ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

August has this shirt, it's a soft all cotton long shirt that buttons and Tera and I both think it's her favorite shirt. She always goes straight to sleep in it and sleeps well with it on. Is it possible that a 7 week old baby can prefer a certain shirt over others?

If it's softer or texturally different, I think it's totally possible. I doubt it's for aesthetic reasons though, although who knows.

Happy Pappy Day to all Dads!

J. shaved his beard just about off last night and had been worried about August recognizing him ever since. Honestly, it didn't seem to phase her.

well not forming memories prob helps

They have facial recognition per National Geographic the Science of babies :) just watched that today.

Yeah but I think babies recognize their parents by other means too. OTOH when I was 3-4 and my dad briefly shaved his beard it totally freaked me out.

i think its episodic memory that develops later but I did LOL

Madolin Lucille Smith was born at 326pm yesterday, weighing 7lbs, 7oz, and 21 inches long. Despite a difficult delivery, including an emergency c-section, mom and little girl are both healthy. She is absolutely perfect.

congratz!

yayyyyyyyyy

mazel tov!

She is absolutely perfect

:-)

congratulations ..

congratulations!!!!!!

congrats! and beautiful name!

awww congrats!!

congrats!

my parenting observation of the day: it is amazing how many different ways a two and a half year old can hurt herself while sitting at the breakfast table.

tylerw : thank you. first lol i have had in a long long time.

[of course i'm not lol'ing at the distress of the child, just the sheer chaos that feeing a young'un induces, and the scope of panic it creates in parents - oh, and how i wish i could confirm it gets easier .. ]

haha, yeah. she didn't do any serious damage, it was just amazing how many times she bumped her head, bit her lip, poked her leg with a fork, got her legs caught in ... something i don't even know what. maybe we have a genius physical comedian on our hands here. maybe.

maybe we have a genius physical comedian on our hands here. maybe

most kids @ that age are "geniune physical comedians".

the hard part is stopping yourself from laughing out loud.

[wait until she swears .. i.e. copying you/mum .. its a massive 'oh oh .. ' moment that never failed to make me bite my lips hard]

Beeps responds with "What the hell?" to so many incredulous situations that we're just content in knowing at least it's not WTF she picked up from us.

K is already teething, and one of the bizarre things she has started doing as a result is trying to get the cloth of her sleep sack into her mouth by putting her legs all the way over her head.

Beeps responds with "What the hell?" to so many incredulous situations that we're just content in knowing at least it's not WTF she picked up from us.

hahah .. tis only a matter of time.

and then comes the whole : 'thats a word for adults' era.

or am i the only f&cker who still swears now that i'm a parent

[note : i very rarely swear directly to the kids, its only in passing when something is crap on tv/driving etc]

oh and teething .. :(

all that mouth slobber and fingers applying gel etc ..

good luck with that hurting.

hopefully it doesn't last too long.

I've got it from both angles - I've got the dramatist learning her lines by listening to me and her mother.

Then I've got the scientist - observing, observing, observing - and figuring out in his two-year-old mind how to disable the child locks on the Honda's door.

With Sarah, we basically said "you can say whatever cusswords you hear us say," and tried to keep it clean around her until her late teens. At that point she was doing a lot of writing and was figuring out where coarseness had value and where it didn't, so we loosened up and now we all basically cuss like a bunch of Bukowskis.

phew.
at least i am not alone.
this new world of puritanical excess makes me feel like i am one loose mouthed mofo if i happen to slip in a 'bloody this, bloody that', whereas in reality i am not like that at all when the lads are within earshot.
i think you are spot on re its all about the value of the word and its useage.

With Sarah, we basically said "you can say whatever cusswords you hear us say," and tried to keep it clean around her until her late teens. At that point she was doing a lot of writing and was figuring out where coarseness had value and where it didn't, so we loosened up and now we all basically cuss like a bunch of Bukowskis.

― Biff Wellington (WmC), Thursday, June 21, 2012 4:30 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was my experience, minus the explicit license to swear (though it was tacitly given, like a lot of other things...which of course made both my sister and i downright puritanical in adolescence). dropping an f-bomb around my parents for the first time and having it go unremarked was like asking to borrow the car and getting a 'sure nbd'. which probably says something o_O about my upbringing but w/e

congrats BLAM! how exciting!

propriety!

xp

Yeah, I had a similar experience to Evan which is probably why I have a mouth like a sailor now but I guess the important thing is that I know when it is and is not appropriate so it's not like I walk around saying "fuck" at work all the time or something.

BLAM - awesome :)

At age five or thereabouts, Alice used to say "What the ..." a lot (that's not censored there, she'd pronounce it "What-the")

Eventually, we had to tell her to stop, it was always funny but it did sound like she was stopping herself from using the f word.

I can recall she almost let one slip one time.

