ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

she's actually gotten sort of cooperative with her arms in the sleeves. Also I always joke with her about getting "stuck" when I put the shirt over her head and she thinks that's hilarious.

i remember being terrified of getting stuck inside shirts when I was little

I'm feeling really shitty about the way first day of preschool went down this morning. I kind of just didn't get to say bye bye to K and I don't think she saw me walk out. I was sort of encouraged to leave quickly rather than linger, and maybe I took that a little too far.

when i drop my daughter off for preschool the moment she turns her head i slip out the door

i remember being terrified of getting stuck inside shirts when I was little

i was always terrified of the necks of shirts being slightly too small and squeezing down on my head and face

i think i still am

i've heard a few times that when dropping them off it's good to let kids know you're leaving, to make that a moment, even if they're shrieking their heads off. dunno how true that is, or if it's true for everyone.

i find that when i say goodbye it becomes a much harder transition + bigger upset than if i just kinda disappear

yeah i know, me too! i dunno.

You know what cracks me up? Pockets on baby clothes. Women's clothes? No pockets. But newborns have pockets all over the place.

they got lots of stuff, yo

re the saying goodbye thing, I think i have told this before but w/e, my nephew would flip the fuck out every morning at preschool not wanting my sister to leave...and the kooky teacher MADE HER STAY until he stopped crying. by the second week my sister was like, um I'm peacing out because this is just making a bad sitch way worse.

ime 99% of the time they stop crying 5 mins after you leave regardless of what you do

That was our experience with our oldest. He would make such a scene, but then once we were out of sight, would just turn around and start playing with his friends.

she seemed pretty happy and normal when I saw her again, fwiw. And when I asked if she liked school she said "yes"

You know what cracks me up? Pockets on baby clothes.

lol this is so fucking true, I have remarked upon it many times. usually just after babby has told me he can't find his keys or his wallet.

something to look forward to: http://nymag.com/news/features/adolescence-2014-1/

little mike has gotten past sleep regression (for now)but now has some sort of cold cough/wheeze thing that although certainly no big deal is totally terrifying as a parent. caught myself staring at him in the middle of the night like 1000 times thinking "wait is he breathing".

Wow! That article.... August is only 20 months old but her tantrums and hurts have reminded me of what I saw in my cousin-in-law at 15. I then noticed how most teens are just huge toddlers. Yikes.

Wendy: UGH! ... I was the same with any congestion at all. Recently August had a fever for 24 hours or so and I was a wreck. It was her first none vaccine related fever. I took her temp like every ...2 minutes (I know). I was losing my mind. Since it wasn't too high I refrained from giving her meds and hoped the fever was killing whatever was trying to get her.

K has started waking up in the middle of the night and doing this particular, low moaning kind of whiny cry for 5-10 minutes, where nothing helps her get back to sleep. It is *THE* *MOST* *ANNOYING* *SOUND* *IN* *THE* *WORLD*. Like it sends me into murderous rage. I felt really terrible about this, and then my wife admitted to me last night that she feels the same. I think it's even worse because we live in a co-op and have neighbors who I know we are waking up, so I get extremely stressed out by her making this awful cry and there being nothing we can do.

good thing it's only 5-10 minutes. i've just kind of put our neighbors completely out of my mind, just kind of accepted that there are going to be some loud nights. we live in a two-family home and the downstairs neighbors have a 4-year old, so i think they get it still.

guys, we've been doing ferber, J is finally, finally, finally, learning how to fall asleep on his own. no nursing, rocking, bouncing, singing, patting, etc., it's kind of a miracle. we've been getting longer stretches of sleep then we ever have. after 16 months of what feels like no sleep (probably 5 hours a night was not unusual), it feels so good to be making some progress. it's still kind of rough going, though, he's still learning and there are still some terrible nights when J protests for a long time, easily an hour or so. we did kind of a very gradual build-up to ferber, starting with cutting out the night-nursing, then cutting out the rocking, then stopped picking up from the crib.

Ivy has gone to sleep at 10 or 11 and then slept until 5:30 or so the last three nights. I'm assuming this amazing thing is temporary but dang, I am enjoying it while it lasts.

Also holy shit this kid never stops eating. She'll nurse for 20-40 minutes, snooze for five or ten, then wake up and immediately start in with the lip smacking and rooting. I'm hanging in there with breast feeding and my supply still meets her demand (thanks to NICU baby pumping initially creating a major oversupply) but it is exhausting.

Love that update so much, except for the part where you're tired! But baby lip-smacking is just...yeah.

When she gets really hungry she'll open her mouth and start whapping her face against me while making this little "rrrrrr eh eh eh" noise like a gremlin.

Oh like right now. Hi, baby.

Hi, Ivy! The internet people love you!

classmate: Oliver is eating a meat donut!
Veronica: that's a bagel, silly

meat on a bagel??

don't look at me dude. at Noah's they sell bagels with fucking bacon on them

um, lox?

fish != meat, that's why you i can eat it w/ cream cheese...

...and Catholics can eat it on Fridays during Lent.

fish is absolutely meat.

Under jewish law, chicken = meat but fish does not. You are (or were) supposed to eat meat on the sabbath, but for Jews who couldn't afford meat, they made a special exception for chicken as long as you treated it like meat and did not combine with milk.

interestingly, chicken = meat is only by rabbinical decree. acc to the torah poultry isn't meat.

i don't think i'd heard the 'poor jews eating chicken' explanation before - i learnt that it was about confusing the two bc of textures + animalness

also i don't think sephardim eat fish w/ milk either -- maybe for same reason? i don't know wtf they do about cream cheese + lox tho. does not sound like a way to live.

right, that's what I mean, rabbinic decree that it could be treated as meat for jews who couldn't afford meat. But that might be bubbemeise.

Trying first night with baby in crib, not in room

Aaaahhhhhh this is so weird

a toast to that weirdness my friend

This is just terrible

The day we moved back to a 2-bedroom and K got her own room was one of the happiest days of my life

It would be bad form if I just posted "aaaaggghgggjhhhhhhh" here every 5 minutes for the rest of the night huh

how's the little one handling it?

lol K was waking us up every 20 minutes last night until 2:30 at which point we were finally like "fuck this, cry it out." She went through an epic tantrum in which she went through every manner of screaming and every possible request:

"WATER!!!!
"MILK!!!!"
"COME OUT!!!"
"YOU NEED TO COOL OFF!!!!" (this is what I tell her when I put her in the crib for time out)
"UP!!!!"
"BLANKET!!!!"
"TUCK IN!!!!"
"DADDY TO READ BOOK!!!!!"
"MOMMY HERE!!!!"
etc.

haha, so funny and disgraceful.

HOW DO I INSTALL PARENTS VISTA

MODS!

Did she ever go to sleep?

Yeah it actually didn't take that long - maybe 10-15 mins? We were actually stifling laughter in our bedroom, which felt sort of guilty.

I was dying at her screaming "YOU NEED TO COOL OFF!!! YOU NEED TO COOL OFF!!!"