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

so my wife suggested Charlotte's Web for the kids to watch last weekend and you know what turns out I hate that fucking movie. Looks terrible, the songs are terrible, the story (what there is of it, anyway) is nonsensical and the "message"... well, what the hell is the message anyway? Don't kill whiny pigs? Always rely on the skills and sacrifices of those more capable than you? Aspire to be a lazy, incurious slob?

SOME PIG

Spekaing of snooping kids search history made me think of this:

http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/i-looked-my-sons-google-search-history-and-it-was--2265

6 yo wants to know how buy Pokemon schwag online

rip

Anyone have any luck teaching an older sibling how not to harm baby? 4 and 1, 4 year old defies instructions not to handle baby in certain ways and is always pulling/pushing/lifting etc. Today we had a huge scare bc she somehow managed to pull the high chair over face down with baby in it, by pulling on the baby's arms (I wasn't home but this is what I heard) -- it's a pretty heavy, sturdy Keekaroo chair and IDK how she managed to do it. Baby was miraculously fine but it was the kind of thing that could have led to severe injury or even death. Scary as fuck. We made a pretty big, serious deal out of it, major consequences and a lot of talking about the job of being a big sister and why it what she did could have hurt the baby and put her in the hospital.

It honestly seems like she is looking to both push the limits wrt potentially harming the baby and get a rise out of us. This is tough.

Aaaargh, sorry, that sounds awful. We're having similar issues with 3yo girl and 14yo dog, but at least the dog can get up and leave the room

Positive reinforcement (I sound like a broken record, sorry) and plenty of quality one on one time with you both, so she's not jealous of the baby. Try giving her tasks she can do to help with the baby, maybe task her with keeping baby amused during nappy changes, etc. so she has supervised fun interaction.

^^^
also 4 years is old enough to try to explain why she's doing it. are you sure trying to harm the baby is what's going on?

I mean she isn't "trying to harm the baby" in the sense that she actually knows what that really means, but she is definitely acting aggressively toward the baby.

So....yuppiest thing I have ever done: run a criminal background check on a potential babysitter via care.com.

Result: she was convicted of conspiracy to commit credit card fraud. She saw that we ran the check and messaged us "I fell in with a bad crowd." Ok, genuinely wish her the best but it's not gonna happen.

That's kinda wild

I just gave a potato chip to my 3 year old and feel like I just ruined his life

Today's manifestation of severe sibling envy -- K smacked me in the nads super hard, and after I walked into the other room so as to avoid lashing out in anger, she came in and said "Daddy, I did something really funny to your sunglasses." She had snapped them.

I'd have... not dealt with that in a sane parental manner I have to admit :/

Marin is currently at the height where every time I pick her up her feet are in the perfect position to kick my nads, whether intentionally or by accident. I think I need to get a cup.

yeah, already happens to me a lot by accident but this was p clearly on purpose. Like I said, I walked into the other room to avoid raging, but she clearly wanted to get a rise out of me and was disappointed by that. They were nice Ray Bans too, the first and only "nice" pair of sunglasses I ever owned. But even in the moment you remember (hopefully) that a four year old has no concept of what that means, and they're only sunglasses anyway.

Welp, we decided to take all the refined sugar sweets and empty carb snacks out of the house. Wish us luck.

baller move

It was H's move ultimately, although tbf I had originally suggested we not buy them at all. We had the old debate a couple years ago of whether it's better to just not have them around to avoid the habit vs do "moderation" so they don't develop some weird relationship to the foods. I advocated not having them at all at the time but H convinced me that we should try to just do it with rules and boundaries. H now has rethought that -- the rules are too easy to let slide and they become a crutch for the parents as well, like basically you bend the rules so they'll shut up tbh.

I think seeing that even the one-year-old was getting addicted to "veggie straws" was sort of the breaking point.

there is a whole universe of, like, organic junk food

I feel like all that stuff exists to give you cover to enjoy junk food rather than to actually trick you into eating junk food you think is healthy. Like I never *really* believed veggie straws were good for my kids, given that I read the labels, but it still somehow allowed me to look the other way.

I wish we could cut out all the junk in our house. I've prob gone over this already but the youngest has coeliac and on top of that is vegetarian and has some strange kind of pathalogical food fears (possibly due to trauma from the coeliac before diagnosis)

All he will eat - and they have to be very specific brands and types - is potato chips, corn chips, cheese, bananas, those chewy fruit bars, Zooper Doopers (ice lollies) and if you cajole and push past his crying, he might eat poached eggs or spagetti with tomato sauce. Try anything else and he has crying/screaming meltdowns. I hate that he eats the iceblocks and chips but if he didnt hed be eating next to nothing. Hes way too old to still be throwing such fits over food. I want bf to send him to a dietician tbrh.

I have a cousin whose daughter literally only eats honey sandwiches and ice cream, nothing else. She's now 14 and has been on this diet since the age of 2.

guys that's not good

poached eggs are great tho. maybe that and the spaghetti could be the starting point? i.e. sneakin stuff into the sauce

There's very little my 20 month old won't eat, and I swear he's eaten a wider variety of foods in his life than my 72 year old father has. He seems to love everything we've given him, even stuff that was kind of a joke like olives and pickled onions, everything except melons. I hope this keeps up.

