ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

I had no idea you guys were Australian.

my girl is 2 years old today :)

happy b-day! get ready for wild times. ours is three in a couple weeks. just moved into a big girl bed. here she is pretending to sleep in it.
https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/549517_4376577253096_685381926_n.jpg

evie's 2nd birthday was a little over a week ago, we had a party that basically took me out of commission for an entire day after

too many cupcakes?

haha yeah we had the party (a duck/dinosaur themed affair because she liked dinos and ducks), man it was a lot of work!

she's turning into a little demon sometimes lately though! she's so sweet most of the time but goddamn now she gets hungry and it's crazy

yeah woke up early and was running around a lot getting stuff ready and then i was frosting her cake and ended up eating too much frosting and then having a sugar crash during the party, there is video footage with me in the background just like sitting on the stairs with my mouth open. then i felt vaguely sick the entire next day but was not actually sick.

evie wants to eat all the time and it's hard to figure out how much to try and limit that. don't want to keep her from getting nutrition but i feel like if we kept giving her food, she'd keep eating it.

she is mostly good but we do get some tantrums, usually related to putting on clothes or taking off clothes.

happy birthdays!

we just sang twinkle twinkle little star together. she wasn't singing the actual words, but it was really close.

M turned one in June, second child syndrome she didn't really have a party, just a few friends round. It's Aidan's 5th birthday and party on sunday, I'm dreading it. It's turned into a military operation to plan and my to do list, to be fitted in with work, tidying the house ready for said party and mother and sister in law coming down for a week, and looking after two children, is starting to scare me a little.

Time sure does fly by with kids, doesn't it?!

My little brother and his fiancée set their wedding date to be Henry's third birthday.

We're still a little miffed about it, but deep down, it's also a bit of a relief.

Happy Birthdays ILX babies! I saw this cake this morning and it blew my mind:

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6078/6067409735_f1f2a58cbd_z.jpg

Vicky im feeling you on the 5th birthday stress and we didnt even have people coming into town.

omg I want a Richard Scarry cake for my 30th!

Seems like for it to be a true Richard Scarry cake, the oven has to blow up and a baby doll needs to be accidentally baked inside.

also a bit of a relief.

because you won't have to go to the wedding?

Because we won't have to plan a three-year-old's birthday party.

So this is kind of crazy of us but we moved into a one-bedroom from a two-bedroom to save money and be in a better neighborhood for kids. Albeit a one bedroom that is probably bigger in square footage than our old two bedroom, with a much bigger bedroom? Anyone have tips? We may wind up partitioning the bedroom.

I used a big bookcase to separate a room when I lived like that.. worked pretty well!

kid #2 has apparently forgotten how to fall asleep :(

it is much harder to "cry it out" when you have a brother whose bed is five feet from yours getting up out of it and complaining about you loudly to the whole house

i was really worried about Henry waking Beatrice up because she was until recently so incredibly difficult to get to sleep. It would literally take hours. But as it turned out Henry falls asleep real quick and honestly once those two are asleep you could prob hold an all night rave in their bedrooms and they wouldnt wake up.

also a bit of a relief.

because you won't have to go to the wedding?

― how's life, Wednesday, August 1, 2012 9:50 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Because we won't have to plan a three-year-old's birthday party.

― pplains, Wednesday, August 1, 2012 9:57 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like to think of it as an elaborate birthday party someone else is organizing for Henry where a couple of people will just happen to get married.

so K is pushing 6 months and I want to start childproofing and also making the apt a little more friendly to crawling around.

I also need a way to set up a space for her to crawl/roll with some kind of boundary around it so she can't get out if I need to put her down. Anyone have any thoughts on this stuff?

Maybe use these?

http://www.amazon.com/GMI-Keepsafe-Expansion-84-Inches/dp/B0001J05GY/ref=pd_cp_ba_0

They come in a variety of different sizes. I don't know how big your place is, but in some of my rooms, they can go wall-to-wall. They're relatively cheap and an easy installation.

that's not a bad idea. We actually have a really nice setup for the use of gates, because our living room has these sort of half-walls on one side with an entryway, and then on the other side there's an elevated dining area (the other two sides are walls). So we'd only need to gate a relatively small area, and then I was thinking maybe some foam floor tiling in the living room area.

re foam floor tiles, we had some that fit together like a puzzle. They worked really well for a while until she realized she could take them apart. After that, the first thing she did every time we put her in her room was to take apart the tiles and throw them all over the place.

Ours was akin to this one, with lots of little pieces.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QbKCeh6QL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Which seems cool, because it's all honing their motor skills and puzzle solving abilities. But we found that we most needed padded flooring at an age before she was really into solving puzzles as much as just taking shit apart. She does puzzles now, but we just use an ordinary rug for the floor at this point.

Yeah. I was thinking about maybe getting some more toned-down (aesthetically) pads and running them around a larger area, like her play area but also around the couch. They make some in some nice colors, and they even make a woodgrain one which I can't decide if it would look nice or just tacky in the same way most plastic stuff that looks like wood does. H and I have this thing about wanting to balance between making things kid friendly and not letting kid stuff entirely take over our apartment and create visual chaos.

I want to find some kind of bumpers or pillows or something so she doesn't slam herself into the wall/bookshelves when she's rolling around. She's quite a roller.

