Hello Mudduh Hello Fadduh: ILX Rolling Parenting Thread

why aren't boys allowed to love their moms the way girls do?

gender roles but you can always ignore'em. ;-)

ophelia's still not walking (indie style) but cruising around at 200 miles per hour. yesterday she CLIMBED THE STAIRS! i was with her but damn it it was scary to see how fast she was! she did manage to say 'koek' (cookie) while pointing at the cookies. :-)

when i put the book away in the evening and say it's time to sleep, she cries for about 15 seconds and then turns around to sleep. very cute.

there was a case in the news of a couple of heroin junkies who hadn't fed their baby for 24/48 hrs. the poor thing died.

hmm
i think she might be into this but if i'm gonna make ice cream it's not gonna be pea-flavour.

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Alice had her fancy hearing test yesterday. She had to wear some funky headphones and have sensors stuck to her head - slept right through it. They weren't sure they'd get a reading because babies with cleft palates usually have too much fluid, but her right ear is perfect, hurrah. In some places they only test one ear, since one good ear counts as being able to hear, but here they do both so her left ear has been referred for an even fancier test.

ahh, so advanced pregnancy is missing.. .

teeny re: lovey boys, you've obv. never met a momma's boy.

My nesting instinct never kicked in. A pity really as the house could have done with a clean and it sure as hell hasn't had one since Alice was born...

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Tallulah's first injections a couple of days ago - she wasn't happy. According to Pam, Ava looked truly traumatised by seeing her sister screaming like that. Ava won't, therefore, be looking forward to her own jab today. Not sure what it's for. Superpowers, possibly.

Ava continues to count (ah-ah-ah) lots of things; yesterday she sort of got to 15: "one, two, free, four, fi, sis, seyen, eight, nine, ten, leyen, eyes, nose, mouf, ears!"

The weirdest night I ever had. I can't remember night turning into dat AT ALL. I had no sense of time whatsoever. Except near the end when I hoped she'd be born on the 16th and it was nearing 11 pm.

What the hell is nesting? ;-)

Aah, sorry that Flickr doesn't have MPEG films cause I'd love to hear Ava count to mouf and ears!

(Keep meaning to put more Ava on YouTube but she invariably clams up when I point the camera at her...)

Congratulations on the weight gain! Do you have to undress the baby completely as well? Do they still come around for the check-up? Here they come around about three/four times and then you have to go to Kind&Gezin. I have to go on the 19th of January. She'll probably need an injection. I can't remember which one though.

They did that ear test in our living room/ Cutest thing ever.

Less cute: doing an xray of her head cause they doc had said she might have WATER IN ZEE BRAIN. :-(

Here we have to undress COMPLETELY. Which of course scares me a bit as Ophelia (like other babies) has been known to PEE and POO *unnappied*.

Speaking of nappies, we are now using the washables and they're fine. Only problem is that Alice is a lot more aware of their contents than with these super-absorbant disposables, so she's not happy to just sit in her own filth for a while any more (generally a good thing I suppose). Meaning that I'm going to stick with disposables at night rather than get up every 2 hours to change her, which in turn makes her wide awake.

Speaking of poo, Ophelia sometimes manages to have these *explosive* poos so it STILL gets out of the diaper. :-(

I can't believe that Ophelia's is nearly ONE YEAR old. I have forgotten how tiring a baby can be. I mean, seriously, I'm just extremely tired myself, but I can't remember the zombified state I was in when she was a couple of months old. This is probably some sort of trick nature pulls on you so you go for second (and third and fourth) baby. :-)

Yes! I know! A YEAR! Any tips on how to celebrate this birthday? No coke and stripper recommendations. ;-)

I don't know, I feel like my quality of life won't suffer too much from washing nappies. But I'm still pretty lucky to have the choice.

He about had a heart attack. I guess my position didn't look too steady.

And I don't think I've ever voluntarily washed curtains before or since that day. Pregnancy be making womens weird.

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Incidentally, my friend Gavin's wife gave birth to their lovely son, Jack. I don't have any pics (because I only just heard about it!), but I do have The Fall's "Fiery Jack" playing in my head.

Accidentally setting your nightshirt on fire at about baby-level because your tummy was sticking out over the stove eye is somehow more memorable for me.

meg, you're a week and a half ahead of me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf77-ZlgxlU

He still doesn't really have any words but he can do this!

The reason I couldn't pass on any of my maternity togs is that they were all indelibly stained on the belly from bonking into the kitchen counter.

My wife's sister ironed a nice big triangle onto her bump.

I read that as "bonking on the kitchen counter" and was getting all TMI!

Lytton is 6 weeks now and is settling into a sleeping pattern - he seems to need about 10-11 hours a day, and is sleeping for stretches of 6 or 7 at night. On the one hand I'm pretty delighted by this, on the other, 7 hours uninterrupted sleep for a 6-week-old can't be normal, can it? We've been feeding on demand and not waking for feeds since about the first week. He's not been weighed for a while but was putting it on at a fair clip last time he was, and during the day he feeds a lot, every couple of hours or so.

If he's piling on the pounds and consistently following a growth curve and everything else seems normal, I would just thank your lucky stars and not worry about it. Ava was a great sleeper from around 10 days old and happily hugged that 25th-percentile for months; Tallulah has been the very opposite but even she is sleeping from 11pm to around 4:30am on a regular basis now.

As if on cue, TG stirs at the sound of Alice Coltrane and it's time to level off six scoops of Cow & Gate into 180ml of water...

Don't worry about it! Especially if you formula feed (or a combination), it's normal for babies to sleep longer. You fed on demand from the first week? You learned faster than I did!
And if you're *lucky* Lytton might go for four hours at a time from tomorrow. It's not uncommon for a baby to *fool* the 'rents. ;-)

TOMORROW OPHELIA IS ONE YEAR OLD. HURRAH! :-)

There should be an unsubmit panic button.

http://www.cafepress.com/schwantz.101126388

we are seriously trying to ferberize the kid now, it is a bitch

At around 7, we feed them a big bottle of breast milk each (twins). Then, at 8:30, we bathe them (and blow-dry them - they love that!). Finally, one more feeding, swaddling (this is key - you may THINK they don't like to be swaddles, but they probably do), and some holding until they start to drift off. They usually sleep 6 hours after all that.

http://www.kiddopotamus.com/p_swad.php