ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

evie is three today. we gave her most of her presents but we're saving the balance bike for after work. and we made pink rice krispie treats to take to school.

Three!!! Happy Birthday, Evie! Pls mail pink rice krispie treat asap.

congratulations mordy!

that's nacho business

― Cap'n Conserv-a-pedia (Hurting 2), Friday, July 19, 2013 4:12 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^ Dadz in dis thread

― pplains, Friday, July 19, 2013 9:26 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao

― THAT'S MY NAME, DON'T WEAR IT OUT! (m bison), Friday, July 19, 2013 9:27 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it will be so great when K is old enough to grimace at lines like that :)

― Cap'n Conserv-a-pedia (Hurting 2), Friday, July 19, 2013 9:54 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

loooool one of the many reasons i want to have a daughter next. can't wait to be a super-embarrassing buffoon in front of her and her teenage friends.

ok so approaching the 2 week to due date mark gave me my first semi panic attack today

man, so I went to the gym this morning and didn't do the normal morning routine with K, and, perhaps worst of all, I forgot to say "bye-bye" as I walked out the door. K was PISSED at me when I came back, just would not even look at me. :(

also, last night I accidentally squeezed diaper cream all over my hand while changing K and inadvertently said "shit" under my breath. The scary thing, dear reader, is that she did not repeat "shit," but rather started gleefully exclaiming "fuck! fuck!" which means that she (1) has heard me curse before, and (2) gets that "fuck" is somehow conceptually connected to "shit". In other words, I am a terrible parent.

i have really got to do a better job of not swearing around my baby

K also noticed that I have a "tsee-tsee" (breast) when I was walking around shirtless. Gender innocence or sign that I need to hit the gym more?

life's too short for gyms, u show them tsee-tsee's off

body positivity yo. work it

I should have said "No no, PEC! PEC!"

yea i have to work on the swearing around J thing, too. my wife are pretty liberal about swearing but i'm really worried it's going to come out when J becomes a toddler. yesterday morning i picked him up from the crib and walked into the kitchen to see tupperwares of all the indian food we spent two hours cooking that we forgot to put in the fridge, and i look at the food and yell "FUCKER! FUCKING BULLSHIT!" and J just seemed real quiet, obviously he hears it and knows that daddy's angry

I watched my youngest kid type "fuck" into Scribblenauts the other day & was kinda puzzled about how, or even whether, she knew that word

Just fucking pwned a goddamn car seat installation, feeling pretty good abt things atm.

Also yeah not swearing around the kid is going to be haha tough for k and i

Stroller construction/learning to collapse it otoh was a total fucking nightmare

huh, what stroller?

Chicco something something babyhover strollaround 2000. Lets be fair, it is more my fault than the strollers.

Oh god, for a while after our girl was born, I still didn't get how to collapse the stroller. If my wife wasn't around, I just shoved the whole thing into my trunk and tied it down with bungee cords.

fwiw I had no trouble with stroller but a lot of trouble with the car seat

every one is designed just differently enough to make it completely fucking impossible to use any prior learnings

I'm the worst at controlling my language around the kiddos but its been 6 years now and Ive never heard it repeated back.

I am already having a hard time stopping it and promised myself I'd have it under control once she turned a year. Pushed it to 18 months. I would love to stop, I feel I really cuss too much, I am even starting to feel it is "unlady-like". Noticed a lot of my girlfriends outside of my closest three do not cuss, ever...very positive and holistic of them and seems to match their clean living regimen. Ahhh to get there....

We have this one very "wholesome" friend couple who has two kids, and I mistakenly thought their four year old said something was "stupid" and they shot me this look like how could I even imagine their four year old would say such a bad word.

August copies all I do, I can teach her dances because she really copies me so well. She is still babbling with a few words that come through like "baks" for books, eyes, baby, this...I really don't want her to be a potty mouthed kid. My dad cussed up a storm in English and Spanish when we were growing up but it wasn't until age 12 that I used anything I heard. After that, no stopping me.

I think I started cursing on the reg when I was 9.

