ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

Another thing some friends found helpful was background white noise, to help the transition from one sleep phase to the next.

(Should have said, the friends who did 'cuddle-it-out' were at 10 months and the mum was about to return to work. They'd been baby-led until then.)

i'll post more on monday but we had a really rough time getting J to sleep through the night and we tried a lot of different things and weren't successful until he was 15 months or so. two quick things come to mind - 1) getting the non-nursing partner (if you guys are breastfeeding, I can't speak otherwise) to do the night care will help break the baby's association w/ nighttime and nursing; and 2) cry-it-out does not have to be savage and brutal, there are gradual ways of doing it that are effective and still involve soothing and comforting, and it is very important to keep in mind that a couple of intense nights of cry-it-out or similar methods are on the whole significantly less brutal than months and months of ineffective night training that bring both baby and parents to tears. We were very anti-cry-it-out for months but retrospectively realized that a well-timed cry-it-out would have resulted in substantially less crying overall.

My only suggestion is cosleeping. Ivy usually starts in her crib and then ends up in bed, where she sleeps pretty soundly so it's the best way for us all to get sleep.

That is brutal though. I'm sorry you're dealing with this.

Yeah we (well, Madchen) hit a wall with F waking frequently and demanding boob. We had tried me giving him a bottle but he just wasn't having it.

I read the no-cry sleep solution and to be honest we had learned a lot of it from other places. But the key point was "they don't need milk at this point; they're just in a habit they can't break by themselves".

So I gritted my teeth and got set to dance him and cuddle him until he stopped crying and went back to sleep. I was all ready for this to take hours but in the end, to my very great surprise, it took about 15 mins before he stopped the fierce crying and just went to sleep. Only lasted an hour, but then I just danced him again and over a few nights he got the message.

Still doesn't sleep through, but I can usually get him back to sleep relatively quickly by myself now. That lets us sleep in shifts, I take responsibility for getting him back to sleep from 10.30-3 and M from 3-8.

(The fact that we've been using the same playlist for bedtime every night since he was tiny may have been a factor, hearing it definitely puts him in the sleep mindset. Sleep associations are important. I also do every bedtime)

What Stet describes we started doing round about 12 months, IIRC.

Is Nora still sleeping in the same room as you? Completely anecdotal but I reckon mine naps better (longer) when I nap alongside him. We have a sidecar crib and i'm not ready to put him in his own room yet. though soon he will be bursting out of the crib. Can't believe what a tiny portion of it he took up when we first brought him home!

Ivy def naps better/longer when she naps next to one of us.

Thanks all.

Nora's six and a half months now. Been (baby led) weaning for about three weeks. Other than that she's breastfed.

I've been sleeping in the spare room mostly, leaving Em to do nightfeeds, and taking Nora from 6am most days, so at least one of us isn't knackered (I'm not a great sleeper). For a while she was waking every three hours for feeds which Em was fine with, but this has regressed and regressed. She goes to sleep initially easily but then wakes lots.

I think we need to lengthen bedtime routine and not feed her last thing before sleep. We're gonna give last feed downstairs and then I'll take her up, dress her, story her, and put her down. She's been sleeping in an ambi hammock but I think it's time for crib now. She's still in the same room as Em.

It's nice to know we're not alone. Nearly kicked my dad out of the house yesterday for suggesting we were doing something wrong by not bottle feeding because that would have her sleeping through. After spending the morning with us (while Em was away for the day) he had to agree that she's an incredibly happy baby so we're doing something right.

And she is; I appreciate that we're very lucky, apart from the sleep thing.

Mine's six months and a week now, and has always been bottle fed because of the whole adoption thing.

Typical night is get changed, suited up in sort of an arms-free swaddle, fed somewhere between 2 and 8 ounces after which he falls asleep and is set into his crib somewhere around 7:30. He almost always wakes up again after 45 to 120 minutes and can be rocked and shushed back to sleep, then wakes up again between 11 and 1am and eats another 4oz or so. Sleeps again until maybe 4 or 5, gets changed, eats 7ish ounces, then might fall back asleep or might babble and flap his arms around until we bring him into bed between us, where he will usually fall asleep until 7:30 or so, sometimes after swatting us in the head for 15 minutes. It sucks because it starts to get light here at 4:15am.

Of course there are infinite variations on this, like falling asleep fully from 7 until 2, then again until 7:30am, or waking up for good at 5am (only once so far), or like the other night when it took two solid hours of crying and fussing to fall asleep during which time my wife holding him would make him cry harder and me taking him let to immediate silence and included me walking around the block with him to chill him out.

