ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

economy plus is pretty nice! we got those one one of our AirNZ flights, seats a little bit wider & a little more legroom

You're welcome! Who says the childfree have no useful advice for parents?

you actually made me realize that trying to stop long-legged K from kicking or grabbing a stranger would be yet another stress of the flight, and that one kind of pushed me over the edge

I think I get now why people say "your life will never be the same." I used to think that just meant having a lot more stuff to do, but it's more than that. It's that you have another person who is (at least for the first period of years) entirely dependent on you. I'm never going to be able to be laid back again the way I was in college, I don't think. I might have laid back moments, but ultimately the profound sense of responsibility is with me to stay.

really? i dunno, my life seems pretty much the same except i have these psychotic midgets living with me.

I dunno, maybe it's a phase that passes when they're a little more self-directing and you don't have to pay attention to them every minute. Maybe it's also that I took on a more demanding career less than a year before she was born, and maybe it's also just part of being older, but I feel like I can never get back the care-free spirit I was capable of when I was younger.

I dunno, maybe it's a phase that passes when they're a little more self-directing and you don't have to pay attention to them every minute.

yeah this passes once they are little bit more like little people and less like larvae

but it's true you can pretty much never cut loose entirely (like, I would never take hallucinogenics now, I don't have time for that 6-8 hr trip shit)

Yeah, you'd better believe I've got an 18 year countdown clock until the next time I can eat acid. Hope it's still around by then. : D

Maybe it's worth considering that when you felt young and carefree in college it was because you were...young and in college? I don't understand why that state is any kind of ideal, I guess, because to me that means being 18-25 and a dumbass and whoa I do not want to do any of that again.

It only becomes appealing again when you realize how thoroughly tied to your new life you are. E.g. it's not like I miss sleeping until 10am (or even 8:30am) every day all that much, so much as it's realizing that every day, including weekends, for the foreseeable future, you are forced to get up at 6:30 am, and that even getting a pass one day once in a while to sleep until 7:30 am and not getting up to make breakfast feels like you are taking advantage of your partner who is also overworked. It's not like I want to get wasted and smoke pot all the time, so much as it would be sort of nice to have just one day where I could do it, sleep late the next day, and then have nothing to do other than go eat a greasy omlette and wander around a park.

I want there to be a day where I don't have to worry about what another person is going to eat for the three meals and two snacks she has every day, like I want to be able to have just one day once in a while where the fridge is empty and I can just say "fuck it I'll go grab a slice of pizza."

I would like to be able to have an epic five hour jam session. I would like to be able to attend a party that doesn't have a time limit for me.

(and that doesn't cost me babysitting money or require me to drive home inlaws afterwards)

I would like to be able to travel without it being a lot like weekends at home since you still have to worry about all the meals and naps and such.

Those things do sound really really nice. Never had any kids but I've had boyfriends and/or houseguests and been responsible for their 3 meals a day and all their entertainment and their comforts and I can only handle about 3 days of that and those are full-grown ADULTS.

it gets easier Hurting! they start to sleep later, become more able to take care of themselves, plus you may have the occasional respite when they (or you) leave town etc

sorry the leaving town part made me lol

ha shakey needs to make it gets better videos for parents

there are a lot of things I wouldn't give up though, e.g. coming home from work and immediately hearing the cutest voice on earth shout "Aba!" from the bedroom, and then having her not want to go to bed because she wants to keep pointing out her sloth ("soff!") and also that I have a nose.

"Aba!"

<3 <3 <3

yeah it's great, she sometimes just looks and me and says it multiple times, matter-of-factly "Aba...Aba." When they learn to talk they just kind of feel out words. I think it's just cool to them that they know a word, so they like to say it to you. Like sometimes she just stands in her crib and names the things in the pictures on the wall that she knows.

that's awesome

That is so great. If I am lucky my friend & her daughter are coming over tomorrow and I am very excited, haven't seen the kid since December, she's 2 and a half. I'm babysitting her in a few weeks as well, looking forward to having little lady Juliet in my life.

