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

Chemo and steroids started today. He’s still super happy and well, which is good. The oncology ward want to send us home next week - as he’s not ‘poorly’ there’s little point him being an inpatient.

Glad he's ok in himself. Would you need to come back up?
Loads of positive vibes your way.

Aw what a sweetface. Sending happy healthy kid vibes your way!

Yeah we might need to come back up, depending how it goes.

Really good day today - took him out for a couple of hours (as you saw!) and they’ve said if his meds go well over the weekend they can discharge him Monday. Brain MRI came back clear, first bone marrow sample came back clear. It seems he’s not as poorly / complex as Exeter feared. Still got 1-2 years of treatment and a lifetime of keeping an eye out in store, but having spent the last few days on an actual oncology ward we are doing very well.

We were having lunch in Friska in Bristol yesterday, and N shared Em's noodle bowl thing. Em went to the toilet when they'd nearly finished an I was helping N spoon up the last of the broth.

"You could just pick it up with your hands and drink it now, if you wanted" I said.

N plunges her hands into the lukewarm broth and attempts to shovel it into her mouth.

"I meant pick up the bowl."

can't imagine what you're going through...my daughter had to have tubes put in her ears which is like a 10 minute surgery but I still lost sleep over it. you care about them so much more than you ever cared about yourself. the bill was $9500 by the way.

I had that surgery twice as a kid, I dont recall it being too traumatic :) (I was more traumatised by the initial perforated ear/middle ear infection tbh)

$9500 though jesus america :(

ahahaha thats awesome

God knows what we'd have had to pay if this were in the US.

Anyway, I don't want to have killed this thread with baby cancer. Talk about your kids!

sleep regression is hitting HARD here. I was up until 5am yesterday before I finally went to bed, then up a couple hours later. slept a couple of hrs last night but up at 4am for the day.

He just won't be put down to sleep! his brain's gone haywire ;_;

Any ILX mums on here atm?

I am a mum/mom! But I’m rarely on ilx these days! I’m going to say I qualify though ;)

How old is the wee one, kinder?

Hi. F started school five weeks ago. How time flies.

I was thinking of you two! smallest is 8 months. eldest had another year before starting school but suddenly seems very grown up. He's started pre school rather than nursery and I'm realising what you accomplish between 9.00 drop off and 3pm pickup IE NOTHING

(^^by 'you' i mean 'me' there)

How old is your little boy, rrobyn?
I guess I was going to ask how you feel about work/life balance. Apols to anyone who's already put up with me fretting about this but I'm wondering about taking some time out of work. Life is different with two but also with getting towards school, juggling school holidays etc. Then even if it would make practical/financial sense how much do I want to be a SAHM? Depends what kind of day I've had with the threenager and non-sleeper...

My son just turned 4, which I can’t quite believe! He’s been in daycare since he was 12 months old (it’s well subsidized by govt here in Montreal/Quebec, thankfully), so I was able to get back to more full time hours at that point. I’m freelance though, so I was taking some writing/editing jobs before then. I know that life would be more of a juggle if I had to be at a job on time every day and stay there for 8 hours and commute etc. And that’s with 1 kid! I know lots of moms who do it and have become v good at planning ahead!

4?!
Yeah my eldest has been in daycare 3 days/week since 12 months old too. Working part-time was a really good balance, nursery is flexible although expensive, we usually had fun on my days 'off' although they were exhausting. and 'balance' being the key word - I don't think I could put in any extra at work without something else slipping. With two, and living in a new town, things look a lot different.
We seem to focus on starting school as being the 'end point' at which you don't need to pay for childcare but it's dawned on me that's when things get tricky without FT childcare available!

Gah yes, managing child care for school-aged children can be a major headache - even if their school day more or less corresponds to your workday most of the time, there are all kinds of wrinkles.

Snow days, sick days. Early release days. Conferences. Teacher workdays. Minor holidays that they have off and you don't. Missing the bus. Needing to intervene in the middle of the day for this or that problem.

I worked from home for the last 5 years or so, and that helped a lot. But I just started an office job with a commute. We will make it work but not without anxiety.

my kids' school informed us last Friday that, uh, SPIDERS had been discovered, spiders that could BITE and HURT and that the school would need to be fumigated which will take..... a week

this is the week before half term, so suddenly we're looking at arranging an extra week of full-time childcare in advance of the childcare already arranged for the actual holiday, and we have the weekend to do that in

False widows?

I’ve taken off three days for the half term break next week only for Granny to decide to visit on those exact same days. Luckily, we really need to finish some decorating, so that’s my holiday.

oof.

yep false widows. we have discovered some in our house too and.. they're kind of nbd??

Speaking as an ecologist with some ecotoxicological insight, I’d handle a False Black Widow any day, but wouldn’t go within 3m of whatever these guys need protective suits for https://t.co/KYrTdRg2fk

— Steve Ormerod (@SteveOrmerod) October 15, 2018

that fear-stoking Sun article tucks this quote away in a sidebar:

A spokesman for the British Arachnological Society said: "The bite of the False Widow is of minor medical significance, comparable to common insect bites and stings."