Like we went to russian and indian restaurants in Portland last month and he was eating all the cod liver pate and cilantro chutney with a spoon and demanding more.

our kids were very adventurous, voracious eaters and, fortunately, will still eat a wide variety of things but one of them now defaults to bacon and sausage and the other defaults to french fries and cheese

like, every single meal is "what do you want to eat?" "BACON!" "CHEESE!" "um okay, here is some baked chicken and Brussels sprouts (or some other non-bacon non-cheese meal)" "YAY"

There's very little my 20 month old won't eat,

Our daughter went through this phase – she loved the attention and approval she got when she ate everything willingly. She developed a few dislikes later – I think those were an extension of learning how powerful "No!" was – but got over them.

It's very unscientific, but I can't help but feel like I noticed a correlation between the introduction of carby and/or sweet snacks and "kid" foods and the decline in my kids' interest in other foods. It's hard to say though because these things also just change with age.

in my experience there's a bit of a curve - at first they'll eat almost anything, then around 3 or so they start to narrow their tastes down.

yeah it may just be that. Still, I already see some positives from the removal of the junk snack foods. K is eating more at meals.

I got a sales robocall on my cell phone last night. It was a woman's voice informing me that my student loan (which I have never had) had been flagged for consolidation at an approved interest rate, or some such nonsense. An obvious scam, I cussed out the recording as I hung up: "You stupid piece of shit."

I returned to my daughter, who I'd been playing with when the call interrupted us. She looked astonished and asked "Who was she?" I immediately felt horrible for behaving that way in front of her. She thought I had been speaking that way to an actual person. "Oh that wasn't a person, it was just a robot," I tried to explain. "A robot?" Her bewilderment grew here. Her eyes were wide. She must have thought I had Bender on the other end of the phone or something.

At this point, my wife stepped in and rightfully called me out: "...but we shouldn't talk that way about anybody, right?"

Not much of a point to this story, but don't cuss out robocalls in front of your kids.

lol

your daughter is more forward thinking than you. She may well go to school with robots one day.

so we just moved to a new place, renting one half of a side-by-side 1907 duplex, and have realized there is a ton of peeling lead paint in the window sills (when you open the windows - the window stools and frames in the interior of the house have fresh paint), several window jambs, and the interior window frames of the kitchen windows. parts of the front porch have it too, especially the main walkway to the front door bc of the foot traffic. we confirmed all this by using lead testing kits from home depot. we are freaking the fuck out right now since we have a 16-month-old and a 4-year-old. the kitchen windows especially scare the shit out of me bc we are preparing our food there.

we told our landlord about it in writing yesterday, also told the next-door neighbors in the other half of the house and they had also noticed it. most of the house is okay - all the walls most windows have fresh paint. but all the windows are ver old and we're concerned about what kind of repairs the landlord will do - whether they will be sufficient, whether they will kick up even more lead dust, what should we do with our stuff while repairs are being made, etc. the landlord said he will come by this weekend to look at the areas I mention but I really want a certified lead inspector to do a risk assessment so this can be handled in the right way. the landlord is a DIY dude and if he hasn't done anything about the lead paint in the 16 years he's owned the place i'm doubtful that he knows the right way to handle this

we're hoping to be in the place only temporarily anyways since we are looking to buy a house, but that could be a while. i'm tempted to just get the fuck out of there, bring our little boys to my parents' house or something.

also i'm super pissed at myself for not doing a better inspection before signing the lease. the lead issue just wasn't on my radar - we've almost always lived in very old homes but most of them had replacement windows and were in good shape so it's never been a concern

You might want to talk to an expert or do some research. I think a badly done "remediation" can actually be worse than doing nothing because it can stir up a lot of lead dust into the air and spread it around the place.

yea, i think my landlord's first inclination will be to just do it himself and i'm worried that would make things worse. i've been doing a little research and it is universally recommended to have a certified lead inspector take a look and assess things. with one exception when i lived in a shitty deteriorating old house in college, i've always had good landlords so i've never really had to advocate or push for things, but i really want to push to have this done the right way. it's a lot easier to do that when my kids' health & safety is at stake.

but jeez this is majorly stressing me out, i've been reading about lead poisoning nonstop the past week and have been waking up at night worrying about it.

oof my sympathies. on the plus side "won't somebody think of the children" tactic liable to get some traction from your landlord, unless he's an inhuman monster

yea he does have kids too so i'm just going to push it from that angle. neighbors in the other unit have three little kids too. i'm just pissed, at myself for not being smarter and more aware and at him for not making updates for a decade and a half.

by law he was required to give us a lead disclosure form but in ohio a landlord can easily get around that by just stating "i have no knowledge of lead paint in the home", and that's what he did

"Won't someone think of the children" is also a good way to imply without implying massive future liability if anything actually happened, if he's smart at all.

yea i'm very curious to see how he responds to this. he owns multiple properties in the city we live in, one next door that has a lot of peeling exterior paint (which is being repaired now), all of them are very old homes and his claim that he "has no knowledge of lead-based paint" strikes me as complete bullshit for someone buying and renting multiple multi-unit early 20th century homes

I feel like if there's clearly visible peeling paint it's kind of transparently bullshit. You're taking pics right?

definitely

In NYC I feel like I'd just be calling 311, but IDK how it works there, how responsive local agencies are etc.

When we bought our first place I seem to recall a disclosure form about it possible existing (house was built in 1940, so obviously) but that it it had been sufficiently encapsulated due to having been painted over a bunch of times and wasn't chipping. Maybe this was in the inspection, I don't remember.

But some friends just passed on buying an otherwise perfect house because of chipping lead paint everywhere and the massive cost to deal with it properly.