The only thing we really did was progressively move things up higher and higher off the floor until eventually our place was actually sort of tidy - I realized this is the secret reason behind the seemingly inbuilt tidiness abilities of parents

we have a lot of stairs in our place and we didn't use any gates, but we did put some foam tiles at the bottom of each set of stairs... to cushion the landings

(i'm making our place sound grand, but we have so many stairs because our place is effectively squeezed up vertically into a narrow tube of rooms)

"daddy, that van sells bread"

i look up and see a van with pictures of baguettes on it

"yep, or maybe it just carries bread"

"why?"

i consider murdering my own son, again. instead i say

"hey, how do you know it has bread in it?"

"it's got pictures of bread"

"but maybe there's something else inside! maybe there's..... alligators in there!"

"daddy! alligators don't exist!"

"yes they do! alligators totally exist!"

"but not in LONDON."

checkmate

You could confuse him more by showing him these pics.

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/c0.0.403.403/p403x403/181380_391421997579323_1612323365_n.jpg

Those are hotel shuttle vans. From what I gather, you can't get cookies from them.

they carry you to, or away from, cookies though, as i understand it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJlV49RDlLE

well yes exactly, though frankly the putative kid in louis' deathless bit asks "why" in a relatively sensible way

my child says things like "daddy, that car is green" "yep, it's a green car" "why?"

sounds like something that should be encouraged imo

the amount of encouragement he needs to ask unanswerable questions = minus 10000000000000

My kids and I are the opposite.

ME: "See that train? It's pulling a whole line of boxcars filled with coal. Why do they call them boxcars? Hmm? Because they're shaped like boxes! Now the round ones, the ones that look like … a shampoo bottle, those are likely carrying a liquid like fuel. Look at the graffiti on some of those cars, you could draw something like that!"

BEEPS: "I'm done with my gummies now."

ha ha

exactly

i mean Henry currently spends around 60% of his weekend worrying whether the ceiling fans should be on or not.
"Fan on? Fan off?"
"Don't worry about the fan. Its okay."
"Fan On?" etc etc

hahaha awwwww

just found out the genitals of the little baby-to-be
it's a penis!

well, I just found out that my kid is afraid to talk to me about his newly-emerged boner abilities, but he's been asking my wife all kinds of questions that she doesn't know the answers to. so good luck with your penis-child. : )

Haha poor mom's of boys.

Congrats on the boy M Bi. :D

Anyone have any tips on dealing with a baby being way more used to one of you than the other you wrt stuff like eating and bedtime? I'm working and my wife is home, and probably 9/10 days I don't get home til after bedtime, so the most I'm able to do outside of weekends is morning diaper changes/playtime and maybe some solid foods or a bottle.

This morning I woke up early and told my stir crazy wife to just go for a swim and I'd take care of K (now 6 months old) something that frankly I should have done a lot more often by now. We had fun for a while but then when she got fussy I tried feeding her and she wouldn't eat, then I tried putting her down and she screamed her head off, and not in the typical "I don't want to go to bed" way but in the "ok, cut this shit out, where the FUCK is mommy" way. When H finally came home, K was clearly tired and hungry, but I was unable to make her sleep or eat. K hasn't had problems with me feeding her or putting her down when mom was there, but this was different.

To be clear, this is not the first time I've ever watched K for a few hours while H had a break, it's just that K changes all the time and it's the first time I've done it in a while, and K seems much more aware now than the last time I did it.

i think at that age the mommy is seen as the protector and comforter. I know Beatrice did that until maybe 4 y/o and Henry still does it. Boo-hoo time means mom time. On the other hand, when they want to go crazy and play like wild things they go to daddy and its like i don't even exist.

Beatrice actually went through a stage of wanting to be with one of us while completely freezing the other one out and this would go on for days at a time. When the periods of this lessened to a 12 hour period PP and I realized that she would like the person she saw first after waking in the morning and freeze out the other. As soon as we heard a peep from her we'd be racing up the stairs pulling each other back or pushing the other out of the way so we could be the favored parent for the day.

So I guess what i'm saying is, even though it sucks you don't get to see K during the week, this sort of stuff, as painful as it feels, changes so rapidly so I wouldn't stress too much.

"We had fun for a while but then when she got fussy I tried feeding her and she wouldn't eat, then I tried putting her down and she screamed her head off, and not in the typical "I don't want to go to bed" way but in the "ok, cut this shit out, where the FUCK is mommy" way."

Unfortunately my only advice is keep going at it and eventually it gets better (esp. the eating once she's able to feed herself). Your wife'll probably be #1 for a good long time, but eventually you'll be seen as an acceptable alternative. :)

first day of preschool today! it went pretty well, she seemed fine when we dropped her off. but when my wife went to pick her up, sylvie burst into tears. not because she desperately wanted to stay at preschool, I think because she was just sort of overwhelmed.
hilarious that we think this is like THE BIGGEST DEAL EVER when it is 2 1/2 hours twice a week, but oh well

Oh man, Hurting 2. My wife works weekends, but typically on the night-shift. This weekend she had to pick up some morning shifts. When our daughter woke up without mommy there, she was out-of-sorts all day. She doesn't talk yet, but she nods, and I asked her "do you want kisses?" she shook her head no. then I asked her "do you want mommy kisses" and she paused, looked at me, then shook her head yes. broke my heart.

at this point i'm very used to be a distant second in the affection sweepstakes. not necessarily something i'm freaking out about, but sometimes it can be tough. actually she's fine when mom's not around, but if mom IS there, there's no contest.