ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

Thanks everyone.

I had a real freakout when I was looking at diaper things and realized they all had a system of refills you had to buy into and one of them only had vague "holds up to 72 diapers" and I have no idea if that's a lot or a little, or if that was for like one refill which seemed ridiculous and then I stepped back and remembered that my parents probably just tossed diapers into the woods behind our house and I turned out fine.

Kind of can't wait to actually have a baby around to give me something legit to freak out about instead of this weird limbo of waiting.

CONGRATS JOYGOAT

We finalized our adoption today so I'm pretty fucking stoked right now

Awesome!

fuck yeah adoption city :D

YAY!

CONGRATS DJP

i kind of teared up at your photo, no joke

This has made me really happy! You guys are amazing.

All the best and congrats, joy goat and djp. Fun times await! That's not sarcasm, by the way.

And we just use a biggish kitchen bin with a swinging lid to dump the disposable, compost able nappies we use in. If we empty it every 1 or 2 days there's no smell problem. Nice and cheap, which is good, because the compostaqble nappies are not.

why is my stupid kid always losing sweaters

like she is literally incapable of owning a sweater/sweatshirt for more than a month

Feel the same way about belts.

"where's your sweater?"
"I dunno"
"Did you leave it at school?"
"I dunno"
"Did you wear it to school?"
"I dunno"
"Do you remember when you wore it last?"
"I dunno"

next time I'm just gonna send you to school in a potato sack. DON'T LOSE YOUR SACK.

Lately K wakes up in a bad mood every day, don't know what's up with it - we're pretty consistent about bedtime and reasonable amounts of sleep. I've taken to just leaving the room until she decides to chill the fuck out.

DJP and joygoat, your updates make me very happy. I still think about adoption sometimes, although I am leaving it pretty damn late and am single and a graduate student and and and

xp yea! J has had bouts of that. wakes up SO fucking upset, it's like i go in there and he just starts screaming. sometimes i'll try to lay him back down and pat his back for a while and that can work, but other times he just flips out even more when i do that. reading stories sometimes helps. otherwise though yea i'll just leave him to calm down on his own for a few minutes

for all the tired moms:
http://the-toast.net/2014/10/20/women-trying-sleep-unsuccessfully-western-art-history/

The next panel in the comic...

http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/thumbnail/107104/1/Judith-Beheading-Holofernes,-C.1648-54.jpg

We made a girl. Nora arrived at 5:47am this morning, weighing 7lbs 4.

Hey! Congratulations!!!

Speaking of birthdays, Ivy is one today! Amazing.

congratulations scik!!!

and happy birthday ivy!

Congrats to you and your lovely wife :)

Thank you, and happy birthday Ivy.

Happy birthdays, Ivy and Nora!

Congrats SM!

^the same things all these guys said! Such good news.

Nice, one, scik! Congratulations!

Nora's a lovely name, congratulations!

congratulations nick, that's awesome. happy birthday ivy!

Congrats!

I can't believe Ivy's been here a year. Ridic.

Nice, one, scik! Congratulations!

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Tuesday, November 18, 2014 8:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can't help but hear this to the tune of 311's Down: "It's your mix/Congratulations!"

Thanks all.

oh cool now every single member of my family is sick (V was the last holdout, but now she has a fever of 103)

this oughta be fun

oh and congrats scik! so much to look forward to

J is sick, my wife is sick, and i have been trying to ward it off but i'm still having a beer every night and i don't imagine that's helping. man parenting J when he is sick, it's like all bets are off. totally unpredictable. is he going to eat? maybe. sleep? nap? not sure. will he be up from 4:30am-5:30am? sure! will he take a 40 minute nap or a 3 hour nap? let's see! any waking hours he is cranky as fuck. this blows.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to learn to do a little girl's hair, being as I'm the one dressing her every morning? I've actually found trying to make K look nice (buying stuff for her, choosing outfits) to be an unexpected pleasure of dadhood, but I have no idea what the hell to do with her hair -- it's sort of medium length and a little bit frizzy/curly. In order to brush it without it getting blown out I find I have to wet it down slightly. Sometimes I put little clips in it but the placement often winds up looking funny to me.

