ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

This whole "stay in the room with her when she goes to sleep (and when she wakes up in the middle of the night)" thing is leading to weird, disorienting sleep patterns for me. Sometimes I wake up on the mattress in her room in the morning still clothed. Sometimes I find my wife there, same. Last night I accidentally fell asleep at 8:30 pm there, woke up at 11:30pm, worked from then until 4:00am, then slept from then until 6:30am in my bed, at which point K woke up again, resulting in me staying with her another hour so I could get a little more sleep.

Ugh I'm still messed up. I fall asleep, sometimes still in work clothes, in different parts of the house every night

Xpost way up thread: I can honestly say I've cried on the 3 hour drive to and from Memphis multiple times in the last decade. I'm not the greatest roadtrip companion. Being a passenger is terrifying.

9 month checkup today - super healthy, kicking ass in cognitive and motor skills stuff, 70% weight to height ratio, but Michael is way at the bottom/off the charts low on height and weight for his age. Logically I realize that's a totally arbitrary and unimportant thing, but it weirds me out a little.

Evie was at the bottom of the weight charts until she started solid food, then she plumped up fast.

Ivy is a shorty, too. Even for her due date, as opposed to her birthdate, she's on the short end of things. I totally understand being weirded out about it, despite intellectually knowing that it is a totally arbitrary and unimportant thing. At Ivy's early development intervention eval on Wednesday, she tested on the low end of her acceptable range, particularly with passing things from hand to hand and grabbing her toes. Again, logically, no big deal but there's always this nagging worry that something is wrong. Then last night when I was out with coworkers, she started rolling over on her own. So my mantra is basically "She'll get there." And if I start to really question something, I ask myself if I would love her any less if she ended up being short or needing physical or occupational therapy or had a diagnosed delay of some sort, and the answer is a resounding FUCK NO. So that's been a helpful thing for me to remember, too.

so the other day V remarked how she saw two birds standing on each other and bobbing up and down = I guess it's time for "How Babies Are Made" (oddly she was not particularly interested in this question when her little brother was made). Have been wondering how to broach this. My wife was of the opinion that we should wait until she starts asking questions but I was kind of of the opinion that she might never ask and what then? Better to give her actual information than her be too shy to ask or unquestioningly absorb whatever nonsense the other little morons in her class will tell her. I seem to recall being around 6 or 7 when the basics of reproduction were imparted to me (although it was of course a bit longer before I understood the actual details). Anyone got any experience to chime in with re: the sex ed

i say be honest, practical, sincere and no-nonsense about it and you can't go wrong. i probably wouldn't just bring it up out of the blue though.

I am reminded of something our preschool teacher once said when there was a parent clamoring about how he wanted to tell his 4yo (and, most irritatingly, any other children in earshot) about reproduction and she pointed out that if you tell them when they're that young, they're just going to immediately experiment with sticking things in their genitals/sticking their genitals in things, so its best to wait until they have some self-control/self-awareness of their bodies. (I hated this dad for other reasons, to be fair, but I was pretty pissed that he thought it was his perogative to impart this information to other people's children without their knowledge/permission). Anyways, V's 6 1/2 now so I think she's probably past that particular milestone but you never know.

I never asked and thankfully my parents never told me.

My memory of it is that my parents started with this vague, partial explanation of what sex was that I only found more mystifying. I didn't really *get* it until I actually took sex ed in school (6th grade?)

I am really just seeking validation here but is it okay to just archive emails without responding to them when they have been sitting in my inbox for a month? It is the tail end of a conversation with a cousin of mine whom I like a lot but am not very close to, and it's my turn to respond but I don't really have anything else to say.

(Asking here because my ability to respond to chatty personal email has gone down the toilet since I went back to work and I'm just tired all the time and pine for the olden days of inbox zero.)

yes

So once your child starts walking and talking they pull you into social situations you'd rather skip, right?

I'm a shy introvert, strangers cause me anxiety unless I feel they are open and friendly. The type that just sit there, posturing, taking themselves all too seriously just send me in the opposite direction. August brought me into their circle yesterday at the farmers market and I was horrified.

