ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

I love TCM and will call August to watch the singing and dancing numbers in musicals. She loves to dance along. She has watched parts of black and white films with me. Because we stay busy we can't watch anything for long. I want her to learn to watch black and white films. I have met too many people my age and younger who don't like black and white films and just lose patience or tune out or something. We had a black and white TV until I was 6 or 7, grandparents had the color tv.

Echo many complaints here on both insane healthcare costs and complete lack of transparency in process. Knowing what your out of pocket max is a huge help in all this, but sometimes even finding that info (unless you are super organized and have received and kept the insurance pamphlets) isn't easy.

BCBS has a decent website to figure all this out, but there are still plenty of gotchas. My work also offers benefits analysts to help with the more tricky issues, or they can provide a health care advocate to assist as well. Still, can be a pain in the ass.

xps i know a good number of kids who like star trek -- what's up with that? is there something about the show that kids particuarly like? (btw i'm no trekkie but i definitely enjoy st:tng)

I understand theoretically what an out of pocket max is and what a deductible is, but what I can't quite reconcile is how they are two different things. They are basically both (seemingly arbitrary) amounts of what the insured has to pay out of pocket before the insurance company starts covering the full (or larger percentage, depending on how crappy your plan is) amounts. So why not just put them together and call them a deductible? "Out of pocket max" just feels like the insurance company's end-run around ever letting any insured person fully use their benefits.

I actually kept a BCBS rep on the phone with me (politely, I swear!) for like 30 minutes trying to get her to explain this but you can probably guess how that went.

Also while I am extremely grateful for the benefits analyst and healthcare advocate that Jeff and I have access to through his employer, it rankles me that such people even need to exist to make sure that the people who are buying a product actually get the fair benefit of the product that they paid for. Like, imagine that you needed a consumer advocate at the register of the grocery store to make sure you weren't charged arbitrary prices for goods or randomly denied permission to purchase something?

re: Star Trek - TOS looks like a kid's show (all those saturated bright colors!) and TNG is full of aliens and based on a fundamentally optimistic view of humanity, all of which I think would appeal to kids (the latter is absolutely a large part of the appeal to me).

Our kid will be forbidden to watch TOD.

TOS too.

The only time I ever watched Star Trek was when I was four, and looking back, I'm pretty sure I did so only because there were no such thing as The Wiggles back then.

this is kind of alarming

The CDC, however, reports that fewer women in high-risk categories, such as teenagers or unmarried women

Teenagers, okay, but "unmarried women" are in a high-risk category? That is either a very weird statistic or a very weird way of expressing it.

singleton full-term births

reactionary skepticism stuff:

* expressing differences in terms of percentages is not very useful - "10 times more likely" could be from a .0001 chance to a .001 chance
* the american journal of obstetrics and gynecology and New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center might not be totally unbiased when it comes to home birthing

but i don't really have a dog in this fight

yea i don't either, i mean, we pretty quickly ruled out a home-birth after briefly considering it, but i also felt somewhat skeptical of the study for those very reasons.

no more births on the way for me, so me neither - but that survey seems pretty broad and I'm not sure how the study could have been more objective

yeah "10 times more likely" sets off all of my statistician/philosophy of science alarm bells immediately whenever i see these sorts of things

So we specifically asked Nanny #2 not to take K to her own apartment (she lives in our building and did this with the kids she used to watch), and today I called and she was at her apartment -- hard to explain but I basically got it out of her. And K was napping in the stroller, which means not in her bed where she should be napping, even though there was no reason not to bring her back to our apartment and put her in the bed. She also claimed K fell asleep in the park, which is bullshit - never has happened, and makes me think she was just hanging out in the park with keren sitting in the stroller, because she didn't want to run after her. So angry right now.

Maybe K being in the apartment is not the end of the world, but the trust thing is really important. And also if she's in her apartment, that means other people are there, people who we don't know, etc.

What the hell?

yea that sucks hurting

ugh man so sorry for you.

having seen nannies in action I would never trust my kid to one

it's a shame, this one seemed at first like she had this great rapport with K, and there was much more talking and singing and whatnot going on, but if we can't trust her then what use is all that

this is really convincing me to just put her in daycare the second she turns 2

we're gonna have to come up with some arrangement for a few hours here and there but my first inclination is to lean on other parents we know or someone referred through our preschool co-op. feel like every nanny I see out in public is doing a shitty, half-assed job.

feel like every nanny I see out in public is doing a shitty, half-assed job.

totally sucks for all us parents but there is a part of me feels, like, who can blame them? the fact that J is my own flesh-and-blood son gives me, oh, i don't know, 75% more patience than i'd ever have with someone else's kids? even as J's actual dad i could still use more patience.

though i'm not discounting any frustration you should rightly feel. it totally sucks.

yeah it's partly kind of the nature of the arrangement - if you get paid a relatively small amount of money to watch a kid who you have no other connection to, it's the rare person who is going to give more than the minimum of a fuck needed. We thought this one was different, but I'd rather have K 100% safe with someone a little less dynamic or whatever.

the proliferation of nanny-dom is pretty interesting to me. such a thing was completely unheard of in my generation - I didn't no any kid that had a nanny. but post-90s it seems to have become increasingly common. maybe it's just cuz of where I am compared to where I grew up (urban vs. suburban) but this seems like a major shift in parenting in this country.

no = know

ugh

TBF, is it possible that more kids of our generation had stay-at-home parents? My mom was home until I was school-aged. I don't really know whether that was the norm or not, although i certainly had other friends with stay-at-home moms.