I have no idea if this is normal or sustainable of if we should be trying to fix anything or just deal with it. After three months of shitty screaming colic it feels great by comparison but sometimes is just objectively awful and demoralizing - which is when I think I should read the No Cry Sleep Solution book we have but by that time I'm too exhausted to want to read anything.

Best thing I bought is some pre-made blackout curtain linings that are really easy to attach to our bedroom curtains. They cost about 30 quid and don't even fit the full length of our curtains but shut out the light.

We had colic for three months too and I videoed some of the screaming to show the doctor when I was desperate. I look at those and wonder how we survived it.

just want to chime in on the small baby waking up in the night thing. with the caveat that every baby is different obvs. and that there are many things one cannot "solve" at all.

it seemed like there was always a reason for my youngest to be waking up a lot. either he had a fever or he had a stuffed up nose or something or other. he'd been sleeping in the next room for months but he was still waking up. two, three, four times a night. sometimes we'd bring him in and sleep with us, sometimes not. it never seemed to make much difference, or at least never fit into a pattern we could discern. my wife was pretty fed up and i was his "defender" in that i'd always be like, well, it's probably because of (x) i know it sucks but he'll get better. and he didn't. and i can't remember exactly when it was, but one night after approximately the 5000000th wakeup i whispered. like genuinely angry at this little 1-yr-old kid (ffs). which is what finally gave me the impetus to do cry-it-out/ferber/whatever. because at this point i was like yes, let the little bastard suffer, god knows he's done it to me enough. it took him about an hour and a half to get to sleep the first time but i was so tired that i fell asleep while he was screaming. the next night it took him about half an hour. and after that it was basically licked. any time he'd kick off i'd go in, shush him and say "now go to sleep" and THWIP right back out of the room stat. and it worked.

now obv every baby is different - and perhaps more importantly every PARENT is different - but among my friends every single one of them with this sort of issue has said the only thing that really worked was something along these lines. i think it comes down just as much to the parents being ready for it, as the kid..

Em still won't countenance it at all.

Last night was horrific. We did the new bedtime routine, which isn't too different, but we fed her downstairs and then I put her to bed solo, with a story, and she went off pretty sweetly. But then - well, we normally get 2-3 hours, in that she normally wakes circa 10pm when we go to bed, but last night she only lasted an hour. Then 45 minutes. Then half an hour. Then we went to bed, and from 9:30 it was hell; she woke every 15 minutes until midnight, when Em told me to go to the backroom and she'd let Nora sleep on her. Which worked, in that Nora slept, but Em had to sit up until 5am, when she finally got Nora to sleep next to her rather than on her, and then I took her at 6am and she slept pretty soundly next to me until 7am.

Mitigating factors: new routine; Em was away from 9am to 6pm on Saturday, so we had our first solo baby&daddy day (which was great, an absolute success); there were arguments and nearly burning the house down on Friday, so the whole weekend was a bit unusual; and we're pretty sure she's teething and uncomfortable. But good grief, last night was horrific.

She's such a smiley, happy, alert, strong baby during the day. It's so weird. It's like she's a different baby at night.

This may be an unwelcome suggestion but if she sleeps well on you, perhaps she'd sleep well on her tummy rather than her back? My friend in NCT was desperate and tried that as it doubled his sleep time (she's also a GP!). At first it didn't exactly help because she stayed up watching him due to fear of SIDS but she has now bought a sensor mat that alerts if no movement for 20 seconds or so. I'm not sure if she's still doing it.

Really hope you guys get some sleep soon

We did the tummy/sensor thing from about four months because of reflux. It reached that point where child's safety due to sleeping on back was outweighed by child's safety due to parents having zero sleep. I'm finding that parenting decisions are usually made when the risk/benefit weigh-up shifts because of utter knackeredness.

If you suspect it's teething, a dose of ibuprofen followed by a dose of paracetamol at an appropriate interval can be really helpful. Another of those things for us which shifted dramatically was our attitude to analgesics. And Anbesol is way better than Bonjela for quick (though short lived) relief.

A friend with a baby the same age as Nora and a 3-year-old has just commented on Instagram that when they're teething, if they lie on their backs it makes their heads throb. That totally makes sense. We'll try tummy-down, I think; she's in a growbag rather than sheets, there's nothing else in the cot with her, and she's strong as hell.

Yeah, we have Anbesol. Is there baby ibuprofen then? A suspension like Calpol?