I am kind of drunk so maybe I shouldn't be writing this but I credit this thread 100% for making me think that maybe actually having kids is something I could do.

my son is such a happy little guy, and in 4 weeks i get to stay home with him all day for 2 months :)
parenting has created an openness in me that i didnt realize was closed before.

i love reading that

i loved writing it!

happy mothers' day to all the moms

to all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends I'd like to offer my love and respect to the end

otm

holy hell Henry is off the charts crazy right now. tonight he got in an argument with the ipad.such a sight: tears rolling down his face while yelling at it "ITS MY TURN! MY TURN!!!!'

in 4 weeks i get to stay home with him all day for 2 months :)

jesus christ, just reading this is making me exhausted

i teach high school geometry all year, staying at home with my son is a welcome reprieve

I just realized that my "parenting voice" is super-nasal, like Bert from Sesame Street. I definitely don't shift voices on purpose. It's so embarrassing. No one has mentioned it to me, but undoubtedly, I've done this in front of strangers, relatives, my wife, maybe even coworkers on Bring Your Kid to Work Day? It's like some unconscious tic.

Traveling with K is a little rough -- she's generally a good sport but it's hard for her to sleep in different places, let alone a different time zone. First few nights she was up until 2 or 3 am. Tonight she actually fell asleep at 10pm, but on the other hand, she totally broke down in the restaurant at dinner to the point that we had to cut out early, where as we thought she would have been fine given her late schedule. I think meeting new people for her every single day has been tough too -- aunts, cousins, friends, etc.

Getting her a ticket was a good idea although it hurt a little on the money side. I don't know how we could have done the flight otherwise.

I just realized that my "parenting voice" is super-nasal, like Bert from Sesame Street. I definitely don't shift voices on purpose. It's so embarrassing. No one has mentioned it to me, but undoubtedly, I've done this in front of strangers, relatives, my wife, maybe even coworkers on Bring Your Kid to Work Day? It's like some unconscious tic.

my cousin has a thing he does where he says "oKAAAAY?" after everything he says to his kids and the "okay" itself is super-nasal though the rest of it is not. super-weird. i'm sure he's not aware of it. it reminded me of friends i had who did telemarketing for this carpet-cleaning place and every single person in the whole goddamned place worked from the same script and had the exact same nasal way of announcing "i'm calling from budget carpet cleaners?"

I think meeting new people for her every single day has been tough too -- aunts, cousins, friends, etc.

yeah this amt of new stimulus is crazy-making for a small kid i think

i didn't know where else to post this, and you guys are always full of good advice.

my nephew is 13, and I just found out from my mum that he's being bullied at school. I don't know exactly the specifics of what was being done to him -- the bullier has been suspended which is something. he's a pretty quiet kid, in a very loud and rambunctious family. he has 2 younger brothers, and they are v energetic/cute so they suck up a lot of the attention in that family, and it's often 'who yells loudest gets noticed' in their house. My sister is a good mum, but not the most touchy-feely parent, so aside from checking in and making sure he's okay, I don't know how much handholding she's going to do with him about this. which could be good or bad, depending on how you look at it.

I guess I'm just concerned that as a kid who's already kind of withdrawn and quiet, that he's going to retreat more as a result of this. my brother was bullied in primary school by his best friend...I was thinking maybe it would be good for him to talk to my nephew, since he gets a lot of admiration from my nephew and all 3 boys pretty much worship him..

idk. I'm thousands of miles away from him and we don't talk except when we visit. maybe I'm just feeling over anxious becuase of the distance, but he's a cool kid and i just get so mad thinking about this little shit who's trying to break his spirit.

have you guys had experiences like this with your own kids? how have you handled it within the home? etc?
i just need to hear some stories to know the ways he might be okay.

my brother was bullied in primary school by his best friend...I was thinking maybe it would be good for him to talk to my nephew

this sounds like a good idea. make it happen

my kids haven't had this experience yet, so i don't really have any advice of my own

Man, bullying. Never figured that one out myself. I'm always kind of tempted to say "hit back" since none of the nonviolent approaches my parents suggested really worked. But it's probably not necessarily the best answer.

my brother's situation was horrible. he was bullied through most of primary school by the kid that we all knew as his best friend. he was a bigger boy, bigger than most of the kids in his class, he had a couple of older brothers and in retrospect it all kinda fit but, man... this kid came over to our house all the time, they went to each other's birthday parties, seemed like a quiet nice kid but apparently he was tormenting my brother throughout the whole friendship, all through primary school :(

he only told me a few years ago, and it broke my heart.

