ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

All of the above has made me laugh today. Oh it's great when it's not your kid :) And yes pretending to fall asleep sounds extremely cute.
I am very familiar with hurt my feelings, that's what August does and it's delivered with award winning bottom lip quivering and chest heaving sighs and cries.

haha my son does that with his sippy cup! He nearly got the hang of it and grabbed it with both hands - but backwards so he couldn't get anything out of it.

http://www.munchkin.com/miracle-360-7oz-trainer-cup-white-24353.html

This is a good one (I don't know if it's available in the UK, though). Also only three parts so you're not washing and losing a bunch of fiddle little sippy cup components all the time.

Except that it spills more than other sippy cups when tossed on the floor.

True. We prefer it for water.

We definitely have munchkin stuff here - granny has one of their booster seats. Free-flowing sippy cups are a pita but much better for the teeth according to a leaflet the health visitor gave me.

On another note, how steadily to your kids grow? Between 12 and 16 months, F has grown a centimetre and put on no weight. Are we in for the mother of all growth spurts or have his two beanpole parents somehow produced a toddler? I'm taking him for an official weigh-in later this month but if the HV is going to give me a lecture on nutrition I'd like to prepare myself. Oh, and he eats like a horse. Three horses.

toddler tiddler DYAC

It took Ivy foreverrrrrr to go from 19 pounds to over 20 pounds, and she grew in height in the meantime. She finally hit 21, almost 22 pounds at her 18 month pediatrician visit and now she's 20th percentile for weight, and 50th for height. The doc asked some questions about what she ate - whole milk, lots of fruits and vegetables, does she eat meat (yes, we're in a mostly fruit phase but she eats a ton, and sometimes but she also likes tofu and black beans and peanut butter) - and satisfied that we weren't starving our child or putting her on a weird diet, she didn't really say much else about it.

But yeah I was getting anxious when she just wasn't gaining any weight, but that phase also happened when she was starting to really walk a lot so I think since her activity increased, she was just burning all of her calories instead of storing them.

D & J were RACING to 20 lbs; by the time they hit 12 months, D was pushing 21 lbs and J was just under 20, and then they got another respiratory illness and ended up back in the hospital and both lost 2.5 lbs of weight.

D is just now back at the weight he was 3 months ago and J is still a few ounces shy.

On the cup front, Ivy's really into straw cups now. We use these - http://thefirstyears.com/products/take-toss-10-oz-spill-proof-straw-cups-8-pack - and Ivy drinks more milk out of them than she does out of anything else.

(they are called "take and toss" but you can reuse them and they are dishwasher safe so I am not sure what is so "toss" about them.)

xp oh poor guys.

Toss on the ground?

I wouldn't recommend it. I think the philosophy behind the name is that they are durable enough to reuse but if you happen to leave one at a restaurant or in your car long enough for it to get disgusting, you can throw it out without feeling like you are literally burning money.

But yeah I was getting anxious when she just wasn't gaining any weight, but that phase also happened when she was starting to really walk a lot so I think since her activity increased, she was just burning all of her calories instead of storing them.

i've got the same thing going on with my daughter. she crawling and climbing like a manic now (taken a few steps too) and that has coincided with a plateauing of her weight. she's still growing and the doctor doesn't seem too concerned.

also, i think the "toss" part in the name of those cups, is that kids can literally toss them around and not make a mess.

Definitely not.

the free-flow sippy cup we use is basic and only has a cup with a lid (the spout folds down) and still I get more enraged at it than any other baby thing because it's a bastard to get the lid off.
The kid surprised us both by grabbing my tea mug and trying to sip from it - he must have seen us drink so many cups of tea! we've bought a doidy cup (slanted open cup thing) so going to try that.

Ivy loves nothing more than backwashing drool and food into whatever glass I'm drinking out of.

I'm way late to the Scik Mouth party but here's my two cents:
COSLEEP
COSLEEP
COSLEEP
for the love of all that's holy COSLEEP

Aww and Tera you did exactly the right thing. I know you feel bad about pulling her off the monkey bars but if she was refusing to drink and she ran back to the playground when you let her down, chances are you would have had to pry her off those bars anyway. Plus she got a great dietary lesson which like no kids get ever. I'd say that's pretty stellar parenting.

agreed

in my own life cosleeping was a non-starter because they wriggle around so much in the bed that nobody got much sleep when they were in with us

plus not sure how to put this delicately but it was sort of an impediment to getting it on

Tracer, you do know you can get it on elsewhere, yeah? ;)

In related news, Molly finally slept in her own bed for the whole last night, and slept through! First time ever, one week shy of four years old!