I mean I specifically remember having this one friend who had a nanny, which makes me think that maybe not many of my friends did.

i didn't know anyone who had a nanny growing up, but i grew up in the suburbs. some moms worked but almost all of them were home for their kids after school.

^^^yeah this arrangement was most common. I knew some moms worked, some didn't

My mom worked and said that she caught a fair amount of shit from people for that decision. She was a single mom so I'm not sure what they thought she should be doing instead... I grew up in a well-off, small town in rural Delaware so people were particularly judgy towards the single mom.

yeah & nowadays there aren't pensions that you're gonna keep getting if your spouse dies so there's more reason now for both partners to stay working, to keep their earnings steady & not falling behind, even if daycare / nannies eat most of the $ that one partner makes. well we didn't do things that way but we were both super young to have kids compared to others in my peer group / this board / etc; my wife's back in the work force now after staying home with three kids at the same time my friends are all starting to have their first kids.

Soooo we fired the nanny. And then our decision was confirmed by an e-mail from a friend who saw them at the park and said that she kept K in the stroller almost the entire time and sat on a bench talking to her friends. Really angry right now.

That's horrible! So sorry, Hurting. Glad you got rid of her. Makes me tear up just reading this.

So we specifically asked Nanny #2 not to take K to her own apartment (she lives in our building and did this with the kids she used to watch), and today I called and she was at her apartment

i mean that right there is all you need. "sorry it didn't work out! byeeeeeeeee!!"

yea good choice hurting

glad you fired her.

some friends of ours have this nanny who so fucking horrible, and they haven't fired her yet. it's crazy. she lost their toddler in the library and blamed it on the toddler, telling our friends "haha isn't H so stupid? she got lost in the library!" wild. and there are so many other stories about her just not giving a fuck. it's horrible but at this point our friends are really the assholes for not firing her. totally passive assholes. assholes who are insanely afraid of confrontation.

Man, the first one came back this morning and I was so happy to see her. She seems so fantastic by comparison -- there was never really anything wrong and we shouldn't have changed.

Yikes, marcos, that's really shitty of them. People can be that way though, slow to action for whatever reason. They are assholes, actually pisses me off just hearing about it.

i am terrified of confrontation but I would CUT a motherfucker if he/she's losing my baby AND bragging about it

if they don't give a fuck about their sole reason for employment then thry need to die in a fire

I agree

otm, I don't think I have ever felt so self-assured in my anger as yesterday when I was on my way home and just imagining what it would be like to see the nanny we fired (who had caused a big scene like a fucking baby when H fired her)

K has had a couple of rough nights, waking up crying a lot more than usual -- wondering if it's a delayed reaction stress kind of thing. Not only because of the shitty nanny but generally because of H going back to work and all the change.

The nanny caused a scene? Nothing is more frustrating, to me, than trying to understand someone who is in the wrong suffer the consequences for their actions and then feel it is all unfair.

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/children-today-are-suffering-a-severe-deficit-of-play/

Read this and the pondering of it is keeping me up late tonight.

Gosh, that's excellent. Is that theory well-known? I almost never see groups of unsupervised kids around anymore, especially not mixed-age ones; if I did I'd probably be a little uneasy at the sight, and I speak as someone who did a lot of it until my early teen years. I feel like I didn't do it very well though, somehow; that piece is making me reassess what was going on.

In our city we have this initiative called 'playing out' where neighbourhoods organise play sessions in residential streets which are temporarily closed off for this purpose - there are a few adults charged with keeping an eye on things but it's unstructured so kids can do what they want.

Our kid plays outside unsupervised with a group of other mixed-age local kids (between 6 and 13 or so). I know from going back to my parents' neighborhood, where I once ran amok with a similar group of hellions, that that's not the case everywhere. I guess both he and we are lucky. He's got those pickup football games, he's got tree-climbing, he's got both elementary school love drama and running around playing zombies/superheroes and pretending that sticks are guns or whatever.

Any of my recent visits to my old stomping grounds and I didn't really see anything like that. They live next to a huge playground and mixed-use sports field, but mostly I just see toddlers and littler kids running around out there. That may just be about shifting neighborhood demographics. Like there are olds there whose kids have already left the nest, but who wanted to stick around the neighborhood and a relatively smaller ground of younger families as those olds slowly move away/die off. But when I was growing up there, there were always multiple roving gangs of kids. And the kids I have talked to out there are all like "sport A; sport B; boy scouts; etc."