That's a very difficult to habit to tame. Cussing is one of life's little joys. Maybe I can pass that on to my son. "Son, when you stub your toe on the furniture, nothing quite beats the rapid-fire deployment of fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck to ease the pain."

my wife said dammit so much with our first listening that the little one started saying (what sounded like) "debit" and that's become our standard correction for cussing with the kids

also the kids LOVE use/mention shenanigans with cussing, eg "mom why did you just say 'shit'?" clever ones

Ha!

knock on wood a million times / bli ayin hara but the new baby is so relaxed and calm compared to her sister. our first time around i was up all night holding the screaming baby. it's not like that at all this time. (part of me wonders if we're just better parents from going through it once before)

that's awesome! fingers crossed for u

When I first met my wife/son, he was four and she had not cussed around him at all. After a couple years, we got really lax and loosened up and started cussing in front of him. We made sure to explain to him which social situations it's appropriate to cuss in and that if he ever got in trouble at school, to tell them that his grandpa was a Vietnam vet and taught him those words. His favorite these days is "shit-ton".

With Abby though, she's just picking up on what we say. Most of the time, she has more important things to say, like "play toys with me", but she's dropped a "fucking shit" out of nowhere too, which I sometimes get a little bummed out about.

The word I'm most proud of teaching her is archeopteryx.

I'm starting to feel like half of Keren's waking hours are spent either with her singing, me singing to her, or her music playing on the stereo. Hope it's healthy.

evie has never seemed very interested in music. she likes "call me maybe" and "beautiful" (by one direction) because they play them at her day care. i find the lyrical sentiment of "beautiful" pretty gross so we don't play it at home, but we'll play her "call me maybe" if she wants to hear it. we thought she might want to listen to music more if she had control over it, so i took out one of our old iphones, which isn't connected to wi-fi or anything, downloaded a kids music controller app, and put some music on it for her. she seems to like that.

we were in the car the other day, i was flipping around on the radio and landed on the rap station. they were playing "no new friends" by drake (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9OWiH9XtV4) and evie was like "why does he say no no friends?" so i was trying to explain it to her. then i thought maybe we shouldn't be listening to that song if she was actually paying attention so i switched stations but she said "i want no no friends." then she spent most of the weekend wandering around chanting "no no friends, no no friends, no no no no no"

Keren has this idea now that every song needs to be infinitely customized and infinitely sung. So example if I sing "Muffin Man" I have to come up with every possible occupation and what "lane" they live on. And if I sing "there's a spider on the floor" there have to be a bunch of other things also on the floor (each of which is on every different body part I can think of, so there are thousands of combinations if not millions).

Beeps plays Dance Dance Revolution at daycare and her favorite song is "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" by TMBG.

That song was annoying (and verrrry catchy) 25 years ago. Hearing it now six times a day though is about to do me in.

Almost makes me miss the days of Katy Perry's "Firework".

10 days to due date, so i should have a kid somewhere between 3 weeks and 20 minutes from now

omg

experiences w/ near constant unstoppable whining plz

Baby gtfo srsly

dude you know the due date is just an educated guess and first-time moms in particular often deliver late, right?

Oh no, I know the actualities, but still, little dude should get out here where I can stare at him.

lol you false alarmed me, i thought you had an announcement.

Beeps plays Dance Dance Revolution at daycare

I'm the worst at controlling my language around the kiddos but its been 6 years now and Ive never heard it repeated back.

!! we control our language fairly well but my 1.5 yr old is already saying "shit", at least when goaded into it by his brother.

re "stupid" my rule is that they can call THINGS stupid but they can't call PEOPLE stupid. i don't think that's too tom's-of-maine, is it?

"tom's of maine" giving me irl lols rn

tom's of maine is dope, do not fear the association
also that is a good rule about the word stupid as well as lots of words tbh like fuck and shit
stub your toe yell shitfuck real loud, ok
do not call your lil sister a shit-eating fuckface, thats belittling

So we're two days away from 18mo and she's not walking. She'll walk for blocks holding my hand, but she won't let go and walk by herself. I've seen her a few times take steps on her own to grab for something, but it's really hard to get her to do this -- often if you put something just out of her reach, she'll get down, crawl to it, and then say "Good! Good job!" Anyone have suggestions? Seems like it's as much about confidence as skill at this point.

Hello fellow people makers, I know I am doubling up threads, but I am officially in your number now. I will save most of my "what the goddamn hell is happening" posts for this thread.