ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

Not literally.

She literally carries her own crap around with her already.

I mean the optics of putting your kid on a leash are not great but whatever. I end up carrying my kids everywhere and having a constantly sore back.

Not a big leash fan. I don't see it as a negligent/lazy thing, but more of an anxious parent thing. OTOH (say it with me people) whatever fucking works...

i don't use a leash but i haven't needed to, J is pretty good about holding hands when crossing the street or in a parking lot, and we live in a pretty residential neighborhood so there isn't a ton of danger

i feel like a leash would give your kid a little bit more freedom. plus you could clip it to your own belt/bag and have two free hands! as for the optics: like i said, it's not as if you're putting a collar round their neck.

i had a habbit of wandering off in stores and getting lost, which is why my mother got one.

I used to love swinging from my reins. Annoyed the crap out of mum, mind.

I really just want one to tie her up outside while I go into Starbucks.

mum had a full on harness for me
i was a ~wanderer~

Aidan didn't like hand holding but hated the reins even more so it was more of a deterrent. Second child made things ten times worse as you have two to herd, she was a bolter and could run surprisingly fast, and I'd find myself in situations where I could only look after one or the other fully, so the little life turtle backpack came back out. As I said it had the benefit of saving many a grazed knee. Could do with it again, really, she's costing me a fortune in tights/leggings, the number of wears she gets out of them before holes start appearing is depressingly low. Dreading summer with bare knees (though it will be cheaper not having to replace clothing!)

ok so.. night terrors is a thing, huh

my son's are mild compared to stories i've heard but trying to imagine what's running through his mind when he's in their grip is just fucking awful :(

I hate thinking about that :(

Owen saw this trailer and was pretty freaked out. No night terrors yet, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Sec-SdvoI

night terrors aren't connected to specific waking fears afaict

no, one of ours was able to report after an episode that there had been a COW in the room. afaik this was not connected with a bovine phobia

evil guide cow

i've kind of been having a hard time lately

not even "kind of," shit has been hard. i know when it is a three-day weekend and i am eager to get back to work and away from the house that things are getting hard. i was sick last week, on my birthday, on this beautiful memorial day weekend with sublime weather, and we had to cancel plans to host our best friends and their two kids who we haven't seen in over a year. then my 2-year-old gets sick and is just this sweaty cranky ball of drool and free-flowing mucus who wakes up all night. also i was holding our 2-month on our front steps and i get up and lose my balance and lose my grip on the baby and tumble into the shrubs and the baby now has this 4-inch long deep scratch on on his forehead. my wife is reading about autism nonstop and we tried to have sex for the first time since the baby was born and she just starts bawling from all the stress about planning school and services for our toddler, and of course she is now worried about the risk for our 2-month old too. the days are hot and so long and i just can't wait to go to sleep at the end of the day but of course "sleep" means "wake up every 1-2 hours because at least one child is crying and needs help"

also being sick and tired and exhausted has brought up all my own shit re: anxiety & depression which usually goes away this time of the year -- feb/march is usually the dregs and may is almost manic happiness but not this year, somehow the nice weather makes it worse because i feel like i'm not present for it you know?

yikes that's rough

we had our own issues but they were against the backdrop of a mini college reunion at a resort in New Hampshire which lessened a lot of the sting

marcos that's so hard. How's your support system?

thank you guys

carl the support system is there i just need to draw from it, something that has been an ongoing learning process for me for a long time, sometimes i am pretty good about reaching out for support and other times i struggle. it is part of the reason i was so looking forward to hanging out with our good friends who also have little kids, it will be so nice to get the kids in bed and just enjoy a beer or a bourbon with them and talk about how it is so draining to be a young parent sometimes.

having two little ones is soooooo hard. & sex can bring out weirdness because it's what got you into this trouble in the first case (maybe that's better with adoptions etc?)

oof sorry to hear that marcos.

parenting is about endurance

yea it totally is. i think i forgot too how hard the first few months of a baby's life are wrt sleep. it took J almost 15 months before he was sleeping through the night, hopefully F won't take that long but in any case i am eager for regular sleep. consistent sleep deprivation fucks with you

Both twins have another respiratory thing (YAY *sob*) which is making them super irritable and unable to sleep; the only way we can calm them down is through touching them, and even then there's a lot of thrashing and kicking. The only saving grace is that we haven't had to hospitalize them again, although I think we would actually get more sleep if we did.

Sorry marcos. Having two kids is hard.