this is probably no surprise to anyone (well maybe it is what do I know) but as the smallest kid in my class from roughl age 7-16 I received endless amounts of (often but not always) unprovoked shit from my physically superior peers. my memories of elementary school through junior high and the first couple years of high school are liberally stuffed with namecalling, beatings, "charley horses", "tabling", smashed lunches, and other various humiliations. it doesn't help having the word "cock" in your last name, lemme tell you... anyway, I got in fights all the time. constantly. some kid would make fun of me or hit me or something and the whole "just ignore them" thing does not work. neither does attempting to reasoning with them, or ridiculing them back, or reporting them to the teacher (fun fact: if you complain that some kid is giving you shit, you BOTH get detention/in trouble/sent to the principal's office/etc. Justice!) I just dealt with it by developing a thick skin and being a wiseass, avoiding people I knew would give me trouble as much as possible, fighting when I had to, trying to be smarter and quicker than my adversaries. Recess (in elementary school) and Phys ed/gym (in jr. high and high school) were the absolute worst because there I was basically in "general population" with garden variety jocks/idiots/assholes who would basically immediately alpha-male it up as much as possible by asserting their physical dominance over the weak and inept (ie, me). There's basically nothing you can do about this, in my experience. This period is the brief window in child development where physical superiority totally rules, other mediating factors that come out later in life are of lesser significance - the strong and the pretty will revel in their (usually brief) moment in the sun at the expense of others and they will do it as much as possible. You just kind of have to bide your time and avoid them, find other things that bring you joy or help you get through it. But there's no stopping it, it's like a force of nature. When I think back on it now, even decades later, I am filled with loathing for my one-time peers, I don't think it's something that will ever go away - even though I turned out fine as an adult (content, well-adjusted, with a family and a job and creative outlets etc.)

booming post. could be the germ of a treatise on bullying.

haha man I say basically a lot

yeah I think you're pretty otm. it's easy to be on the outside and talk about 'dealing with it'

if it isn't clear already from that post, I have a pretty fatalistic attitude about "bullying" in general. My response to various campaigns to "eliminate" bullying is usually an eyeroll. if one of my kids starts getting it I don't know how helpful my experience will be in providing advice because I don't think there are any hard and fast rules. I'm not going to tell my kids not to hit back if they're being hit - sometimes it's smart to, and sometimes it's not, and knowing when is part of the trick. sometimes it's better to run away from a fight you know you can't win (ie it's you vs. a bunch of kids) and sometimes it's better to take your chances in a fight (ie if there's no one else around and it's just the two of you)

and you definitely can't rely on authority figures to provide any kind of help. they will not always be around, and, more importantly, they will not always do the right thing, because they have their own interests that come into play (how much do they care about resolving this headache? whose parents are they going to have to deal with? do they have the time/energy that day to really figure out what's going on? do they have biases/prejudices of their own regarding any of the kids involved?) Bullies act when they know they aren't being watched - then they can either deny it later if they are caught, or otherwise obfuscate the blame. So the bullied kid ends up having to always have a better/more believable story than the bully. and on top of that bullies usually repay being "ratted on" with further bullying. so appealing to teachers/cops/hall monitors whatever is fraught with its own perils. kids tend not to respect another kid that relies on the protection of authority figures, and respect (or lack thereof) is really what bullying is all about.

yeah "telling" was basically the worst, like a betrayal. as if "betrayal" was even an operative term in conjunction with someone who has been fucking with you 24/7. but somehow it was.

i think for my nephew, as far as hitting up my brother to talk to him, my thinking was less of 'how to stop it' and more 'make him feel less isolated' so that he at least knows you can grow up and be ok in spite of it

i once hit a kid in the face at school, during recess. he was a perfectly nice guy, and i liked him. we had a game we were playing, it was basically a "war" with two sides. he was on my side but then he told me he switched. i felt so rejected by him, so disappointed, that i hit him right in the face. he immediately started crying and went to tell on me and i got in big trouble. i still feel terrible about that. what in the world??