ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

hahaha exactly

I know nothing about what either of my kids do during the day. They refuse to tell me anything.

but yeah i do believe in the too many Nos end up meaning nothing but you find yourself saying 50 times a day because they want to play the toy story game for 7 hours straight or have breakfast dessert for the third time or drive the car or some damn thing

My girl made me let her watch a single Batman Brave and the Bold episode over and over for an hour and a half right around three a.m. last week.

That would....... not fly in my house.

And I don't know if that's a discipline thing, or a me being less patient thing, or what.

Well, she sleeps in our room. That's where the TV is. I can sleep with the TV on. I can't sleep with her crying about wanting to watch a TV show. It really sucks, but I can't really see any other options. Waking up at 3 a.m. and demanding things has been a bit of a habit lately. Not all the time, but enough where my wife and I are like "oh, here we go again..." Sometimes those things are deliverable, sometimes they aren't. I perform better at work on the nights when I can just give her something that quiets her down.

would it be unhelpful for me to suggest moving the tv in the bedroom to another room? like, the bedroom becomes a space of quiet and sleepytimes. tv is in x room, that's what we leave behind for sleepytimes.

Yeah, that's not how it works around here.

fair enough!

Rooms have to be multi-use within our small set-up. We've got it about as workable as it's going to get. : )

I know nothing about what either of my kids do during the day. They refuse to tell me anything.

You crack me up.

I think if the TV and my child were in the same room as me during bedtime I would be even LESS inclined to be listening to demands to turn on the TV at 3am! Not judgin just sayin. From my perspective. It's hard for me to imagine the scenario though. When everybody's on top of each other you can't just close the door on 'em. GOOD NIGHT.

trying to finish getting presents for 3rd bday, picking out toys for kids (esp girls) is so fraught w "what message am i sending my child?" and "how is this going to mold her in the future?" that it's not that much fun.

we'd been talking about getting her a balance bike, and i was excited bc when i took her to the playground yesterday there was a girl her age riding a pink balance bike around. the mom offered to let evie try it and the girl came up multiple times and offered it to evie but she refused to try it so i was like "hmm maybe not a good idea." but then i was talking about it with her on the way home and she said "i wish i could have the bike with no pedals." i think the turning point was when she saw the disney princess medallions the girl had put on her bike.

it's a good age for the balance bike imo

okay one of the things about being a new parent is that shit just does not get done. there's no time. it's taken me four days so far to install a safety gate on the stairs, it's still not done yet. we bought a new macbook 18 days ago and it's still sitting in the box and the plastic bag from the apple store. it took almost a month for us to finally lower the crib mattress. cooking dinner needs to be done in like 4 different stages.

Yep. This was pretty surprising to me too although im not sure why

my child is now the size of "a bunch of swiss chard"

fuck safety gates

yeah i said it

hmmm. id agree expect for crawlers and stairs

they learn.

when a friend of mine was a toddler he fell down a flight of stairs because he was fucking with a safety gate that hadn't quite been shut properly.

we have never had them ( = we are lazy, cheap ) and it's been totally fine. it takes just one time not respecting the stairs to learn to respect them. and then they're very careful.

thats true

Plus, they bounce.

yes indeed

At least the bottom gate will stop their fall and not embarrass you and your guests in the sitting room.

I grew up in a house that didn't even have a banister let alone a safety gate.

I didn't even have STEPS.

i did. cleared them on my tricycle when i was 2.

We briefly had one of those octagon playyard gates -- we used to call it "baby jail" because it looked so depressing and institutional, and K hated it. And it was an eyesore and way too big for our apartment, and it broke.

fuck safety gates

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, July 17, 2013 7:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i understand. i'd totally be cool without one. especially since installing it has been such a pain in the ass due to no free time to actually sit down and work on it and also having to deal with shitty drywall workarounds and shitty baby products (the first gate we bought was so flimsy that we returned it).

but my wife's the one home with J while i'm at work, and in terms of getting stuff down around the house, it totally helps her not to have to pick him up every four seconds when he tries to crawl over to the stairs. when i'm home from work i'm mostly playing with him, and so I can be with him 100% to make sure he's safe. but my wife is also trying to accomplish daily tasks at the same time she's taking care of him, so it helps her in that regard.

