3-8.

(The fact that we've been using the same playlist for bedtime every night since he was tiny may have been a factor, hearing it definitely puts him in the sleep mindset. Sleep associations are important. I also do every bedtime)

What Stet describes we started doing round about 12 months, IIRC.

Is Nora still sleeping in the same room as you? Completely anecdotal but I reckon mine naps better (longer) when I nap alongside him. We have a sidecar crib and i'm not ready to put him in his own room yet. though soon he will be bursting out of the crib. Can't believe what a tiny portion of it he took up when we first brought him home!

Ivy def naps better/longer when she naps next to one of us.

Thanks all.

Nora's six and a half months now. Been (baby led) weaning for about three weeks. Other than that she's breastfed.

I've been sleeping in the spare room mostly, leaving Em to do nightfeeds, and taking Nora from 6am most days, so at least one of us isn't knackered (I'm not a great sleeper). For a while she was waking every three hours for feeds which Em was fine with, but this has regressed and regressed. She goes to sleep initially easily but then wakes lots.

I think we need to lengthen bedtime routine and not feed her last thing before sleep. We're gonna give last feed downstairs and then I'll take her up, dress her, story her, and put her down. She's been sleeping in an ambi hammock but I think it's time for crib now. She's still in the same room as Em.

It's nice to know we're not alone. Nearly kicked my dad out of the house yesterday for suggesting we were doing something wrong by not bottle feeding because that would have her sleeping through. After spending the morning with us (while Em was away for the day) he had to agree that she's an incredibly happy baby so we're doing something right.

And she is; I appreciate that we're very lucky, apart from the sleep thing.

Mine's six months and a week now, and has always been bottle fed because of the whole adoption thing.

Typical night is get changed, suited up in sort of an arms-free swaddle, fed somewhere between 2 and 8 ounces after which he falls asleep and is set into his crib somewhere around 7:30. He almost always wakes up again after 45 to 120 minutes and can be rocked and shushed back to sleep, then wakes up again between 11 and 1am and eats another 4oz or so. Sleeps again until maybe 4 or 5, gets changed, eats 7ish ounces, then might fall back asleep or might babble and flap his arms around until we bring him into bed between us, where he will usually fall asleep until 7:30 or so, sometimes after swatting us in the head for 15 minutes. It sucks because it starts to get light here at 4:15am.

Of course there are infinite variations on this, like falling asleep fully from 7 until 2, then again until 7:30am, or waking up for good at 5am (only once so far), or like the other night when it took two solid hours of crying and fussing to fall asleep during which time my wife holding him would make him cry harder and me taking him let to immediate silence and included me walking around the block with him to chill him out.

I have no idea if this is normal or sustainable of if we should be trying to fix anything or just deal with it. After three months of shitty screaming colic it feels great by comparison but sometimes is just objectively awful and demoralizing - which is when I think I should read the No Cry Sleep Solution book we have but by that time I'm too exhausted to want to read anything.

Best thing I bought is some pre-made blackout curtain linings that are really easy to attach to our bedroom curtains. They cost about 30 quid and don't even fit the full length of our curtains but shut out the light.

We had colic for three months too and I videoed some of the screaming to show the doctor when I was desperate. I look at those and wonder how we survived it.

just want to chime in on the small baby waking up in the night thing. with the caveat that every baby is different obvs. and that there are many things one cannot "solve" at all.

it seemed like there was always a reason for my youngest to be waking up a lot. either he had a fever or he had a stuffed up nose or something or other. he'd been sleeping in the next room for months but he was still waking up. two, three, four times a night. sometimes we'd bring him in and sleep with us, sometimes not. it never seemed to make much difference, or at least never fit into a pattern we could discern. my wife was pretty fed up and i was his "defender" in that i'd always be like, well, it's probably because of (x) i know it sucks but he'll get better. and he didn't. and i can't remember exactly when it was, but one night after approximately the 5000000th wakeup i whispered. like genuinely angry at this little 1-yr-old kid (ffs). which is what finally gave me the impetus to do cry-it-out/ferber/whatever. because at this point i was like yes, let the little bastard suffer, god knows he's done it to me enough. it took him about an hour and a half to get to sleep the first time but i was so tired that i fell asleep while he was screaming. the next night it took him about half an hour. and after that it was basically licked. any time he'd kick off i'd go in, shush him and say "now go to sleep" and THWIP right back out of the room stat. and it worked.

now obv every baby is different - and perhaps more importantly every PARENT is different - but among my friends every single one of them with this sort of issue has said the only thing that really worked was something along these lines. i think it comes down just as much to the parents being ready for it, as the kid..

Em still won't countenance it at all.

Last night was horrific. We did the new bedtime routine, which isn't too different, but we fed her downstairs and then I put her to bed solo, with a story, and she went off pretty sweetly. But then - well, we normally get 2-3 hours, in that she normally wakes circa 10pm when we go to bed, but last night she only lasted an hour. Then 45 minutes. Then half an hour. Then we went to bed, and from 9:30 it was hell; she woke every 15 minutes until midnight, when Em told me to go to the backroom and she'd let Nora sleep on her. Which worked, in that Nora slept, but Em had to sit up until 5am, when she finally got Nora to sleep next to her rather than on her, and then I took her at 6am and she slept pretty soundly next to me until 7am.

Mitigating factors: new routine; Em was away from 9am to 6pm on Saturday, so we had our first solo baby&daddy day (which was great, an absolute success); there were arguments and nearly burning the house down on Friday, so the whole weekend was a bit unusual; and we're pretty sure she's teething and uncomfortable. But good grief, last night was horrific.

She's such a smiley, happy, alert, strong baby during the day. It's so weird. It's like she's a different baby at night.

This may be an unwelcome suggestion but if she sleeps well on you, perhaps she'd sleep well on her tummy rather than her back? My friend in NCT was desperate and tried that as it doubled his sleep time (she's also a GP!). At first it didn't exactly help because she stayed up watching him due to fear of SIDS but she has now bought a sensor mat that alerts if no movement for 20 seconds or so. I'm not sure if she's still doing it.

Really hope you guys get some sleep soon

We did the tummy/sensor thing from about four months because of reflux. It reached that point where child's safety due to sleeping on back was outweighed by child's safety due to parents having zero sleep. I'm finding that parenting decisions are usually made when the risk/benefit weigh-up shifts because of utter knackeredness.

If you suspect it's teething, a dose of ibuprofen followed by a dose of paracetamol at an appropriate interval can be really helpful. Another of those things for us which shifted dramatically was our attitude to analgesics. And Anbesol is way better than Bonjela for quick (though short lived) relief.

A friend with a baby the same age as Nora and a 3-year-old has just commented on Instagram that when they're teething, if they lie on their backs it makes their heads throb. That totally makes sense. We'll try tummy-down, I think; she's in a growbag rather than sheets, there's nothing else in the cot with her, and she's strong as hell.

Yeah, we have Anbesol. Is there baby ibuprofen then? A suspension like Calpol?

I had suspected that about lying on their backs for a bit - F is teething molars right now and refuses to lie on his back for more than a moment at a time. Which is making nappy changes interesting for sure.

xp yes, Boots does both baby ibuprofen and baby paracetamol. You can give each every four hours, and they don't interact so you can alternate them every two hours when things are really bad. They even come with these little syringes which make it very easy to administer. (I think they're very new -- our first bottles came with spoons, and that was a *nightmare*)