Mum: "Clubs"
Alice: "Oh F..(GMPF!)"

all that mouth slobber and fingers applying gel etc ..

hopefully not benzocaine?

this was my experience, minus the explicit license to swear (though it was tacitly given, like a lot of other things...which of course made both my sister and i downright puritanical in adolescence). dropping an f-bomb around my parents for the first time and having it go unremarked was like asking to borrow the car and getting a 'sure nbd'. which probably says something o_O about my upbringing but w/e

― catbus otm (gbx), Thursday, June 21, 2012 10:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was pretty much my exact experience and i remember having a negative, almost physical, response to saying 'shit' among friends. Now I swear like a sailor but I have a finely tuned mental censor which turns my output PG around certain people and in certain places without having to consciously restrain myself.
Unfortunately this doesn't work around the kids and I'm starting to feel pretty bad about what they are taking in.

My wife and I have no self-control about swearing in front of the kids. He's allowed to swear, except in certain company, but he does it way less than we do. We discourage him from swearing around my parents, who use cusswords on very rare occasions, but secretly encourage him to swear in front of his cousins, whose parents swear in adult company but not around their children. Lisa and I will swear in front of BOTH her sister and the kids specifically to get lectured about "appropriate language in front of the children" and then blow her off. This is probably terrible of us, but we don't really mean any harm.

That needs to be a flowchart/drawing.

Yeah, it's pretty nuanced. : /

We moved K (4 mos now) to her own room last night. I was sort of sad about it, but she seems to have actually slept better.

Hooray!

cool! yeah, i think *everybody* slept much better once sylvie moved into her own room.

It was a massive sleep improvement for all concerned with us too.

At 19 months Dalton is sleeping awesome at night, but has recently decided he wants fuck all to do with napping reducing his 2-3 midday nap to 45-50 minutes at most and preceding that with 20-30 minutes of impassioned wailing at the injustice of it all. Hoping this just a phase.

August got her shots on Monday and ended up with slight fever off and on Tuesday, made me very nervous. I was able to bring it down with cold compresses pretty quickly. It peaked at 100 for all of ten minutes. She carried on as if she was not bothered. I would have freaked had she received all the shots due at two months at once.

It was a bit of a hassle to get the pediatrician office in our new location to agree to the alternative vaccination schedule. It was all billing issues, insurance doesn't cover an alternative schedule and so I said I had no problem paying out of pocket. Finally someone smart from billing spoke to me and said the insurance would cover the traditional vaccination months but I had to pay on those months it wouldn't. The cost would be $30 for the visit and $15 a shot. I was surprised, my cats and bunny vet visits were so much higher.

The nurse practitioner came in and understood the schedule, was aware of it and how it worked and said it was not a problem . I was afraid the office would not, in which case I would seek out a different pediatrician for fear of mistakes etc....Copies of the schedule were made for her records, bringing it in every time I will be going in too.

This is a small town with plenty of people swimming round and round in their fish bowls. I lived here for 18 years, 22 years ago...news from the modern world takes awhile to get here. If it ever arrives. I'm a weirdo here (again) with August in my sling. Get asked about it all the time, stared at in grocery stores...

FYI the alternative vac schedule has already been written about as part of the anti-vac movement, that parents freak about their kids "suffering" from all the scheduled vaccinations when in fact the children will never remember it obvs, but then have trouble making up the ones they opt to miss and their kid ends up unprotected, along with the local population whose risk is increased by non-vaccinated people.

the insurance would cover the traditional vaccination months but I had to pay on those months it wouldn't

....What? Failing to see the logic here. I'm sure there's an Excel spreadsheet somewhere that somehow justifies it vis-a-vis the insurers' bottom line but.. jeez.

It isn't about the pain from injections but reactions to them. I was going to go with a traditional schedule, but at the last minute I got a bad feeling in my gut and I just went with that.

I really don't understand how parents can fall behind when the schedule requires monthly visits. I have an apt already for next month. If a parents cannot take a printed copy of the schedule to their doctor once a month for required shots then I have a hard time understanding that they would stick to the traditional schedule either. My friend asked her doctor about the schedule and even asked if all were needed at once. The pediatrician advised her on what to get first and approved of the schedule. It seems quite the norm in Austin for several years now. I am living in Del Rio, TX right now.

I am by no means a follower of the "herd immunity" philosophy.

It is an extra doctors visit. I thought they would do a full charge on the first visit and charge nothing on the 2nd but a nurse administers the shot and needs to get paid, paperwork and then there are audits and every thing needs to be accounted for. I understand and don't have a problem with it, even if the costs out of pocket would have been much more.

I'm not gonna get into the whole vaccination debate here, but by following a staggered vaccination schedule, you are actually giving your daughter's body more opportunities to react, as well as leaving her un-immunized for longer periods. That is all I'm going to say about it, goodbye now.

The staggered vaccine schedule is complete nonsense.