At least the bottom gate will stop their fall and not embarrass you and your guests in the sitting room.

― pplains, Wednesday, July 17, 2013 11:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also lol

Our baby gate situation is pretty awesome. We've been able to remove most of them at this point (she's almost three), but we've left a couple specific gates in place, more to manage her location rather than prevent injury. About a month ago, she figured the gates out and demonstrated to us that she could do so. She had a few giggly little escapes and runs around the house. But since then, she hasn't escaped at all. Like, she wanted us to know she could work the gate, but is for the most part cool with staying in the part of the house where mommy and daddy want her to be.

I can't wait to get rid of all the gates though. They really fuck with the chi flow.

aw

Like, she wanted us to know she could work the gate, but is for the most part cool with staying in the part of the house where mommy and daddy want her to be.

that's cute

it totally helps her not to have to pick him up every four seconds when he tries to crawl over to the stairs

but what would happen if he crawled up the stairs? is what i'm getting at.

um, he could wind up rolling down the stairs. K has already a couple of times climbed up onto shit and then fallen off of it so this doesn't seem that unlikely.

Yeah. The "they bounce" explanation more boils down to "sometimes they are lucky about the manner in which they land".

i know we were talking about discipline being hard already but seriously how do you guys punish your kids or respond to bad behavior? i try to put evie in time out and she won't stay in the chair so i either have to let her go or force her physically to sit there. other times she asks to be put in time out so it's obviously not much of a punishment. but maybe that's ok.

also i don't believe in hitting/spanking kids but it sure must have been easier for kids to understand why they shouldn't hit when they could experience being hit themselves. evie hits when she's mad and the other day she wasn't even mad, just goofing around, and suddenly reared back and smacked me flat in the eye.

Henry also displays this exact behavior. We don't know what to do with him because if we put him in a 3 min time out it extends out to 30+ minutes because he refuses to stay there.

Henry is also big with hitting when he's mad or frustrated. Biting too.

um, he could wind up rolling down the stairs.

well i'm telling you, i have lots of stairs in my house, two kids, no safety gates and they have never rolled down the stairs. once or twice they've taken a tumble down a couple of them, and cried, but after that it has never been an issue. i may simply be justifying my extreme laziness, i don't know, but i really think it is much less of an issue than many people think. what completely paralyzes me with fear is fingers in door hinges but i'm not even sure how you deal with that besides getting those stoppers that mean no door in the house actually closes.

other times she asks to be put in time out so it's obviously not much of a punishment. but maybe that's ok.

personally i think the big benefit of time outs isn't as punishment per se (which i'm not convinced about the benefits of, anyway) but as a cooling off period. from that perspective the fact that she's asked for them sounds like a pretty encouraging sign of maturity.

I've even seen our son hit his sister and then sit down on the steps for a time out. Like Otis the Drunk letting himself in the cell with the key on the hook.

lollllllll yes

so willing to take the consequences

as for the stairs it really depends on the kid. with bee we wondered why babyproofing existed at all and with henry we found out. also we have zero doors in our house with the exception of bathrooms and bedrooms. theres no way to close the living room door or whatever. so that might be a consideration, no? anyway. if your kid is a wandering daredevil who crawls at the speed of lightning GET A GATE.

it totally helps her not to have to pick him up every four seconds when he tries to crawl over to the stairs

but what would happen if he crawled up the stairs? is what i'm getting at.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, July 18, 2013 7:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also we have the gate at the top of the stairs. we live on the second floor of a two-family house, the stairwell goes down to our apartment entrance. i don't see a huge use for a gate at the bottom of a stairwell -- babies could take their time exploring it, learning to crawl up it slowly, etc. my wife wouldn't feel the need to pick him up every four seconds if we was crawling over to the bottom of the stairs. but when J crawls over to the top of the stairs he'd just tumble down the 12 or so steps down the stairwell, imo that's something that we'd like to avoid and i think that's pretty reasonable

ok sure! i'm just saying that i have empirical evidence, collected over 4 years with two children, that kids very quickly learn how to navigate stairs (or just leave them alone if they're not ready for them). when each of my boys figured out how to swing their legs down first, and go down the stairs "backwards", like climbing down a ladder, it was the source of a lot of pride for them (and me too, vicariously)