ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

carl/jeff i dont have anything to bring to the table except OMG THE PINCHING WOULD DRIVE ME INSAAAAANE

wtf ivy, cmon girl

my niece is an armpit pincher, i've just discovered. but she also giggles all day and has cutest little face in the entire history of the universe, so it's ok.

As I told my mom after she declared Ivy's pinching wasn't too bad: talk to me around minute 45.

stevie there are two sisters on this bus about age 2 and 4 who could seriously be older versions of Marin.

Anybody else have routine diaper changes turn into full-on epic wrestling matches? Like he's not angry or sad, just squirmy and trying to get away. It takes like three times as long and routinely ends with half-applied diapers.

Yes, although Ivy is often angry and sad about it, too. Distraction works for the wiggles - giving him a toy or something particularly enticing (a clean diaper, a pack of wipes, matches, I don't know) - and to avoid angry/sad especially in the morning, I've taken to changing her diaper while she's watching Daniel Tiger or whatever.

Mine always uses it as an opportunity to flip onto his front then turn round and grin at us. He looks so proud I can't be too cross (until the 5th, 6th, 7th time...)

diaper changes are like a baby's version of Jazzercize AFAICT

Lol yes. The diaper comes off and it's like "wait, whoa, LEGS, I have LEGS"

Most nappy changes, once they'd mastered coasting round the furniture, were done standing up. Couldn't face the endless wrestling

Are any of your kids facetiming relatives/friends yet? Our kids are huge fans of it but it is getting a little out of control. Just the other night I busted Hank facetiming his grandfather with the camera pointed in full close up of his balls that were, thankfully, covered in Avenger underwear. He looked so pleased with himself. Like a broken record i said once again 'Henry, please try to remember, FACEtime is for FACES.'

We've been doing Facetime/Skype since Evie was little since our families live elsewhere. The biggest problem is Evie always gets super hyper and crazy and starts yelling and wants to grab the iPad and run around with it instead of talking. She often wants to Facetime with her friends from school too, we've only let her do that a few times.

Kindergarten orientation yesterday was making me emo. I think Evie will be fine once she gets into it but she was being shy at the orientation and sitting by herself reading instead of talking with other kids. It's a big change from a small day care to a big school with 65+ kids in kindergarten alone (split into three classrooms).

My local public school I think has 25+ kids in K classrooms and 30+ in first grade. It's been the subject of a lot of handwringing for us, private school not really being an option so it's sort of this or the suburbs. And I hate to be all special snowflake about my child, but she is pretty sensitive wrt noise/large groups and does tend to shut down a little. So I totally feel you on that NA.

This is supposed to be a really good school, so I'm not worried about that so much. I'm not even really worried about her because I know she's generally very social. I'm just eager for the transition period to be over.

I'm sure she's just absorbing things for now, which is great, because that means when her normal outgoing personality kicks in, she'll already understand how it all works. I'm excited for her! Go Evs!!! <3

Ivy and I Skype with my parents every Sunday and have more or less since she was born. If you say, "Where's Pop Pop?" she looks at the computer. Or if I'm sitting at the desk, she'll hop up in my lap and say "Pop Pop" or "Mom Mom" or "Coco" (that's their dog). She doesn't have much patience for sitting for long periods, but the desk is set up so that my parents can see into her room, too, so I'll let her play on the floor and get out of the way so they can just basically watch her do stuff for about a half hour. Sometimes they feign interest in my well being but mostly they just watch the kid.

I really wish that we could do a similar video call with her other grandparents since it really does help her stay familiar with her far away family but they can't get internet access where they live.

"Facetime is for FACES" is cracking me up. Oh Henry...

I've been facetiming with my parents pretty regularly, and my wife started to somewhat with her mom since all our families live 2,000 miles away. Cecil seems to really dig it, and I swear he was more familiar with my parents when we went to visit in July, especially compared to my wife's father who he'd never seen before, even on a phone screen.

Also ball time is the greatest thing

I'm pretty sure the only time Jesse and I tried FaceTime he put the phone in his pants so I'd like to say Henry will outgrow it but ...

Hahaha I don't doubt it

I can just picture Hank pitching silicon valley VCs: "It's Facetime for balls"

I call it Ballstime

I'm imagining that going like GOB's "Fuck City" pitch from Arrested development.

A friend's kid choked on a hot dog friday night and had to spend the weekend in the hospital with tubes in his throat and getting MRIs. His mom found him unconscious and not breathing and had to resuscitate him. They are very fortunate that she was able to revive him. God knows how close he was to death or brain damage.