Feeling this - http://streetsblog.net/2014/11/20/the-idea-that-families-dont-belong-in-the-city-is-antiquated-and-harmful/

(courtesy of Jeff)

sometimes when people say "in cities you have to watch out for the schools" they mean "they don't have enough of the kinds of parents with whom I want to associate"

and sometimes not

eh sometimes the schools are just shitty too

True, and sometimes people are just racist.

ha, that's fair.

we'd love to stay in boston. i love my job, our neighborhood is great, we have friends here, boston is a great city and it's super fun to live in the city. but the schools are pretty shitty and while there's a chance that J could get into one of the better public schools a lot of the process is fairly random afaik. we could take that chance but we might not get what we'd ideally want. private school is just too expensive too.

but tbh though i think one of the main reasons we probably won't stay here is the price of housing. we'd probably have to continue renting forever, and i guess that's an option, but there is something about the lack of stability that is somewhat scray. we simply can't afford a $400,000 home, and that seems like it's as good as it gets. for what we want (a modest 3 bedroom) it's more like $500,000 or $600,000. we could live in a shitty 2br condo for $300,000 but that's not super appealing.

feeling pretty much everything about marcos' post and we aren't anywhere near the school decision atm. trying to figure out how much we reasonably have to spend to get into a Newton starter house and hoping we can find something under $500K

I'm all for urban living with kids, but it seems like most people who do it still prefer low-rise/rowhousish neighborhoods that are closer to walkable suburbs. And I think that's understandable -- there's a certain constrained feeling you get walking around a very dense urban area that also has heavy car traffic (e.g. many manhattan neighborhoods), like you almost have to have a small child on a leash. There is something to be said for yards, woods, space, also for having a place on your own property where your child can play outside unattended. Whatever though, I mean, obviously lots more people ARE choosing to live in cities with kids than a couple decades ago, it's a widely noted trend.

The other thing is that certain cities (NYC, SF etc.) are getting very expensive to live in with kids -- choosing a neighborhood for us felt like this insane and exhaustive process of matrixing various factors and it really felt like there was only one neighborhood we could find that was within a good commute of our jobs, relatively safe, with good schools, and affordable to us, and it lacks a lot of other things we'd like.

eh sometimes the schools are just shitty too

― marcos, Thursday, November 20, 2014 1:45 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

True, and sometimes people are just racist.

― carl agatha, Thursday, November 20, 2014 1:49 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If you send your kids to school in a newly gentrifying area where most of the students are low-income, whatever race, they are probably gonna deal with some shit that they wouldn't deal with in an affluent school. I say this as someone who went to a totally affluent public elementary, a "mixed" jr. high with lots of bussing, and a magnet high school with pretty much everything from all over the city, and also from my wife's experience teaching in both in one of the poorest neighborhoods in America and in a slightly less poor(and now starting to gentrify) neighborhood. This can vary widely in what it means, and it in no way means you should never do this, but I think it's a bad idea to put on blinders about it.

There is something to be said for yards, woods, space, also for having a place on your own property where your child can play outside unattended

seriously. i mean in nice weather we basically just to playgrounds and parks, all we do is spend time outside w/ J.

In regards to school, as long as it is average to good, I'm fine with it. Any school that my daughter goes to in the city will be many times better than the elementary and high school I went to. And she'll probably be smart enough to figure everything out.

Yeah my baseline is not super high, it's mostly "Is she going to feel physically safe?" "Does orderly learning take place in the classrooms?" "Do they have adequate supplies and equipment?" "Will she not have to feel like the only ___ kid in the school?" "Are the teachers mostly competent, and are the classes not so large that she'll get lost in them?"

WE ARE IN THE NINE-MONTHS SHOUTY PHASE AND HAVE JUST THIS WEEK MOVED FROM A HOUSE TO A FLAT AND OUR NEW NEIGHBOURS MUST REALLY LOVE US KILL ME NOW

Anyone have any suggestions on how to learn to do a little girl's hair, being as I'm the one dressing her every morning? I've actually found trying to make K look nice (buying stuff for her, choosing outfits) to be an unexpected pleasure of dadhood,

Yes! Obviously i missed out not playing with dolls. But Ella won't let us tie her increasingly long hear back. "No ponytail!"