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

I clearly remember telling my mum there is no Santa Claus. We were in the kitchen with mum's best friend when I made the earth shattering announcement. They both broke into hysterical laughter and one of them said 'Well there goes half your Christmas presents!! Hahahaha " and I remember think 'oh no! What have I done???'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueVPUsyrT0s

We went through this with

BEEPS: Is there really a tooth fairy?

ME: Do you really want me to tell you?

stare at each other for 30 seconds.

BEEPS: My friend from school got a two-dollar bill once.

xp
Parental death with betrayal frosting. Phoebe wins.

I feel like I've told my tooth fairy story before but here it is: I started suspecting that there was no tooth fairy around 7 or 8 so one day when we were driving somewhere I asked my mom who the tooth fairy was. She said, "Who do you think she is?" and I guessed the name of a woman who used to live in the same apartment complex as us that my two-timing father had been sleeping with. So my mom was like, gritting her teeth and gripping the wheel, "Nope. It's me. I'm the tooth fairy."

haha oh wow

loooooool

And you're all "You mean dad was sleeping with you too?"

He did have a type (women who paid small children for teeth).

fuck, that's hilarious

haha carl that's awesome

I'm not sure what my younger kid's take on Santa is. I'm definitely not taking an aggressively pro-Santa stance this time around though.

― how's life, Tuesday, December 15, 2015 8:11 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ok, day after I post this, I come home from work and the first thing I hear from her is "Daddy, unicorns are real!" Because apparently she'd seen this:

http://www.fox5dc.com/about-us/season-of-wishes/57638341-story

I've got a whole different problem now.

Ella borrowed this book from the library in September
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91KpE2-3cpL.jpg
and it's been non-stop Father Christmas/Santa pretty much ever since, with occasional returns to the hardcore Betty Boop obsession she developed in seconds after watching a single old cartoon on our local community TV station

wooooah, big image, sorry

though, frankly, that's how big it looms in my life, so the rest of you can deal with it too

Kids get to open all their presents a day early, due to having actual xmas day at their mums. Open dozens and dozens of boxes of lego, skylanders, lego dimensions etc etc.

Kid 1 immediately goes to the WiiU and, ignornig all his new Skylanders, fires up Splatoon which he's had for ever.

Kid 2, when he realises he has to wait for the Dimensions game to update on the PS4, wails "I have nothing else to play with!" while surrounded by piles of new toys.

>:|

Welcome to parenthood, Trayce!

*cries*

"What was your favorite part of our trip to Thailand?"

"Playing video games in Bangkok with [friend's kid] Joey."

lol

I have witnessed a decade of Christmasses if my niece being a goddamn asshole about presents

:/

After she came back from summer vacation I asked Beatrice's best friend what she liked most about the Alaskan cruise she had just come back from. 'I got to see 'Inside Out'!' LOL
Xpost

youth is wasted on the etc

stealth/non-stealth parenting tips for getting a little one to eat vegetables? have a 14-month old that just learned the valuable skill of saying "no." currently cooking up greens (kale/spinach/etc.) and dumping them into grilled cheese sandwiches (minimal cheese, healthy bread) and that seems to work.

Yeah I sneak chopped up veg that he didn't eat earlier into a pita with cream cheese. You can make big matches of pasta sauce with loads of veg in but apart from that I don't think you can really force it so I try not to make a big deal out of it

My wife grew an herb garden in the window as a little mother/daughter project. Once the leaves grew she was allowed to eat as much parsley etc. as she could. That's not "sneaking" per se, but she became invested in it. After that it wasn't hard to add other veg to her plate at meal time, although she's still particular about which ones.

12 hours! 7 to 7! Fucking hell!

dunh dunh duuuunnhhhhhh!!!!!!

No fair, M is still coming through to our bed, waking through the night, then waking up before 6am most mornings. (she's almost 4.5)

I think we've had about two solid weeks of solid 12 - 13 hour sleeping and it's amazing. He also started walking on Christmas Eve - like really walking, more than three or four steps - and talking a lot more and I swear he's just exhausted at night from all this learning and doing.

Sneaking foods into things dont work with the 7yo. He's celiac so has developed a real distrust of food generally, and if *anything* changes in taste or texture from expectations he outright refuses it. His list of foods is getting narrower by the day and I really worry he aint eating right (being also vegetarian on top of that) but... its not my kid, so not much I can do. Also he's a stubborn little &*%&^

He once refused to eat a zooper dooper iceblock because daddy cut it open upside down.