I'm sorry marcos, I remember how awful and defeated and depressed I felt for a long time early on and that was just one kid.

the support system is there i just need to draw from it, something that has been an ongoing learning process for me for a long time

This is a big thing for us too, having people offer to help but feeling weird about asking, etc. My wife is going out of town this week for a couple days, which will be the first time I'm totally alone and at some point I'm going to have to will myself to summon the neighbors (who are expecting twins and eager for practice) if I need to take an hour off.

I think new parents are well within their rights to brazenly demand assistance from nearby family members, which we definitely did early on

ouch marcos
I have no experience with two but would expect that having a 2-month old as well is probably the 'worst' point i.e. it will hopefully only get better from here?

it def gets better/easier (or rather, you swap out one set of hard things for a different set of hard things, that are hard in a different way)

on another, funnier note (I didn't witness this so I have no photo documentation fwiw) apparently this morning when my 2yo Judah's playmate buddy came over to visit the first thing Judah did was a) take out and show him the Kraftwerk record we were listening to the other day (Man-Machine) and then b) insist that my wife put it on the stereo and then c) made everybody (Judah, playmate, playmate's mom and sister, my wife) do "the Robot"

lol

my kids swear so well in French now, it's amazing. they say really really horrible things & I'm like "yes! great job!"

haha merde

yeah way worse stuff than that. & now I find myself saying these things too. I gotta be careful. evidently the teachers in school cuss too. what a country.

I got told off for swearing in French class after my parents' friend - essentially my French grandad - taught me a few mots. I thought they were expressions of minor irritation :-/

Marcos, you have my full sympathy. I have no idea how parents of two cope; one has nearly finished me.

my kid is addicted to bouncing. He goes in the jumperoo for a few minutes a day and crashes that thing around like you wouldn't believe. Then if you stand him up on your lap he tries to bounce. And when he's lying down. Or being carried around. He's a bounceaholic.

Ivy got frustrated and bit herself today at daycare, and then she bit another kid. :( Five and a half teeth and she's biting people with them. Sigh.

Evie keeps complaining that her friends at school don't believe her about things. These are the things they don't believe:

1. That fairies are real. Evie visited some kind of "fairy garden" in Virginia and this convinced her that fairies are real. Her friends say that the tooth fairy is real but not other fairies.
2. That she has "the allergies" (she has self-diagnosed with allergies and keeps bugging us to take her to the doctor so she can get allergy medicine, which we are ignoring because she has manifested no sign of allergies)

She has a loose tooth now and was really excited but then she sighed and said her friends probably wouldn't believe that she has a loose tooth.

A French friend in college used "putain" as her expression of minor irritation. I later dropped that one into casual conversation with some American kids who had taken a French class and they were pretty scandalized.

"putain" is used as an expression of minor irritation, yes.

our current fav around the house is "je m'en battre les couilles" : it means "I don't give a fuck", but literally it's more hilarious: like "I hit my own balls". my son watched a kid with bad French say "battre les couilles" to a girl recently, and she glared at him and said, no, I'll do it for you.

Marcos are you dealing with Autism on top of all this?

yea, J was diagnosed a couple months ago

That's a rough schedule in itself. It gets easier though. My parenting mantra: 'this too shall pass'.

We need sleep help.

Desperately.

Nora's never been good but she's regressed and regressed and now wakes every hour at night and won't settle unless she gets boob. It's destroying Emma and me.

Wtf do we do? We're baby-led and gentle as a rule and everything else is going so well, but this is horrific.

Em won't countenance cry-it-out. I can't see any alternative.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

I've got nothing as tonight is the first night in as long as I can remember that the kid went down at his usual time and hasn't woken up crying every hour for the first three hours. I've checked on him twice already as I simply can't believe this.

Nick, you must both be in shreds. How old is Nora now? We have friends whose 16-month-old is now able to sleep 2.5 hours at a time but for ages it was every hour as you describe. They found the No Cry Sleep Solution helpful to an extent. Other parents we know went away for a week and the dad just cuddled the baby through the night to get her used to no night feeds. It's not exactly the attached parenting, on-demand way, but she was never left to cry it out.

F has never really taken to the bottle so I've had to do all the night feeds, but it's usually just one and never more than three these days. And about one glorious night in 100 he'll sleep right through.

Plus if he wakes before 2am, Stet is almost always able to cuddle/dance him back to sleep.

Oh Nick that sounds awful. She's around 6 months iirc? Mine has had a horrendous few days and been quite up and down since ~4 months but nothing that bad and tbh nothing I can really complain about. Anyway a few ppl have said things settle a bit around 6mo and as he approaches that, the last few nights have been really good. So fingers crossed?

Do you think she actually needs feeding when she wakes or could you try cuddling back to sleep? I guess if boob does the job no-one wants to be up for hours trying an alternative.
Have you started solids?