If feeding hot dogs to little children, do not feed it to them in sandwich form. Instead chop it into little pieces. We use one of these to get hot dogs down into child-friendly pieces: http://www.amazon.com/Dachshund-Shaped-Hot-Dog-Cutter/dp/B0088OJB5U

My little girl is the same age and I've been known to leave her with a snack while I go take the trash out or flip the laundry or whatever. This has been a huge wake-up call.

I have extreme choking paranoia so we avoid hot dogs completely.

I always quarter lengthwise and then cut into sections. She doesn't like the bun anyway.

Worst thing about choking is that it can be totally silent so you could even be in the same room with your back turned. Sorry about your friend, hl.

marcos how did it go?

― carl agatha, Sunday, August 23, 2015 10:33 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ferber is going pretty well tbh!!! we made a lot of improvements. F is still only 5 months and nurses every 3 hours or so each night but the best thing we've accomplished is F can now fall asleep on his own so long as he has a full stomach. so that is cool. before, my wife would nurse him and one of us would have to dance him around for a long time, upwards of 45 minutes sometimes, before he could finally get to sleep and stay asleep. now he'll nurse and we place him in the crib awake and he might cry for a few seconds but then he's out. so huge huge huge improvement.

eventually we will try to space out the night feedings but it is so cool that he just goes to sleep on his own after them.

and we've been pretty lucky with our older kid, he's almost 3 now and has been a great sleeper since about 15 months or so (when we had to do some pretty intense and torturous sleep training stuff, which is why we're trying to get this over with earlier with F)

Ferber method is underrated imo

FWIW K showed incredible resistance to the Ferber method. There were a few times when it seemed to work, temporarily, but then some event would upset it. Also it took many more nights of crying than advertised, each time. As noted above, we're pretty much back to square one with her recent anxiety and the new baby.

Meanwhile E @ <3 months is a natural great sleeper. Sometimes goes 8-9 hour stretches at night, yet clearly is eating very well based on growth/weight and just sheer chubbiness.

xp yea i agree, also it is extremely different imo than the actual "shut the door & see you in the morning cry-it-out" method, the intervals and frequent checking in make ferber pretty humane imo. though the longer intervals can be pretty hard, we kind of set a cap that we won't go longer than 10 minutes of crying.

We did Ferber with K around age 7 months and I think it took almost a month to work. Then we had to move to a 1BR for a while and that kind of threw everything.

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/daniel-tiger-becomes-a-boy-with-autisms-guide-to-social-life/?smid=tw-share

Daniel Tiger is very popular in our home. This morning, Jeff asked her what she wanted to watch* and she said "TIGER."

*We use TV to hypnotize her into compliance while I get her dressed in the mornings.

We noticed K's behavior is better when she watches no TV than when she watches TV, but short of that we also noticed that there's a huge difference between the days she watches Daniel Tiger vs almost anything else. We completely stopped with Disney.

Any of you guys end up with a kid who likes Billy Joel? Because FUCK this phase.

That would be tough.

I assume you have only yourself to blame. I mean where they exposed to BJ in the first place?

^ILP quoted out of context

btw, in re that disciplinarian thing upthread, we kind of had a come to jesus moment about it and realized it wasn't exactly working, or rather, we were right to be more disciplinarian but wrong to be more harsh and negative, so now we're all about trying to set limits in a more positive way, and I finally feel like this is paying off.

I got a really simple but very effective tip from a parenting magazine, for example: instead of saying "If you don't finish dinner, you can't have dessert," you say, "first we finish dinner, then we eat dessert."

I was a kid who liked Billy Joel, I used to listen to The Stranger all the time when I was a kid and think I still have my dad's copy in my vinyl collection

We are going to check out highschools. She's in fifth grade now. Seems early but the open school days are all on the same day. So we're doing a few now and the rest next year. Omg high school.
Prob going with Latin.

I assume you have only yourself to blame. I mean where they exposed to BJ in the first place?

― Οὖτις, Friday, September 18, 2015 10:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would never knowingly expose a kid to Billy Joel. He started liking it after a few long car rides with my mother-in-law, the same place he learned to like the Eagles. But apparently all the kids on his bus like Billy Joel too and they had a big sing-along to Piano Man the other day.

my eldest loves Billy Joel thanks to car-based indoctrination from his grandad. i got no problem with this, Billy Joel is okay.

there's a french parenting expert named Dolto who says they can have dessert first, it doesn't matter

we tried that for about 5 minutes before centuries of habit rebelled

"I don't care if you get mad at me because I won't let you eat Oxyclean" is a thing I say now.

If she eats dessert "first" there is no second

xpost i lol'ed

Relating directly to this thread title, PP busted Henry out in the backyard in his skivvies yelling at the daughters of our super christian neighbours right after church last Sunday.

Nice!