ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

I'm beginning the think no one gets exactly what they want, and you just work around and with what you are given

^^^welcome to parenting. people who have "plans" and agendas and whatnot are usually deluding themselves. rule #1 is just do whatever works for you and the baby. and when things stop working, stop doing them and try something else.

I try to restrain my parent-judginess to instances where the parents are clearly sticking with things that aren't working

out of either force of habit, or denial, or refusal to let go of preconceived notions etc

had an ultrasound and we saw the heartbeat!!!

― he bit me (it felt like a diss) (m bison), Thursday, May 17, 2012 3:00 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The first ultrasound was magical for me!!

― JacobSanders, Thursday, May 17, 2012 3:03 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My reaction was, "How in the hell did that get in there?"

― pplains, Thursday, May 17, 2012 3:46 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think mines was 'Holy shit! I can create people! There is a god and that god is ME!'

'mines' now i just write like my creations speak

whenever I see a parent, I think, "they fucked" & I giggle

& I love awkward convos with other parents, esp. when there's a big age gap b/w us, in which the baby-making comes up, even obliquely, e.g. "well, it turns out breast feeding isn't a totally reliable means of birth control!" b/c those people are telling you about their fucking & I dunno, I love it

btw we breastfed our youngest until she was four, hate on haters

Again, no hatin', but if a kid can figure out how to find a movie on Netflix though the Apple TV box, he can drink 2% with the rest of us.

When I was first pregs I decided to nurse mostly because of all the you're a bad mom if you don't vibes and some mom-in-law hippie pressure but I really really didn't want to. Finally I fessed up to my OBGYN (who also majored in chemistry at one point) my feelings on the matter and his response was that formula is so chemically close to breast milk these days that it was more a financial decision than anything. Is it better? yes. Is it going to make a difference in the health of your child? no. Then he said that in his experience moms who want to breastfeed more often than not have a super stressful time with it so moms who aren't into it are most likely to fail completely and subsequently feel even worse. That was enough for me to ditch the whole idea.

Shit my husband says (xpost <3)

kids reported to us after the fact that breast milk tastes like sweetened condensed milk which makes it sound tasty! never really got into it myself.

Oh also best part of not nursing - yr baby daddy gets some serious one on one bonding moments they might have otherwise completely missed.

at 4 am. Good times.

haha good for me

<3 aw

yeah, the purported benefits (genius children who never get fat or sick!) are overstated at best, misleading at worst.

http://www.neefusa.org/assets/images/health/NEEF-CNI-Infographic.jpg

kinda think it's awesome that someone coined the phrase "Nature Deficit Disorder"

haha, yeah.
in my parenting news of the day: what's that sound? someone being tortured within an inch of her life? no, it's a two-and-a-half-year-old having her hair brushed.

lol. my mom literally chases beats around with a hair brush just like she did with me. my grandmother, me and beats are def dont touch my hair or ill scream bloody murder no matter what age i am types for sure.

Ha! We gave August her first bath last night and I was expecting tears and arms in the air. Instead she had this wide eyed look for confusion and almost delight, that I could swear she was telling us, "I'm gonna trust you guys that this is ok" Afterwards Tera gave her a baby massage which she really seem to love and then she was out for hours.

Beeps screamed bloody murder during her first bath. Hammer tried to go snorkeling.

nice, Jacob. Cant ask for better than that!

Hammer was trying to climb into our giganto jacuzzi tub from the time he could crawl. Now he screams bloody murder getting in and then once hes in, floods the bathroom trying to get all the water out of the tub

Hammer!

I really like the name Beats! Is it short for Beatrice?

Beatnik

Beatrice & Henry. We're big Beverly Cleary fans.

biz's beat of the day

yeah, we're definitely deep into the tantrummy stage. wrong cup for her milk? tantrum. can't find the shoes she wants? tantrum. look at her funny? tantrum!
"tantrum" might actually be a strong word for what she's doing -- she's usually over it in about 30 seconds, but there is SHRIEKING. just have to dig deep for those vast stores of patience.

case in point, a minute ago she was shrieking "I NEEEEEED MORRRRRRRRE MANGOOOOOHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!" and now she is quietly humming to herself.

How old is she?

Hammer will turn himself beet red, place his forehead directly onto the hardwood and curdle blood with his screaming while banging on the floor with both palms.

Then you offer him a banana and he instantly laughs, takes the banana and says "thank you!" with leftover tears on his cheeks.

such a great positive force, that kid.

haha.
sylvie turns 3 in august. yeah, i mean, i'm just trying to roll with it -- there are a lot of crazy emotions going through these kids as far as i can tell. just a phase!

a phase of mad neural connections and pathways being created in the limbic system that stick (or dont stick/do stick/are never made/should never have been made) for life. i guess the trick is to acknowledge toddlers emotions without playing up to them? fuck. we are walking a minefield here people-makers.

i've said to sylvie: "I understand that you are upset." did not help all that much tbh.

http://www.vintagechildrensbooksmykidloves.com/

we should have an ILP-M book thread!

I have always loved the names Beatrice and Ramona, I loved reading all the books when I was a kid. Those were also very common names in Mexico at the time.

That vintage children's book blog is going to make me cry.

infant aerosmith will never learn to sleep through night. let's just accept reality here

i have an all-time best selling classic for u to read

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_e4z5YXjJf0U/SlkZ70ASmxI/AAAAAAAABoM/D7__Z8dl_u0/s400/Ferber+Book.jpg

Ramona is my youngest daughter's middle name! And Mexico is the name of my oldest daughter's imaginary horse!