Madchen, do you need to go and see the HV? I never managed to go after I went back to work with A, and tbh, with M, I hardly went at all. Both slowed down massively on weight gain once they were active and at nursery, both were fine. Just keep an eye on clothes fit (that they're not getting baggy) and nappies (plenty of poo and wee)

Nora's sleep stretches have lengthened a bit in the last few days; she did a 3-hour stretch and several 2-hour stretches over the last couple of nights. Em is generally taking her our of the hammock and into our bed (that I've barely slept in in months!) halfway through the night.

Re: cups, ya'll need DOIDY: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=doidy&newwindow=1&es_sm=122&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=Anh1VaeZOcHSU6bXgdgP&ved=0CCEQsxg&biw=1280&bih=899

(xp) Congratulations on the long sleep Vicky! That's it, she'll sleep right through every night from now on :)

We have plenty of poo and wee, that's for sure. Just want to get him done on the same set of scales he's always been done on. They also recommended he go back at 18 months for a check anyway because he was a big fatty in the 92nd percentile for weight and between the 25th and 50th for height.

^^ Those measurements were at 12m.

Oh, and we got F measured for his first pair of shoes yesterday and the only pair in his size were boring brown. Had no choice but to get them because he really needed them for outdoor play at nursery - he was ruining all his socks - but I am so mad about the boring, boring brown.

Tracer, you do know you can get it on elsewhere, yeah? ;)

Just saying, from our co-sleeping experience, this usually involves one parent waiting downstairs on the couch for an hour and a half while the other is upstairs trying to lull the kids to sleep, followed at like 9:45 pm by a text message "just come up. I'm too tired for this shit now."

Child transportation ideas, please.

I'll be needing to take Nora to the nursery at work from September. If I go direct, which I will with her, it's a 1.5 mile route, mostly down a straight but reasonably busy road (busy with people going to campus).

Trailer looked good until a friend said he'd never use one on the road because motorists don't see them.

Child seat seems OK.

Would like a cargo bike but they're expensive.

Ideas and thoughts?

We're really fortunate that our nursery is a 10-min walk away, so I do that with the pushchair. I can see that becoming grief when F starts insisting that he has to walk and won't sit, though. There are quite a lot of bicyclists who leave their babyseat in the buggy park at the nursery, that seems a popular way to do it.

(How's the sleeping going? You guys catching a break yet?)

(See above; very minor improvements.)

OMG I just googled this out of interest and you can mount a maxi cosi on the back of a bike! Not sure I would, mind...

success w/ co-sleeping imo is very much dependent on the nature, demeanor, and personality of your kid. co-sleeping was a non-starter with my older son who is very fidgety and high-energy and dependent on highly-controlled environments for sleeping (e.g. black-out curtains, lots of white noise, large bed to roll around in), and since birth he has never really been cuddly and gets anxious and claustrophobic if cuddled too much. nobody slept well when we attempted co-sleeping. he would toss and turn and bump into us and would get really upset.

our younger son is very chill and relaxed, loves being held, immediately starting sleeping better when we started co-sleeping. they are both boys have have incredibly different personalities, it is wild how apparent that was even right after birth.

Tons of people, including many I know, use bike trailers for their kids and we're going to get one soon (baby is now 8.5 months old). Montreal driving is kind of ridiculous but lots of people bike with their kids and people I know say they feel safer with the trailer than a kid bike seat on the back of their bike. Imo any drivers who can't see a big bright trailer shouldn't actually be driving... They're not exactly tiny. Use the orange flag and reflectors though obv! Is there a less busy set of roads you could use that wouldn't add too much time?

xp

Co-sleeping has not worked for us at all - I tried though, thinking it'd be a comfort to him. Alas... He has a lot of energy and wakes up often still and when I do bring him into the bed at 5am bc he won't go back to sleep in the crib he'll fidget and nurse and nurse and nurse just because it's there - not restful for either of us!

We often plop the kid in our bed (in this walled co-sleeper thing some friends gave us) if he fusses after 4am or so. Often he spends half an hour making fart noises and pawing at my beard but eventually falls asleep in a way he never will in his crib at that point in the morning and we can get another couple of hours of sleep.

I've also been looking at bike trailers but everything said you shouldn't use them until they're at least 12 months old so I assumed that would be off the table til next year. Or is this just a suggestion?

I think it's just a suggestion (all kids are different, of course); it seems to be about them being strong enough to sit up by themselves.

Here's where I stumbled on the maxi cosi thing. The Dutch put babies on the front of their bikes, it says. https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/cycling-with-a-baby/

I think I'd go with the seat, less for you and other motorists to think about, more visible, easier for you to communicate with her/less of a distraction for you if she's wailing/demanding your attention.

