ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

Thanks for the replies all :) I should be clear this guy parented the 2 kids solo their first 5-6 years and has done a very good job, they're smart and well behaved. I guess it's just my role I'm feeling unsure of. he knows this, we've had chats about it, it's just such new ground for me (and as many of you prob know I never ever wanted kids - the bf knows this too and we manage that accordingly, if that makes sense?) they spend 50% of time with mum and that works fine, tho neither me nor bf agree with
some of her ... ideas.. (anti vax, anti wifi/phones, sigh). I'm not even sure my point now lol sorry.

I've been part of the scene for about a year now ( living with them for about 8 months?)

Ha ok I backtrack a little on what I said earlier - just heard dad tell 8 yo "this isnt a restaurant! I'm not your waiter! Get your own grapes from the fridge!" hehe :D

ruh-ruh!
sorry, that's my little one's word for grapes. and blueberries and Cheerios. small and round things, I guess...

Both of us had horrifying shitting-and-puking stomach flu and succeeded in keeping a perfectly healthy and incredibly active toddler alive, fed, and cleaned for the past 36 hours, though a blow-out shit diaper really tested our limits.

that's the worst. We had that once and thankfully were able to get her to daycare so we could suffer through it without having to care for anyone.

Yikes. Made me feel a little hesitant to even post near you.

The time H and I got horrifying stomach flu at the same time, we wound up going to the hospital, in part just because we were afraid we would get too weak to take care of K. It was the absolute worst stomach bug I had ever had though, like painful, violent puking until there was not a speck left in my stomach.

Yeah we never would have made it without daycare yesterday, it was hard enough just to get him there. I spent most of that time asleep to make up for all the time I spent semi-conscious in the fetal position on the bathroom floor the night before.

i dont want to jinx ourselves but somehow we have never had a serious stomach thing since having our first kid 3 years ago, kind of a miracle

i mean he's only thrown up twice maybe in his whole life

he's in preschool now though so i can only imagine what is in our future

yeah once they start hanging around other kids a lot ... hoo boy

Our house has been thankfully free of serious illness all winter, but I just got a facebook flashback from our bout with stomach flu two years ago. Described it as "like that episode of Battlestar Galactica where the fleet has to keep making hyperspace jumps to get away from the Cylons, but somehow the Cylons keep finding them EXACTLY 33 minutes later, and everybody is awake staring at the clock for days on end because they are trying to escape. But with puking children."

In our time of stomach flu, I stopped at a Walgreens on the way back from taking Ivy to daycare to get some Gatorade and had to rest on the chairs in the pharmacy, and I looked so ill that the pharmacist came out and offered to call 911 for me. That was a rough bus ride home...

My K turned four today. When she woke up in the morning she sort of gestured to her body and said "Look, I'm four!" She later expressed confusion that she wasn't "big." So cute.

happy birthday to her!

Happy Birthday!

We are currently having massive issues with throwing/spitting food. Both will decide to start flinging food they don't feel like eating at that particular moment at the floor/each other/us and D particularly will fill his mouth with food and then attempt to spit it as far across the kitchen as he can. They also like to throw their sippy cups around or pour them out onto the floor/their trays/their hands (which they then pretend to wash).

Yesterday got so bad that I ended up putting them in bed over an hour early. I also slapped the back of a high chair and yelled "STOP IT" at one point; which did at least coerce them into eating for about five minutes.

That makes Nora's habit of pushing food onto the floor when she's done seem much more bearable.

Em and I both had stomach bugs at the same time in December; I escaped vomitting, but it was pretty horrific. There was a day or two when I wasn't too bad so looked after Nora, but eventually Em's mum had to come and take her because we were just wiped out. So sympathies to anyone ever going through any variation of that.

we had the sickening too, one after the other 'luckily' and the baby didn't get it. Was grim though even for those couple of days.
J shoves food on the floor, it can be completely infuriating but I try not to react too much. He's usually too much of a food fiend to chuck it unless he's full, but when teething or not well he goes off his food and then everything ends up on the floor. He chucks his sippy cup too and always wants to play with packets/vitamin bottles etc which all end up on the flood too! He definitely does the thing where he dangles it over the edge and then looks at you...

pp and I got food poisoning back when I was about 6 months pregs with Henry and Beeps had just turned 2. She was a total champ though.

J shoves food on the floor, it can be completely infuriating but I try not to react too much. He's usually too much of a food fiend to chuck it unless he's full, but when teething or not well he goes off his food and then everything ends up on the floor.

it took awhile for us to learn this, too. went out and bought a good deal of blueberries when she took a shine to them and some 4-5 days later would just throw them or attempt to feed them to our cats in defiance.

I wish our kid would feed the cat, one less chore I'd have to do.

Ugh, I made my daughter cry during playtime last night guys. I feel like total shit. We were doing a familiar game where the kid hides and the dad pretends to not be able to find them. "Well what happened to A____? I wonder where she went..." And usually after a bit of this, I'll see her poke her head out and go "ohhhhh, there she is". Or she'll get tired of waiting and jump out and yell "BOO!"

But this time she wasn't popping her head out and I got carried away in my spiel, my voice growing more and more dramatic: "A____, she has left us. She has run off to sail the seven seas. Wandering the open road where the stars shall be her guide, among the wolves and the coyotes*. Oh, how we'll miss her! WHYYYYY?"