We used the Ferber method (or a variant) with our first kid and it worked. Sleep-training twins, with a three-year-old in the (very small) house, would be a nightmare if I ever got to close my eyes long enough to dream.
The twins actually settled into long sleeps around 3 months, but around five months they changed their minds and I've had no more than a handful of 3+ hours uninterrupted sleeps in two months. It's just, how do you let them cry it out when that wakes the other kids up and then you just have three kids screaming, which leads to two adults screaming (or at least glowering) at each other and everyone is always tired and on edge?
At least I get to come to work so I can rest a little.

That post makes my problems seem tiny.

It's not all that bad. I know from our experience with our first kid that all of this is temporary. All the kids are healthy, developing as expected, and mostly very sweet. The girl twin only cries at bed and nap times. She's the polar opposite of her big sister who cried so much that first year. The boy twin babbles jokes and then guffaws. He howls between spoonfuls of mush, he loves it so. They're both crawling and pulling themselves to standing and just beautiful kids. The only thing wrong with them is that they're babies. They'll grow out of it.

Mordy-I don't know how your post slipped by me. Huge fan of that blog, have it listed on my own blog roll, glad you posted it and yes, ILP-M book thread! It has me looking for certain titles when we go thrifting. My kid book list is now longer than my record list.

Got a book thread already! kids' books - SEARCH and DESTROY

this thread makes me want to adopt

a plant

We had kind of a powerful parenting breakthrough tonight, and apologies for the confessional post but maybe sharing it will help others who have these sorts of problems.

So to recap, K is a little over 3 months now. As I detailed in above posts, K has always put up a huge fight about going to sleep and made a several hour ordeal out of it. And K was becoming increasingly inconsolable. Eventually K was crying even at the breast (only at night -- other times of day, she was fine and happy), and would even scream while lying on top of her mom. I had been against sleep training this early, although our pediatrician had actually been kind of pushing us to do it early, and moms in the area had told my wife that they had done it and that it was easy and worked well. Finally one night I came home to my completely exhausted and demoralized wife with a screaming baby on top of her, and I said "Ok, we have to do this."

We did a ferber-type thing (letting her cry for intervals and then coming in to briefly console, gradually lengthening the intervals). For a few nights it was hard but we seemed to be making progress. K slept longer stretches, got to bed earlier and was more rested in the morning. But then we hit some kind of wall. Every night when we put her down she'd cry for a significant amount of time, fall asleep, then wake up again 20 minutes later and cry more. Some nights it was shorter, some longer. The total length of each crying bout would be maybe 15-25 minutes, which is a long time to listen to your baby cry, even though I know of people who did sleep training and put up with much longer bouts.

We started to have horrible doubts. We took a couple of nights off from it. Then the pediatrician told us that we shouldn't do the ferber thing because K is too young to understand it, and we should just close the door and do full-blown cry it out. I felt kind of furious and yet I felt trapped into the situation -- we tried a couple of nights off from the "sleep training" but things just seemed to get worse. So I fought my instinct and said "Ok, we'll do cry it out." We agreed to give it five nights and if no progress, we'd stop.

Tonight was night three. At first she just kind of fussed and cried mildly and then stopped. But then it kept starting up again. Gradually it built, and then eventually she's crying hysterically and screaming, and I looked at the timer we used and she had cried a total of twenty minutes over the course of a thirty minute stretch. I completely broke down. I cried. I told my wife (who I had a few times stopped from caving in herself) that I couldn't do it anymore and I went in. K was practically thrashing in her crib. I'll never forget her red face and the way her legs were kicking up frantically in her sleep sack. I started to pat her and she got slightly less agitated and then my wife came in and pretty much worked magic, and K stopped crying and a couple of minutes later was actually smiling.

We had had all kinds of arguments and discussions about consistency and about what plan we were or weren't going to follow, and we had read books and spoken to experts and gotten all kinds of advice about how important it was to be consistent. But we hit a point where something just felt deeply wrong to us, and we followed our instincts, and I'm really glad that we finally did. I don't think there's any way to know whether the "cry it out" thing is actually damaging to a baby in the long run, but I realized that it was damaging to me. I was actually getting depressed about it. I felt like it was damaging my soul.

After that we did eventually leave the room and she cried some more, but we went in regularly to check on her and pat her, and she didn't get as hysterical and finally fell asleep around 8pm. My wife and I talked about it and decided that we just have to accept that K may have trouble falling asleep for a while, and that it's not worth the potential harm to her or to us to go for an easy, quick solution. She's probably going to continue to cry every night for a while no matter what we do, and maybe that's the way it is, and we are going to keep trying to get her to sleep in her crib, but we're not going to force ourselves to just sit there and listen to her go into hysterical fits by herself, because it feels too awful.

It gets better.

It does get better, and lots of parents struggle with setting sleep habits. Fwiw, your pediatrician is wrong about the ferberization (at least according to Dr. Ferber). You don't go in and visit every 5/10/15 etc for the baby. Acc to Dr. Ferber you could just do cry it out cold, but parents have a tough time just letting their child cry. He sends you in at an interval really for your own peace of mind, not for the baby. Of course, I always found visiting the baby while she's crying exhausting and almost as bad as not visiting at all.

Hurt, have you completely ruled out something odd like inner ear pressure that's increased by lying down? Does she lie down happily enough at other times of day? Can you think of other anomalies, things to do with bedtime/sleeping/lying in crib?

Otherwise I think you are otm with the doing what you need to do for your child and yourselves. There's no quick solution, and you know your baby better than a book does.