ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

Those pigtails are adorable. I remember (and seriously miss) when my girl was that size.

I remember (and seriously miss) when my girl was that size.

Ditto and ditto.

Adorable!!! Bison!!!! Happy Boy!

So cute, pigtails and smiles and at a library!!! LOVE!

Okay can anyone confirm this male child development track that a friend, who studies child development, informed me of recently:
0-6yrs - it's all about mama
6-14yrs - it's all about dad
14yrs+ - it's all about friends

my son has been all about daddy from age 3-4 and shows no sign of stopping so

My son is almost 9 and is totally, totally into his mother and definitely not me. My two-year-old spent much of last year being a daddy's girl, but has needed her mother a lot more recently and it's just killing me.

:(

Okay can anyone confirm this male child development track that a friend, who studies child development, informed me of recently:
0-6yrs - it's all about mama
6-14yrs - it's all about dad
14yrs+ - it's all about friends

― I thought, 'This is Jeezo. He came in, he activated' (sunny successor), Friday, March 15, 2013 2:27 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

K, now 1, does apparently sometimes ask for me in the middle of the day while I'm at work, and she seems pleased when I get home before her bedtime. But mom is definitely #1. In fact, when she's scared or uncomfortable in a crowd/public situation she'll sometimes refuse to go to me and only want to go to mom, which is kind of embarrassing. At her birthday party, she actually stayed on her grandma the whole time and didn't want me to hold her. :(

OTOH, I'm usually the one to get up with her and make breakfast, and she'll make me sing to her for about 30 minutes straight.

evie will change who she's more into week by week

fwiw it can be totally exhausting being the favoured parent

I am the favored one for fun things & have been so from about 2 years on with all three of my kids. I'm not the one to ask for help with things (nightmares, food, cuts & bruises), so I've got a pretty good deal I think.

we'll see how it goes with my son. I feel like my 5yo daughter kinda favors us each for different things, which is going fine. personally, as a male child I don't recall every feeling particularly attached to one parent or the other, I was always more fixated on my (older) brother.

Somehow K learned the word "iphone." This makes for fun:

"K, what's better the Samsung Nexus or iPhone?"
"IPHONE"

I mean, it sounds sort of like "ahphoo" but she definitely says it.

My daughter's working hard learning to string together sentences and sing large chunks of songs now. Her favorite songs are the Wonderpets theme and Gangnam Style.

"Whoop whoop! Gangnam style! Heeeeeeeey, second lady!"

lol
my three and a half year old reallllllly likes that justin bieber song "beauty and the beat"...i kind of like it too. weirdest thing is that she imitates nikki minaj's opening "uhhh!"

i think iPad was one of henry's first words. sometime he'll say a color instead like 'where's blue, mama?' this means where is the ipad with the blue cover as opposed to the ipad with the green cover.

awww!!

it is crazy how quickly sylvie picked up on the ipad touch screen -- i guess that'll just be second nature to her. i'm still kind of clutzy with that stuff.

i guess that's the true test of an intuitive user interface, right?

RE: my question above about boy's development and people preferences. My friend has a 7 year old boy who sat her down last week to explain to her that he didn't love her the most anymore. Henry and I have such a love affair going on. We're smitten. It will surely kill me if he delivers this speech to me someday.

Abby handles our tablet with ease. The only thing she can't do is type in search terms, but she knows where the search box is located on the netflix app and is eager to handle it herself.

VERB CONJUGATION ALERT: Dalton on the way to bath chanting "I A NAKED BABY, I A NAKED BABY!" stopped and corrected himself "I AM a naked baby."

<3 <3 <3

Awesome!

Adorable!

Keren learned to say "guitar" when I take out the guitar case <3. "GUI-tah! GUI-tah!"

Tomorrow we do the last ultrasound, which is scary wrt abnormalities but also when we find out what sex the kid is. O_O

Also for people that don't do wdyll, this is what I look like totally geeked hanging out with my 5 day old nephew and niece, who I just met for the first time today

https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/8804_10151520284264609_397314500_n.jpg

oh man, cousins nearly the same age, that's the best. congrats.

As an added bonus, they live 8 blocks from us

They'll be 20 weeks apart if everything goes according to schedule

jealous. had no cousins growing up, k has none yet.

Thx to my ancestral Irish catholicness, I had 40+ cousins on just my moms side.

:o

If it helps you feel less jealous, most of them are completely awful

It is a boy. K is going through a bit of disappointment, but better now than later obv.

Healthy w/ just one (as stressed by the doctor over and over again) abnormality, which is the terrifyingly named but apparently not worrisome unless accompanied by other markers "choroid plexus cyst" or CPC. Anyone here ever have that show up?

we had one "soft marker" for Down's Syndrome but everything turned out fine. I sort of resented how the Kaiser docs handled it to be honest.

JJ, I suspect K is going to get over the disappointment pretty quick. Boys and their moms are mad tight.

yeah shes pretty much over it already - and to be fair, theres sort of a weird "what if" malaise that settles in either way i think. i was leaning towards hoping for a boy, and i went through various thoughts abt how it could have been with a girl after finding out the details.

we did our first trial run for ben in day care this morning since my wife has to go back to work on monday. he did okay! he slept a lot and only cried once and peed on a lady changing his diaper.

i am just counting down the weeks left in the school year so i can stay home with him, though.

<3

I just discovered my (third grade) sons instagram account. His username

... Incorporates the word "swag". The whole enterprise is obviously the work of a sixth grade friend of his who wears tight jeans and has like a dozen pairs of shoes. Please help me think of some good daddish ways to drop "swag" into conversation with him.

"hi son. seen any good swag lately?"

K and I have a game now, which I call syllable-pong. Basically it goes like this:

K: "Ma!"
H: "Ha!"
K: "Za!"
H: "Fa!"
K: "Dee!"
H: "Coo!"
K: "La!"
H: "Zu!"
K: "Na!"

This can go on for many volleys, but usually she wins, either by "technical" (playing the dreaded "DEEDAH-DEEDAHDEE!") or by "check-mate" (grabbing my nose).

Love it!

In other news, K has discovered getting really freaking mad out of nowhere. Usually because we dare refuse her request for yet another cracker or piece of cheese.

ugh we let Evie eat part of the ears on her Easter bunny this morning and she was entirely unmanageable the whole day. Crazy and tantrumy and never took a nap. Also would ask every 30 minuted if she could have more chocolate bunny (we didnt let her). I get irritable when I eat more than a few bites of chocolate so maybe she inherited that trait. Exhausting, frustrating day.

Henry would take a few bites of chocolate and immediately hunch his shoulders and start walking in this fast circle, like he was on Nixon on PCP.

A little bit goes a long ways inside those tiny little veins.