ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

Aw hell, I really miss the days when we'd just stick her in the sink. She loved that.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/t31.0-8/201626_10150222885263783_3502721_o.jpg

<3

Cute!

never had a code brown really. altho I do recall the first time (when she was an infant) that Veronica saw poop coming out of her body and she freaked the fuck out. which makes a kind of sense, "hey part of my body just is no longer part of my body!" you can see how that would be traumatic if you had no concept of what was going on. like if all of a sudden their foot fell off or something.

Sooooooo sweet! I miss sink days.

Οὖτις, :Makes sense!

Re: adoption

Time wise it is actually kind of a mixed blessing and it will happen sometime in the next 12 months, hopefully.

― joygoat, Monday, April 7, 2014 10:14 PM (4 months ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWa0dZMHYeE

Last time it was a sketchy situation, last minute, birth mom backed out and was never serious in the first place. We've met with a new one (and her girlfriend, long story) three times now including them coming 75 miles to see our house and the crib we just bought and bringing us baby clothes as a gift so this one feels legit. Feels really surreal right now.

Oh my gosh I am so excited for you.

A+++ hooray

Oh, best of luck!

^

good luck dudes

Crossing everything for you!

People keep telling me what a great age six months is, and they're right!

our girl is now at two weeks and i am praying for this day to come asap.

Don't wish it away! We grieve for that tiny baboo curled up like a little frog snoozing on your chest.

there is no snoozing. there is only screaming.

Yeah, I am having a blast with Ivy now and she is super awesome but I see little tiny babyloafs and get a little pang when remembering that age, too, just because it's gone for good. I even forgot, until I was thinking about it last night, that she went through a phase where she wouldn't sleep at all, day or night, unless someone was holding her.

xp yes something like that, although not that bad.

we had those issues for like a week, and then I remembered that I could swaddle them

ya, that works for all of 10 seconds.

Have you tried Dr Karp's 5 S's?

http://www.babycenter.com/0_harvey-karps-happiest-baby-method-for-baby-sleep-and-soothin_10373838.bc

Scarily, shockingly effective; the whole idea is that you're simulating what it was like inside the womb

my son was like why are you trying to shove me back into a womb I just busted out of one of those LIKE SO

lol

Miracle Blanket.

Everybody has kids, right? Everyone knows about Diaper Genies and microwave steamers for cleaning the bottles. But if there's one thing we learned that we pass on like sages, it's the wonders of the miracle blanket.

Miracle Blanket didn't work for us.

Well did you follow the directions correctly and do the part where you wheel the crib out into the garage?

What is this microwave steaming for bottles?

http://www.amazon.com/Philips-AVENT-Microwave-Steam-Sterilizer/dp/B007VBXKG2

http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/baby/detail-page/c26-B007VBXKG2-2-l.jpg

God the crap they market to parents

Microwave sterilisers are awesome.

After we were done with the bottles, I just started going around the house looking for other shit to sterilize, like soda bottles or those little rubber coin purses that they give out at banks.

I think the baby wipe warmer was the most shameful thing we purchased.

looool

Hey man changing a newborn baby in an apartment in an old house without central heating during the polar vortex, we wished we had a damn wipe warmer. Nothing like a freezing cold wet cloth to the butt to really get a baby's lungs working.

Have you tried Dr Karp's 5 S's?
http://www.babycenter.com/0_harvey-karps-happiest-baby-method-for-baby-sleep-and-soothin_10373838.bc
Scarily, shockingly effective; the whole idea is that you're simulating what it was like inside the womb

for a second I though "scary" and "shocking" were two of your 5 "S"s! but ya - was taught the five S's in prenatal class. but results are fleeting - only seems to calm her down for a few minutes before she's back to crying.

I think a certain percentage of the 5s technique is just giving you a tool, any tool, to help you feel like you have a grip on this crazy situation, and any tiny increase in parental calmness and confidence, especially as expressed in an actually soothing physical action, will help calm a child

5s didn't all work for us, maybe more like 2s or 3s. they also maxed out on effectiveness around 3 months

I don't have any magic advice (I don't think there is any magic advice) but I have lots of sympathy/empathy because this situation sounds frustrating and exhausting and I hope the little one moves beyond it soon. Really soon.

imo the only universal tools that every parent w an infant needs are patience and endurance - everything else is a case-by-case basis

congrats joygoat!!!

we are in trimester three. there's a three-year-old in the house now. I am prepared for the mayhem, which is to say, I must continue to assure myself that I am prepared for the mayhem.

Aw. 3 year olds rule, but are masters of mayhem. Last night mine was convinced that she could do a jumping flip from one bed to the other.

xpost Same deal except with a four-year-old. Weirdest thing for me is for baby one we did an intensive, months-long birth class, and while I assume we don't need to take it again, I also feel like I've forgotten everything about birth and hospitals. We are taking a one-day refresher course on Saturday, hopefully that'll be enough.

I got to hold someone's new baby recently and I felt like it wasn't that long ago when I was doing this daily, but I sure wasn't used to it.

thermo we had a really rough newborn/young infant stage. like hours and hours of crying, definitely colic. lots of other parents said their kids cried a lot too but when we told them how much J cried, they were like "yea our kid doesn't do that." J could put in 4 hours of crying. it's fucking hard. sleep in general was always hard for us, J didn't start sleeping through the night until the past few months and he'll be 2 in a few weeks. he'll still wake up here and there.

motion helped a little bit, we had this exercise ball that we bounced on (though i don't think we used it until maybe 3 or 4 months). the carriers helped a lot, the moby/ergo etc.

beyond that though, we wished that we got J checked for reflux early on. turns out that he had it but by the time we found out about it, he was about 9 months and upright a lot more and it passed.

but in general J is a high-strung kid, we see chill babies and toddlers a lot and they seem very different from J. lots of parents told us how wonderful the first few months are because you can just take them around in that portable car seat thing and go out to bars, restaurants, whatever. that was fucking impossible for us, J really didn't seem happy unless he was in motion and otherwise just cried most of the time.

the first few months are hell incarnate, everyone knows this but has to lie about it, it's one of the ten commandments iirc

Thanks everyone. It's kind of weird to not really worry day to day about a pregnancy because it's happening elsewhere. I trust the birth mom, she's really level headed and mature about it all, doctor's visits are going well, all that. She's got her birth plan figured out like a heist film, who will be where, when the baby will get handed off, and when we will rendezvous later in order to minimize her emotional trauma. She wants to see us with the baby but outside the hospital.

But I'm starting to get freaked out about actually having a baby around. How did you all figure out what to do? We've got maybe 10 weeks and are starting to look at books, think about formula, all that sort of thing. How much can you plan ahead and how much do you just have to deal with as it comes?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bocKIlZIGwE/U2F0x8looyI/AAAAAAAAAoM/gZ2aS2-fHq8/s1600/lasciate_ogne_speranza__voi_ch___intrate___by_sbi29-d59qxyw.gif

How did you all figure out what to do?

improvisation

we read a bunch of books for first baby, idk how much of it was actually useful but it made us *feel* more prepared which is perhaps just as important

i pretty much felt like there was little i could do to prepare until the baby was there. we used all those sleepless nights in the beginning for preparation. one of us held the crying baby, the other person read dr. sears "the baby book." we must have read 300 pages of that book in the first few weeks.