She took a very light weight, small, plastic ball and threw it over the head of a girl who was 8 or 9 years old. The girl cried like, well, a baby. I went with August to retrieve the ball and we apologized to the girl who was being held by her older sister who was maybe 12. Then I noticed we were in a den of the types I am not comfortable with. They were all sitting there, languidly under the tree and staring. August went up to their dog, tried to play with their much younger child and the whole time I am silently freaking out, perspiring and heart thumping. I want to just get out of there. They were not friendly, didn't look happy, seemed annoyed. UGHGRRRRR! All my sweetly delivered exit lines to August were really calm and controlled but behind them was a shit load of anger and anxiety. Once we got out of there, I had to just leave.

Two or three new families recently moved into my apartment complex. They all seem to know each other or be related to each other. There are at least three kids, one about 2 years old, one about 4-5, and one 6. It's mostly good because Evie is really excited to have other kids her age around, and when they're all playing in the backyard, they seem to get along pretty well and play well with each other. But there are two weird/annoying aspects:
* The parents let the kids run around by themselves while they mostly stay in their apartments, very rarely popping out onto their porches to see what's going on. We don't let Evie play outside by herself so me and/or Sarah are always around, so we end up being the default parents, trying to make sure squabbles get resolved and no one gets hurt. A few times they've opened up the gate and gone out into the alley, which is not a safe place for young kids. Generally it's not that big a deal but I don't want to be responsible for other people's kids.
* More troublesome is that the 4-5-year-old has no boundaries about other apartments. He's tried to go into our apartment a few times, and yesterday he opened the screen door and walked into our neighbor's apartment, and I know there are no kids in there and he has no connection to that neighbor. Another person in the complex said he's walked into her place before too. It's annoying and also obviously unsafe, but I don't really want to have a big confrontation with his parents about it.

Add this in to the weird old guy who lives in the building next door who constantly talks about what an angel Evie is and how he watches us when we're outside on his security cameras and gave Evie candy through the fence yesterday, and I'm ready to look for a new apartment.

Ew. Double Ew.

yikes

I'm still in the "hey, they lifted their heads unaided!" phase

yiiiiiiiikes

Ugh NA, that's no good. My wife and I are often the default parents at our local playground. The kids are mostly in the same age range as my 10-year-old, who we allow to go there on his own, but we like to bring our 3-year-old there as well. This has led to us having to intervene in a few disputes. It's always a little awkward.

We don't really have anyone in the neighborhood under maybe age 7 who is allowed outside unsupervised. There was one kid when we first moved in who was basically freely roaming about on his own because his dad was an addict. At one point (when he was 4 or 5) he got hit by a car. Didn't change his dad's mind about supervising him though. My wife would basically take him in during the summer because the dad would send him outside to play everyday in 90 degree Maryland humidity. Glad they're gone. Hope the kid is in good hands, somewhere.

yeah that sounds awful. I hate talking to other people's kids, generally, and having to maintain order...no way.

Yeah I don't know. The families are of undetermined Asian descent and have varying English skills so there's probably a cultural/language issue going on too. Sorry if I'm a racist now.

Oh, I was just figuring they were dustheads.

Somewhat relevant to this discussion:

http://inequalitybyinteriordesign.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/are-class-difference-in-parenting-style-disappearing/

Thanks. I know I'm probably on the over-parenting side. When we went camping with extended family recently, it seemed like other people were ok with not knowing where their kids were sometimes, assuming that they were in the general area and that someone was keeping an eye on them. I like to know where Evie is and know for sure that someone is monitoring her.

And yeah these families seem ok and responsible as far as I can tell, though we haven't had much direct contact. The yard is fenced in so the kids are probably fine as long as they're in the yard. I think it's mainly the "wandering into other people's apartments at random" thing that's stressing me out. Probably someone just needs to let the parents know that he's been doing that.

Next time he wanders in, hand him a beer.