Not trying to thread police, but purely for informational purposes, there is a whole sleep training thread with good info on it: Sleep training

ooh *bookmarks*

We do sort of a modified cosleeping where Ivy goes to bed in her crib, but if (when*) she wakes up, she comes to bed with me**, and it works really well. Sometimes I worry that we're setting up some kind of a pattern that will be really hard to break, thinking of parents I know who had a hard time getting their older toddlers to sleep in their own beds. But it's the best way to get enough ("enough") sleep, and then I think of my best friend from elementary/high school who had her own room but primarily slept in bed with her grandmother until she moved out and she was and remains reasonably well adjusted so SHRUG.

*We didn't cosleep when she was a baby because our bedroom is about one foot wider than our bed so there was no room for a sidecar cosleeper or an in-bed cosleeper, and Ivy was so tiny that I was terrified of rolling over onto her if we just let her sleep free range in bed with us, so she slept in a pack and play at the foot of the bed. But then she started sleeping through the night at six weeks!!! But then at about one year was was like, "Fuck THAT" and now if we put her back to bed in her crib she wakes up two or three times. If she sleeps with me, she doesn't wake up at all.

**Ivy and I are both cuddly creatures so we sleep together really well. Jeff definitely can't sleep with Ivy and can barely sleep with me, so he just sleeps on the couch.

We started sleep training the baby (6 months) this weekend using a modified Ferber method and it went surprisingly smoothly. She went down pretty quickly every night, was up a few times to nurse the first night, the second night she only woke up once to nurse. It was amazing. HOWEVER, the older kid (almost 5 years) had gotten in the habit of coming and getting me every night and I'd end up sleeping in her tiny bed. So we also created new sleep rules for her (modifying this: http://www.ogradywellbeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/HelpYourChildSleepAlone2.pdf), which went pretty well the first two nights. But last night she woke up at 4 a.m. and came to get me and freaked out after I wouldn't lay in bed with her, crying so loud that she woke up the baby and refusing to go back to sleep. So that was kind of a shit-show.

We did cosleeping with both babies, which imo works out great until you have to eventually get them in their cribs, and then it sucks. If I were made of tougher stuff we would have just crib-trained them when they were tiny and gotten it over with but it's hard when you're exhausted and are dealing with a tiny newborn baby.

From that link:

I want my child to feel secure. I just can’t stand the thought of my child being alone and feeling so scared.

Dude's got my number.

You should have been at my house at 4:45 a.m. when my child was whimpering pathetically "I just want to be with mom and dad."

Yup, Ivy is definitely going to be sleeping in bed with me until she goes to college.

That's because of the pathetic whimpering and also the part where it happened at 4:45 am.

When people talk about co-sleeping do they mean actually in bed with them? We have a sidecar crib and it works well but I don't really think of it as co-sleeping. I am sort of dreading putting him in his own room because at the moment I can sleep next to him and put in his dummy when he stirs in the early morning which gets me at least an extra hour of sleep.

Yup, Ivy is definitely going to be sleeping in bed with me until she goes to college.

― from batman to balloon dog (carl agatha), Monday, June 8, 2015 11:45 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We are sort of having this problem with our oldest. He's slept in his own room a few times but boomeranged back for various reasons. He's currently crashing on a blowup mattress on our floor with an understanding that he has to be out by the time he starts middle school in the fall. The little girl sleeps with us but she's definitely too big for the bed now. But we realistically can't do anything about moving her into her bedroom until her big brother is out. \o/

Why doesn't he want to sleep in his room?

I've mentioned it before but I was an anxious kid and vastly preferred to sleep with or near my parents as well. When I was 10 or 11, my mom and I lived in a one bedroom apartment and shared a bedroom and she felt so guilty about it but I thought it was the best thing ever.

It's complicated.

He slept with his mom for his first four years, when they were just two people all alone in a big house and the nearest bedroom was up a long way up a flight of stairs, so they were really used to that arrangement. We got him his own bed when I moved in, but he stayed in the same room.

Then we moved houses and he started off in his own room, but then the AC quit working in that room and he came back in. Then it was back and forth for a while and once his little sister was born, she stayed in our room too, both due to sleep apnea issues and her bedroom not actually even being a room, more a hallway. So since she got to stay with us, I think that some jealousy came into play for him as well.

But it's been okay. We're a close family. We have like, a little nest.

Sex life is horrible though. No lying.

neither of our kids want to sleep in our bed, thankfully, a scenario which I would not countenance barring recent newborn status. More annoyed that Judah's sleep schedule is just completely fucking irritating at the moment - he now refuses to go to bed until we do (typically around 10pm) and then also wakes up when we do (somewhere between 5:30 and 7:30), leaving zero personal time for either of us. How he manages to function/be so energetic on so little sleep is a mystery to me, suffice to say neither of us are getting anything done. He does come crawling in to our bed when he wakes up in the morning which is sort of cute.

that suuuucks

my life and sanity depend on those two hours after the kids are asleep