ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

I put this song up against anything on pop radio right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxMrtK-kYnE

Plus K will ONLY let us brush her teeth while watching it.

Making birthday cakes is fucking hard.

Oh god I totally failed at icing Evie's cake this year and ended up tossing it in the dumpster and buying one at the bakery literally an hour before her party. Big globs of gross melting pink icing everywhere.

Cake actually ended up tasting great (Smitten Kitchen recipe) but it was a stupid amount of work and icing is a bitch.

Smitten Kitchen resides are often delicious and a huge PIA.

To be honest I was reasonably okay with the whole thing until I had to sift 3 3/4 cups powdered sugar to make the buttercream icing. That was the point where I was like okay this is bullshit I have better things to do with my time. Adding the tinting, icing and lettering and I'm like I am never doing this again.

There's a lot of stuff in baking and cooking that seems to me like it can only be accomplished in the allotted time once you've done it like 50 times before.

only learnt this after years of frustration but i found it's a lot easier to prep the items before you start (if you can), sift flours, melt butter, etc, that way the time you take is mostly mixing + cooking. less stressful that way.

Ugh. I need a personal chef.

yeah it aint for everybody :)

I'm like the worst prepper ever. Pretty much just add 50-100% to the time a recipe lists when I cook it because of how long my prep takes.

Yeah I prepped the cake and while that was cooling I did the icing prep, but it didn't matter the order because sifting that much powder sugar was an insane pain no matter what order I did it in.

Babies first day of daycare tomorrow. House full of bummed out.

;_;

daycare seems like a bad thing until you actually see the staff in action and you realize they do a great job (assuming you found a good place)

Oh no, I get that, but k is having to leave the kid for the first time, so it's pretty rough for her - rationally we are both down with the situation, and thx to close parents and my weird ass schedule there's going to lots of quality fan time as well, but first time separation is a tough thing. I was pretty bummed when I had to go back to work, and that was 11 weeks ago.

Basically I am not sad for the kid, he's probably going to have a pretty awesome time, I'm sad/sympathetic for her.

yeah it's a rough first week but I have only had great experiences with daycare and really came to appreciate the work they do wish they got paid a lot more

Yeah it's easy to bitch abt the cost of daycare until you do the math and realize that soon enough you will be paying some rando babysitting high school kid more per hour to ignore your kid and watch tv in your house.

Not of course that that has stopped me from doing so, probably somewhere upthread

we're increasingly thinking daycare when she's old enough for the good one. All the inconsistency seems like a lot of strain on her, and on us too -- one day the babysitter comes, another day I take her on the subway, another day her grandma comes over. I think knowing what to expect would make her less anxious.

She's actually come to understand that Saturday is the day Mom and dad don't go to work, which is kind of sweet. She doesn't actually understand when it falls in the week, but when she wakes up and we're both there, she says "Shabbat" (Saturday).

Plus daycare involves licensing, training, and there are more sets of eyes on your kids and on the people watching your kids. With a nanny you never really know what you're getting. We already had one bad experience.

I think it's probably good for the kids to be around other kids, too. I mean, what do I know. We're putting our kid in daycare because that's our only option financially, but that seemed like a good benefit.

Hank Sr was sick last week. I was taking Beeps in there anyway, and stopped in his classroom to talk to his teacher. Couldn't get out without four members of the Lollipop Guild cornering me and asking about how he was doing.

"Does he have a fever?"
"Did he go to the doctor?"
"Did he go to the hospital?"
"My great-great-great grandfather died at the hospital and now lives with Jesus."

I told H that Ethan was asking about him, and he replied, "no, no. Wyatt's my friend."