Last ten days or so we've got into a really nice groove of sleeping from just past 7pm through until 5-7am; most days it's about 6am. This is after 13 months of pretty much every two hours. We'd got to 1-2 wakings a night and then Em got a cold and conjunctivitis and went into the back bedroom, so I did all night wakings, and, by necessity, a little bit of controlled crying. And that seems to have done the trick. As others have said, this has coincided with serious walking and gobbledegook talking since she turned 1, so I suspect she's also just knackering herself out. It is a blessed relief, because we were pretty broken. I also have no doubt that once she can get herself out of her cot / bed that we will have night time visitations!

http://www.theonion.com/article/parents-crying-child-must-not-be-any-good-50322?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=InstantArticles:NA:InFocus

Switching from a crib to a toddler bed. What age did you do it? How did it go?

badly

I mean we did it around 3, and she liked her new bed, but she also started getting out of it all the time at night, which totally fucked up her ability to sleep by herself, which caused our current crazy sleep situation (in combination with having the baby).

went remarkable smooth for us, somehow. he was 2.5. he slept in a big bed one time on vacation, and we had our second baby due soon at the time, so when we got back from the vacation we bought him a regular bed (twin size, with a safety gate thing we attached). we skipped the toddler bed, seemed like a waste unless you have one of those cribs that converts into one.

i don't know how we've avoided the getting-out-of-bed thing, but we have. he still wakes up at night here and there and will call out for us, so we still use a monitor and go check on him, maybe that's why? i guess i'd rather go check on him myself and have him stay in the bed than get out of the bed to get us. but we didn't really do anything strategically to avoid him getting out of bed

also he is fucking toilet-trained!! like completely! feels like a miracle, he's 3 years old. as of 2016 he's been going diaper-free at night, this was after a few months of dry diapers every morning. maybe one wet diaper a month.

Oh yeah fwiw we didn't buy a toddler bed either, bought a twin bed with a pullout. Now H sleeps on the pullout so she can feed the baby at night and keep each from waking the other. If E's sleep ever actually normalizes a little though we're going to try to get them to sleep without H in the room again, hopefully within a few months.

K also still uses the diaper at night fwiw, and is turning 4 in 2 months. She was a little late on general potty training though. She has never had two consecutive mornings with dry diapers, and says she "never" wants to switch to underwear at night, so trying to wait til she feels a little more ready. During the day she p much never has accidents though.

with #1, used a crib but mostly she slept in her carseat placed in the crib lol. hey, it worked. I don't know why. she went right to a regular bed after that, age 2 I guess?

with #2, no crib, he just slept with us, or really "slept". age 2 went to regular bed.

(btw obstructions to funk w/ co-sleeping are overstated, just expand your places of funk. plus first 2 years are pretty rough anyway. after that...which leads us to)

#3: no crib, slept with us, went to regular bed again at 2ish.

in six months all my kids will be in double digits and man having kids these ages is so awesome. my boy'll be a teen in a few weeks, he's hilarious, vulgar, loves video games, it's like having your best brother around without having to hide how much you love him.

That's kind of reassuring. H is afraid that the semi-cosleeping is just going to last until age 5, but I think/hope maybe getting the extra reassurance they want now can lead to an easy transition later.

yea i think J being toilet-trained at 3 is really early, we just kind of got lucky i guess. fwiw i think it may have something to do w/ his autism and sensory issues, he really hates being wet, he barely had any accidents when we were training i think bc when he did he totally flipped out about how weird it was

We're more or less semi-co-sleeping now, which is actually fine (unless she's sick and waking up a lot, we sleep pretty well together. Helps that we're both cuddly sleepers) except we can't get Ivy to go to sleep in her crib. She'll fall asleep on us in a chair in her room, but as soon as she senses the clumsy transfer into her crib, she wakes up. We'll get her back to sleep, but she'll wake up when we try to transfer her again. Eventually she just wakes all the way up, and then one of us ends up taking her to the big bed because there's no going back to sleep in her room at all. So basically our evenings are shot, which is bumming us out. I've got a lot of laundry to fold and we're only on episode three of Making a Murderer!

My thought was that if we converted the crib to a toddler bed, it would be easier to get her to go to sleep in it, either because we could more smoothly move her once she's asleep, or be more snuggly with her while she goes to sleep in the bed (as opposed to laying on the floor with our hand through the bars of the crib). She can climb out of the big bed and I assume she'd be able to climb out her her converted bed, too, which is not that big of a deal. Might even be good because then instead of waking up and crying until one of us gives in, gets up, and takes her to the big bed, she can just walk in by herself.

Man, we've had so much trouble with K's behavior lately, including last time we had guests when she repeatedly loudly announced she was not going to share with anyone, that she didn't like people, and that she didn't want guests. And needing attention all the time, not cooperating with anything, lots of tantrums, etc. etc. Then all of the sudden tonight we have people over for dinner and she acts like a totally reasonable, mature kid, like even beyond her years for an almost-four-year-old, and it was like suddenly I could envision a future again, a manageable future with our two kids (although presumably the second one will go through her tantrum phase).

K otm to be fair

She actually announced "I'm allergic to people!"

I guess she's just like anyone else who sometimes likes company, sometimes doesn't if she's tired or something, and she can't have any control over it? I mean, not that that helps you. 'Allergic to people' is such a good way of putting it!

My point wasn't really her behavior with company, where you can only expect so much at her age, but her behavior in toto and how honestly exhausting it as been. The comparison of the two dinners a few days apart was just an example of what felt like a breakthrough that made me feel like life with kids could become sane again.