I had suspected that about lying on their backs for a bit - F is teething molars right now and refuses to lie on his back for more than a moment at a time. Which is making nappy changes interesting for sure.

xp yes, Boots does both baby ibuprofen and baby paracetamol. You can give each every four hours, and they don't interact so you can alternate them every two hours when things are really bad. They even come with these little syringes which make it very easy to administer. (I think they're very new -- our first bottles came with spoons, and that was a *nightmare*)

http://www.boots.com/en/Boots-Ibuprofen-3-Months-Plus-100mg-5ml-Suspension-Strawberry-Flavour-100ml-_1225226/

http://www.boots.com/en/Boots-Paracetamol-3-Months-Plus-120mg-5ml-Suspension-100ml-_1225218/

are the two we use

Em has headed to Boots!

I'm happy to accept congratulations today – I showed my five-year-old a YouTube of the Slimer scene from Ghostbusters, and now he won't go to bed by himself.

I mean, he wasn't really going to bed by himself ibefore, but he'd at least go get his pajamas on by himself.

While Sunny was outside in the backyard on the phone with her mother on Saturday, Henry went up the stairs, thought he saw Slimer in his sister's room, and came outside shaking.

I've even played him the cartoon Real Ghostbusters since then. See? He's a friendly ghost, like Casper. Just completely disgusting.

Nothing.

Kid absorbs everything like a sponge. He's telling his sister "there's a picture of him where he's typing on the computer and moving his head up and down." No idea where he got that, until I realized he had seen this while I was looking for Real Ghostbuster gifs.

http://i.imgur.com/FiIcFMc.gif

We had already decided that both of them are still too young to see the whole thing, but I figured the Slimer scene would be a good starting point for when we eventually see the movie. Last night, I asked him what was so scary. He then told me in that little voice, "I want to be the man who sees the ghost and shoots him and says on the microphone he's coming for you. Not the guy who says Yes, he's right in front of me - and then I would say He's an ugly guy, right? Because then the other guy would say I think he can hear you - and then the ghost flys at him and goes through the wall and I run like this and say Are you OK?"

He watched the damn thing TWO TIMES. I saw the movie five times in the theater, and there's no way I could've recited all the dialogue like that.

Ha ha. Evie has been talking about The Beatles lately so I put on A Hard Day's Night the other day, forgetting that most of it is them making impenetrable references to arcane British comedy routines in thick Liverpudlian accents, so that lasted about five minutes.

I don't know what either of them would do if we tried to show them a black-and-white movie. Their cones probably can't recognize such images, like how we can't see the light at the end of the remote. They'd be all "Why did you turn the TV off and where are those funny sounds coming from?"

Cecil has been sleeping on his stomach for at least six weeks now; even if he's totally passed out and we set him on his back he instantly flips over. It freaked us out but our doctor was cool with it - said if it's what he's going to do and has the strength to roll over and back it's fine.

Our continuing hilarious / not hilarious thing is that when he wakes up screaming he won't calm down if my wife holds him but will almost instantly stop when I take over which of course makes her feel awful and really sucks for me as there is no longer any concept of taking shifts in the middle of the night as it's all up to me.

I'm much bigger than she so maybe it's how he fits in my arms, or how I'm able to sway him? She's also been out of town for work a couple times so I've been solo with him for a total of about 7 days in the last two months which also does nothing to alleviate her guilt about this.

I'm feeling like kind of a dick because Evie has expressed interest in taking karate, and I want to support her interests, but the only class we can find that runs on the weekend is like $300 for a three-month course and I'm doubtful of her commitment to something that lasts three months that she's literally never tried before. They let you take a single class for $25 so I guess we'll start with that while I investigate their refund policy.

Shout-out to all the places that only offer classes on weekday afternoons, because we all have nannies or stay-at-home parents who can shuttle our kids to classes during those times.

We went through a thing before Henry's Pre-K graduation where all of the moms on the list decided "Hey, let's take all the kids out to Chuck E. Cheese when they're done!" "Great idea! Little Morgan will love a pizza party!"

and Sunny and I were all Gee, must be swell to be able to take the whole day off to go to Chuck E. Cheese.

my wife just announced at work that she's leaving as of July to be a stay-at-home mom for a while, which is exciting and scary

she hasn't told our daycare yet, which should be an interesting conversation

There's got to be two families on the waiting list that will be going "Really? Oh God, reallY?"

yeah, the interesting part will be the "I still want them in daycare 1-2 days a week so I can actually do laundry and buy groceries" conversation

Ours has "You're Paying for Five Days A Week, Whether They're Here or Not" rule.

Even during snow days. I'd hate them if they weren't so awesome.

Ours has a similar rule for full-time kids but also supports part-time schedules, or at least we think they do; we'll find out when we tell them about our status change (and maybe my wife will be less "stay-at-home" and more "part-time schedule with a temp job")

We go to a local place that is drop-in. I believe it costs more per hour than full-week day care, but we only use it a handful of hours a week, due to my wife's weird schedule. Don't know if you could look around for someplace like that.