She staggered out of her hiding place, curled up on my lap and started bawling uncontrollably for about half an hour, all the way until she fell asleep.

We play together a lot. Sometimes though, it can be very difficult for me to get into the right headspace for imaginative play. Like, yes I know you want to pretend we are building a snowman, but I have to do the dishes and rotate the laundry. So I try as much as I can to make sure that I'm fully engaged. I become the little plastic unicorn that's in my hand, or whatever.

I guess I overinvested in my character last night and took it down the wrong path. In all my years of parenting, I've never had playtime end up this badly. I think she really wanted a beat where I pretended to discover her instead of waiting for her to jump out. Anyway, I'm just gutted about it and hope to make it up to her with some less distressing playing tonight.

*These are her favorite animals. I don't want you to think that I was telling a story in which I left her to predators.

aw. She was probably just tired? I raised my voice at J when he was really little (actually it was telling him NO a little too firmly not to chuck his food off the highchair) and he cried and I felt like absolute shit, like the one person who's meant to take care of him was scaring him.

I can't remember the circumstances but I did similar a couple of weeks ago. Plus, y'know, who hasn't dropped their own baby.

Oh, she's cried plenty when I've had to correct her behavior. Or when I've inadvertently hurt her (slammed her finger in the trunk of my car two days after Christmas - dear GOD that was a nightmare). But this time I feel like I guided her emotionally to a place of loneliness. It wasn't my intent, but it felt like I'd placed a dangerous hypnotic suggestion. Or like, a creepy guided meditation from a manipulative cult leader.

I'm sure it's not that bad.

lol @ you putting it all on yourself. she probably did get a bit scared but it was with you, and it was imaginary so quite probably HEALTHY in the end.

I let E roll off the bed a couple weeks ago -- very low bed, carpeted surface, but she fell head/face first. She got freaked out and then fell asleep, woke up seeming totally happy and fine. Then the next day we found fucking dried BLOOD in her ear. For about ten minutes I wanted to not exist anymore. Then we realized there was no blood inside her ear and that it appeared to be from a scratch, almost certainly unrelated to the fall. Yikes.

my 4-y-o gets epic bloody noses in the night, wakes up looking like a horror movie

Tonight featured the first fully intelligible, well-formed sentence from one of our sons:

ME: Lie down and go to sleep, buddy.
J: No.
WIFE: Lie down, sweetie.
J: I told you I didn't want to do that!
WIFE AND ME: WHAT???????

send help

haha.

"I shall repeat my declaration once more for you, Mother..."

I REFER YOU TO MY PREVIOUS RESPONSE

"Up until now everything has been satisfactory"

Worst teething/illness today for a long time. He's inconsolable, being taken out for a walk right now.

OK, so Ella is now three and has gone from someone who sleeps reliable through the night to someone complaining of "tickles" and being afraid of being left on her own in her room at night, andneedling all sorts of lights on, and basically my wife and I are taking it in turns to sleep in her room each night, and I feel as though I've been hit in the head with a mallet.

Somebody please reassure me that this is normal and that it will pass!

see, has affected my ability to type, cant even spell arrgh i'm falling

My middle schooler just casually brought up that they were talking about Mali in social studies and my wife started in on a huge sermon about drugs.

:D

took me 2 hours to get the joke :(

Does the joke require an american accent, if I'm reading this right?

(cos i didnt get it til just now either)

Anyone have thoughts on whether or not to post photos of kids to facebook? We try to mainly confine it to a private "channel," but even that has 59 members, many of whom are not family and we were considering limiting it to family. Also wondering if I should stop with the occasional posts to my page -- although it's "friends only," I do have hundreds of fb friends, some of whom I just don't know all that well.

quit facebook is the easiest solution to this conundrum

Seriously considering that, for real, but then I'd have to actually go to like 20 different websites every day to get my obsessive Trump and Bernie updates.

Carl isn't on FB, and I never post on FB, so we don't have that issue. However, we do like having a platform to share photos with select individuals, so we got a smugmug site/domain and password protected it. I like it because I can turn off comments and everything that I don't want on, basically it's just the pictures, a download link and a link to buy them if they so wish. I gave the password to just our parents, so they can access it and download whatever pictures they want. I also keep every single photo/video we take on the smugmug site in an archive folder, that no one has access to except myself. So I use it for backup as well.

Our older kid got busted yesterday. He was snooping around a vacant house in the neighborhood with a couple other kids when one of them broke a window with a rock. The house was apparently supervised by a nosey neighbor (the cops referred to him as the property manager, but I've lived in the neighborhood for 5 years and that property has never been "managed" so to speak). No charges were filed but the kids all have to pitch in to replace the window and help the property manager clean up the mess. Wife and I weren't even home, but his grandma was there babysitting our youngest kid when the cops brought him to the door. The kid was FREAKING out - I think it's probably good he picked up for something minor and had the shit scared out of him. Reasonable learning experience?

Hahah yep, that def will be. I remember when my younger bro was tossing rocks into the road once as a kid when bored, and he smashed one (by mistake) right thru the windscreen of a passing car. Driver screeched to a halt, got out, and started chasing him in bellowing fury. Never seen a kid so terrified. Dont recall S ever doing anything remotely bad again.

kinda glad to hear kids still throw rocks at things tbh