We've swarms of deadly deadly spiders over here and Ive never seen anyone descend upon schools like that :|

it's the ladybirds you have to watch for

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/07/experience-a-ladybird-nearly-killed-me

(they bite and people have severe allergies)

there've been a lot around recently too:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/harlequin-ladybirds-attack-invasion-ladybug-united-kingdom-infest-houses-native-species-pest-a8571671.html

We've swarms of deadly deadly spiders over here and Ive never seen anyone descend upon schools like that :|

Yeah, to an Australian this just seems bizarre

Yeah, this Bill Bryson quote has always stayed with me since reading it years ago:

"It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures - the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish - are the most lethal of their type in the world. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. ... If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. It's a tough place.”

the NOBLE FALSE WIDOW, please call it by its name

i think i just washed one down the sink uh oh

Yeah, this Bill Bryson quote has always stayed with me since reading it years ago

The thing is, though, despite the wild levels of toxicity in everything living here, _almost_ nobody here is actually seriously injured or killed by wildlife.
* less than 40 snake bite deaths in the last 20 years
* there have been only 2 or three deaths from spider bites since 1979
* only 2 people killed by sharks in Australia this year, and one of those was someone provoking the shark

how many deaths by Crocodile Dundee though?

Gah yes, managing child care for school-aged children can be a major headache - even if their school day more or less corresponds to your workday most of the time, there are all kinds of wrinkles.

I literally have to spend 45-60 minutes every workday taking my 3 year old off the bus and through the parking lot to the day care - they drop him off there, but there's no teacher on hand to bring him inside. Was seriously considering just not doing 3-K but that felt selfish. I used to dream of the 'windfall' that you'd get from not having kids in day care anymore, but yeah...its not exactly like that is it

I'm a mom, not on ILX much, and I have very mundane thoughts on work/life balance which are: it's really fucking hard and I generally feel like I don't do either (work or motherhood) as well as I'd like. I work from home 90% of the time, which makes it easier, but it's not easy. Part of the problem is that the entire school/childcare situation presumes there is a non-working parent, but many other smarter people have written about that at length better than I could here.

I'm not sure I'd want to be a SAHM but I would like to take six months off work and just... sleep a lot. And clean everything real good at least once.

"working" at home when your kids are there is one of the most enraging, frustrating activities i can think of

yeah I can't really do it

Yes when I was the only parent home, which I gather is the situation here. But this gets better, once they’re 10 or so.

i've been doing it for the past year. it was ok with a baby baby but it's getting harder now (i am in a coffee shop and have like 8 tabs for coworking spaces open right now)

When I have "worked from home" with kids home, it's more "I will monitor and respond to email, and I will answer the phone if you call me" than "I will do the same level of work as normal, except that I may occasionally hand the kid a snack or iPad or whatever."

This type of "work from home" is really only tenable for occasional times like a sick day or freak show day. It can't be the norm for an elementary-aged kiddo.

My daughter is in middle school now, and can look after herself, but with my special needsy son it would never work. If he's not in school and my wife and I need to work, we get a sitter.

Freak show day should be freak snow day, lol

Yeah Carl isn’t working home with the kid. She’s at school (pre-k) from 7:30 to 5:30. No work would get done otherwise. Problem being with her working from home and close to the school is that it often defaults to her to handle those unexpected events, random stuff they would require a parent during the day, special events, school holidays (that aren’t work holidays), etc.

Carl! I've missed you.
Childcare in the city was pretty good, until school age - I could've left my kid from 8am - 6pm all day every day if I wanted to (paying a hefty price though) from 6 months to 4. Pre-school in my new town is school hours/ term-time only (plus those 'closure for training' days) which is a huge shock to the system, even the fact that we have to drop off and pick up at specified times. You can pay extra for wraparound care which is good but still only til about 5 I think, and not in the holidays, which may change if enough people demand it.

I've asked other working pre-school mums what they'll do once school starts and they're either doing some horrendous juggling, working fewer hours over more days (so paying for more nursery days for the younger siblings) or several people have admitted they're 'in denial'. I'm just hoping as they get older it'll at least be easier to ask another mum to pick up if needed or send them round to others' houses (reciprocating, of course!) which you can't really do with tiny tots.

Yeah the logistics difference from nursery (7-7, though we didn’t use that full time obv) to school was a shock. There is good after school club provision but only until 5.45 and it’s really not holistic: same building but different people. If they need to cancel activities at short notice, they will.

7 to 7 sounds glorious. I would use every single second.

He was mostly in 9.30 to 6.00 but on days one of us was travelling for work, or when a train was cancelled, it was a life saver. Really, really not cheap though - it was the only nursery in the area with those hours.

I went to my first concert since my kid was born nearly 4 years. Yes, it was Raffi.

Kid is turning four and we're having a birthday party. Is it acceptable to ask attendees to not bring gifts and suggest that if their kid really wants to pick out a present that they could do that and then donate it to something like Toys for Tots? He's got six grandparents and a whole mess of birth family who buy him shit all the time and he wants for nothing, and we don't need more toys in the house.

Or are people going think we're preachy/bragging/pretentious/killjoys/etc and will bring them anyway?

dunno what they will think but ime they will bring gifts anyway

We had a low-key thing last year with just friends so it was easier; this time we're shotgunning the whole preschool class (party is at an indoor bounce house place so easy enough) so potential for people we only see randomly at pick up and drop off to be there.

friend of mine did a 4th birthday party in a village hall that was just 'join us for play and cake, no presents, 10.15-11.45' which was brilliant. toys and games but no faff with party lunch or anything.
I approve of 'no presents' and think it's fine to ask nicely not to bring them but ppl will anyway.

We've had "no presents please" invites, with no trouble. Another non-stuff-centric party idea we've seen is a book exchange (everyone brings a used (or new) book; everyone leaves with a different book.