Ours is flexible and does part time schedules, as long as you give them plenty of notice of the change. Anywhere from 1 to 5 days a week are cool.

Like, we buy $500 worth of daycare at a time and use it up as we go. A few hours here a few hours there.

Isn't this what children's television programming is for?

A place just opened around the corner of us that is a pre-pay drop off type of place. I'm skeptical of it, because from the outside it just looks shitty, they don't even have proper signage. But it would be very convenient for times on the weekend when I just need a couple of hours to get some stuff done. Or if I wanted to go to a bar.

Well a good sign of a decent daycare is if it has some poorly painted caricatures of Bart Simpson, Teddy Ruxpin and some sort of duck – wait, I think that's Popeye – on the window.

Yesterday at the playground, August found two children that she really hit it off with. The three of them were like little butterflies dancing around buttercups. All laughs and smiles and it felt great to watch them. The only problem was, the two other kids were drinking water and when their parents showed up with a sippy cup they'd just drink. My kid did no such thing. Her face was red, it was 88 out, we were in the shade but ugh! I kept trying to get her to drink water or eat a peach or have the apple I brought. When the other kids had a water break I'd bring her sippy cup and encourage her to drink like her new friends and told her it was the thing to do in the heat and if she wanted to stay playing at the park she'd have to drink. Off she went.

Really soon after that the loopiness of a kid who has overexerted themselves started to show. At that point I referred to our deal earlier which was playground, then ice cream, then home for a nap. That went out the window. So...after some pleading and sweet reminders that we were going to leave soon if she didn't drink water etc... I finally just got her when she was on the monkey bars and carried her kicking and screaming off to the truck. Halfway there I put her down to walk but she only tried to run back to the playground. I picked her up again and she was hitting and kicking me. That's all new to me.

I told her I knew she had fun but she didn't drink the water and we had already been there a really long time. It's important to drink water. I told her we would return tomorrow, a promise I always keep. She was over tired and cried all the way home. I dropped by the store just a block away and got her coconut water, put that in her sippy cup and she drank the whole thing immediately. The other sippy cup had water that she drank up as well. I told her had she done that at the playground we could still be there. Anyway, I felt really bad just picking her off the monkey bars that way and wondering how that whole situation could have been handled better. In the past I have brought juice, water and coconut water and she wouldn't drink but it was so much cooler weather. She also has been agreeing to when we leave, but yesterday she was just having too much fun.

tbh I think you handled that perfectly

Yeah, me, too. And there's probably nothing you could have done to avoid the kicking/screaming part. If you let her keep playing without drinking, she would have gotten loopier and less rational (plus that is potentially dangerous!) so you needed to get her out of there, get her hydrated and rested. You did the right thing!

Agreed. My girl has reached a stage where I've had to give her a few talkings-to, or withhold fun activities. She used to be ridiculously well-behaved too. It's nothing big, just being a 4-year-old, ya know? But the other day I had to turn around and take her back to the house (while we were on our way to go get ice-cream, coincidentally!) because she was being rude to her brother. That was a real downer.

But yeah, especially with dehydration on the line there, you can't really screw around.

I can't even keep myself properly hydrated, not sure how I'm going to manage it with a child.

Stillsuit

http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/blog/15-3-30-dune.jpg

LOL

Thanks because I did feel I did something wrong and started re-reading Happiest Toddler on the Block...I panicked over no water but also thought just plucking her off the monkey bars was mean and spirit breaking. But we did have a serious talk about hydration and little bodies drying up in the sun, raisins vs grapes, health etc....how drinking water, coconut water, peaches all equal more time at the playground.

this is probably wrong of me but I am pretty much wholly on board with the "benevolent overlord" school of parenting, at least up until the age when they are capable of presenting arguments beyond "because I want to"

On some of the occasions where I've had to have disciplinary conversations with my daughter, she pretends to suddenly fall asleep. It's cute, but very frustrating. She'll start fluttering her little eyes just like at bedtime and then slump over. I actually got real worried once, because I thought maybe she was having seizures or something, but I was able to bring her around by asking if she wanted a chocolate milk.

my daughter's favorite tactic when attempting to avoid discipline is that telling her she needs to change her behavior "hurts her feelings"

somehow this ties into the Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism thread I'm sure...

Yeah Evs has started blaming her "imaginary friends" (who she never references in any other situation) when she gets in trouble for doing something she knows she's not supposed to do. Or she finds some excuse to get mad at us instead, like we try to talk to her about what she did wrong and she says "I ALREADY KNOW THAT!"