I'm going to have Ivy wear a GPS.

Yeah there was a news story yesterday that had Jeff and I unapologetically shopping for toddler leashes so we are at least right there on the same page with you, NA.

When I was about Evie's age we lived in a courtyard apartment in a small city and my mom used to let me play out in the yard with all the idiot neighbor kids and I ran away a couple of times (not out of anger - I was just bored). My dad once found me wandering along a heavy-traffic road (think Ashland or Western) when he was coming home from work. It was the first time I ever got grounded.

So yeah. Leash, GPS, whatever, only God can judge me.

*straps baby into carrier; helicopters away*

imo as kids get older its important - formative even - for them to have some degree of unsupervised time to interact with other kids. I feel like between the ages of 7-12 or so I spent a LOT of time just running around with other kids in the neighborhood. I always had to tell my parents where I was going/what I was doing (playing baseball in the street, going to ___'s house) and yeah sometimes I wandered away or got in trouble or was exposed to stuff my parents would not have liked but in retrospect these were important experiences where I was learning what the outside world was really like and how to navigate it. My oldest daughter is 6 so she's not really there yet, but there's clearly a community of kids forming in our building - some of whose parents I like, some I don't - but as she gets older I fully expect her to go wandering around the building with other kids, to a certain extent. The important thing is to a) have open communication with the other parents in the building (it takes a village yadda yadda) and b) instilling certain decision-making processes in my child so that she can make appropriate decisions (don't take candy from strangers etc.)

haha I was googling toddler tracking devices this weekend

we have one of these, but didn't use it as often as we thought we would.

http://www.amazon.com/Eddie-Bauer-Harness-Buddy-Monkey/dp/B0054U4RLO

I dunno I wanna teach my kid that I trust them, and that they can earn that trust, not that I'm here to keep them on a leash

I tired the Filip out for work research, and it was pathetic. Like 6 hour battery life.

And I hope to let my (now 7-year-old) boys out to play by themselves soon. Luckily I live in a less-fancy neighborhood, so I don't think I will be judged as much.

(XP) I'm broadly of the same opinion, also because I think kids need to learn to negotiate, sort out disagreements etc. while they're relatively young and learn the consequences of risk taking. Stuff that turns you into a decent grown-up, really. How I'll feel about this once Fox reaches that age, though, I'm not sure. It might be a moot point because no kids round here roam about like I used to.

My mum had me in reins (do you really call them leashes in the US or is that just slang?) because I had a tendency to bolt and if you do a lot of walking in a place with a lot of traffic, it just seems sensible to me.

Hi my name is VG and I was a leash-baby

me2

yeah me too

wow I didn't know they had been around that long (or else you guys are way younger than I thought)

like I didn't even know those things existed until they were parodied on the Simpsons in the mid-90s

yeah mine was like a harness that had a leash attached to the back

I am 38 fyi

if you do a lot of walking in a place with a lot of traffic, it just seems sensible to me.

Bingo.

I'm all for fostering independence but I'm talking about toddlers. And NA's daughter is 3* so wanting to watch her when she's playing in the yard, especially when she's playing with other kids, is not exactly being a hovering, overprotective parent, IMO.

*I feel she would be cross with me if I did not tell you that she is almost 4.

Oh and yes, we really call them leashes in the US.

yeah toddlers you gotta watch cuz otherwise they're going to be hitting each other over the head with shit, crying, running away etc. no argument there

exception being MAYBE if they were accompanied by a much older sibling

And even without older kids having some kind of nefarious motive, it's pretty easy for an excited six year old to push down a three year old in the heat of the moment so you want to be there to stop the madness/comfort the afflicted and it would be really useful in those situations if there was someone in a position of authority over the perpetrator to be like cut that shit out.

this weekend we were joking with some visitors that we planned to send the boys over to their house to help them landscape this summer; reading this current thread digression with the vestiges of the conversation in the back of my mind is generating images of us putting 4-month-old twins out on the sidewalk in front of our building with instructions to play responsibly

That's very Scandinavian of you.