Oh man, I love how they can only have one friend. Sorta like "I don't love you. I love mommy" or whatever.

there can be only one

must be his Scottish ancestry

I hope there's no beheading involved.

kid dropped off, feeling a lot better about the whole thing. of course this morning he wouldn't take a bottle at first no matter what, kept spitting it out or choking on it or whatever which led to me having some vague paranoid fantasy that he didn't like reheated milk, or it was too old and had gone bad, or was freezerburned or like 15 other panic strategies - after which I realized that we hadn't bottle fed him for about a week and was prob just bottle confused, tried again and bingo. im a pretty levelheaded calm dude but wow, kid problems are a path to pure freakout mode sometimes.

when we first visited the daycare it was naptime in the infant room (lights dimmed, a row of cribs, a bunch of people silently wandering around the room) so i have been dreading the idea that it was just basically a turning babies into money factory. today everything was bright and exciting, people talking to infants like people, michael just staring around and chattering. feel so much better about this whole thing now. also the kid to handler ratio is pretty good i think, 3 caregivers for 6 infants. whew. what a morning.

must be his Scottish ancestry

I forgot to tell you that Officer Phil – this big 50something muscled-up bald ex-cop with a Santa Claus beard who works security for the daycare – was dressed up as Braveheart/William Wallace on Halloween. Blue paint, kilt, mace and everything.

I asked Beeps if she knew what he was and her reply was "a bagpipe player."

A BAGPIPE PLAYER????

hahah

One thing that's tough about the inconsistency of our arrangement is...the inconsistency. E.g. the babysitter gives K her regularly scheduled meals and snacks, just like we do. But her grandma keeps telling us that K "ate constantly today," which basically means grandma FED her constantly, on demand, instead of keeping a schedule. She has this problem with other things too, for example, she once suddenly got into this panic about videos and sent me all these articles about why videos are bad for your child's brain or whatever and she texted me "We have to take video completely out of her routine. All she wants to do is watch it all day." Well the thing is, when K wants to watch videos all day with us, we use a technique known as "no" and don't give in just because she whines.

why does babby always play video games??? itisamystery.gif

im hoping that the inconsistency of michaels childcare will just keep him constantly on the ropes, thus making him more malleable and docile. its like breaking a horse. except its a baby. and people get mad if you try to throw a saddle on it.

Yeah, and even with our crazy routine, there's a consistency to the inconsistency I guess, and she is getting used to it -- she knows what to expect with us, with the babysitter, and with grandma. Maybe it just makes her more "adaptable" or something.

we're probably going to be able to avoid doing daycare, due to both of us working part-time and one set of grandparents stepping in. not sure how people manage it financially. and this is in Australia, where the govt throws lots of $$ at daycare facilities.

having said that, man do people get super defensive and angry when you express mild reservations about whether daycare might not be 100% the best thing for babies/very little kids.

I'm not sure how people afford it either. We're sort of going to wing it and hope it works out. I do have dependent care benefits through work, so I can take $5K a year out of my paycheck pre-tax to pay for part of it. Good thing is that it gets cheaper the bigger they get. We'll also try to only do 4 days a week to save some cash.

yeah were doing the $5K child care thing too. anybody know if that payment can still be deducted come tax time?

when you express mild reservations about whether daycare might not be 100% the best thing for babies/very little kids

parents are an insecure bunch because we don't know how to do it, are just faking it all the way, and it can be hard to react well when it seems like someone is judging your steez. what you call "expressing mild reservations" might have been interpreted as "doubting my choices".

possibly--was very careful to be mild, not like I know what I'm doing either

I have no clue about the tax implications, because I'm incredibly stupid with such things. The dependent care money is only going to cover about a 1/3 of the year for childcare expenses. No idea how that effects the eligibility for the childcare tax credit.

OK, I guess with the tax credit we could only get $600 a year, since we make both make combined more than 43K a year. Using the dependent care flex account, we would save twice that.

btw in case American parents are tired of hearing from the britishers how awesome their health care is we deal with the same criminally high child care costs

cool, global anti-family conspiracies

Been off ILX a bit because we got a puppy and with August and puppy at the same age, it seems...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7341/10710907076_7fe712d75b.jpg

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5537/10710867094_cc590f1464.jpg

someone is always being a little too rough with the other

parents are an insecure bunch because we don't know how to do it, are just faking it all the way, and it can be hard to react well when it seems like someone is judging your steez.

lol being a parent has made me totally judgmental of other parents

August + puppy = <3

lol being a parent has made me totally judgmental of other parents

oh me too. it's impossible not to be. and it feels so goddamned good!