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killer crane posted:Sleep at a moment's notice, but then wake up alert to baby's needs, when you've only slept 3 hours in the last two days. I don't feel like my son's nine months out of the womb so far have gone by quickly or slowly - they're just a blur. How do you "cherish these memories" when your brain hasn't worked due to extreme sleep deprivation and poor sleep quality for over a year? He has more restful nights now than he used to (but still tends to wake up at least once a night, and always by 6am), but my brain still hasn't recovered from the newborn days so it feels uneasy trying to sleep a full night.
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Jun 27, 2023 03:06
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hallo spacedog posted:First one is a little over two right now, and we just started thinking about it but I would probably not want to wait more than a year to get started if we decide to move forward because I'm about to turn 40 We're in this boat right now because my wife just turned 37 and we have a kid who will turn 1 at the end of next month. We want to start trying at the start of next year so the age gap would be 2 years or more (depending on how long it takes). We're a same-sex couple, I'm 5 years younger, and for medical reasons, I carried the first one with the plan for her to carry a second one. So time for the postpartum body to recover isn't a factor, but the obscene costs of queerception are a big factor. This last one had to put us out over $10k between fertility and legal costs, and that is excluding all of the normal pregnancy/childbirth costs. Since it's already so expensive and requires so much intentionality as a same-sex couple, we have to worry about waiting longer making it so much more expensive and time-consuming. I feel like we've had a super privileged infancy experience with the first one because my mother-in-law is a very high energy retired bilingual preschool teacher and she stays with us for four days a week, sometimes the full week. But she's so intense with our son and I kind of wonder if a second baby would break her. (We'd put him in school part time in that scenario, but that's still a lot.) She already expressed that she'd rather we wait longer, but she had her fours kids in her late teens through her twenties (and with her husband, not a donor), so the biological realities are very different. At nearly 10.5 months, we're in this sweet spot where we're well past the newborn sleep hell but still lucky to get a full night sleep (as in...until 5am). I sort of want longer before we return (and I know it'll be worse than that because toddler will also be a concern), but I also worry about getting used to having a slightly normal life again then being dragged back.
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Aug 14, 2023 04:53
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Hadlock posted:Babies are 100% more comfortable on their stomach, they also sleep better/longer/deeper on their stomach I sleep on my stomach and struggle to ever sleep on my back, so I get it. I was born right before the Back to Sleep campaign was introduced, so my Mom always had me sleeping n my stomach. My son started sleeping on his stomach as soon as he learned he could. It is terrifying at first though because of how much it's drilled into you that being on his stomach will kill him.
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Aug 17, 2023 02:58
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remigious posted:I caught my little dude with my husband’s toothbrush trying to brush the dog’s teeth last night lol. He is very enthusiastic about brushing! Kids just love to brush! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QMogM6TRIQ I was never a Sesame Street kid, but I've settled on that being the one brand we're letting our baby get into. I play a Sesame Street album for him at bathtime, and it contains a lot of songs about toothbrushing that are all in my head now forever.
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Aug 18, 2023 05:00
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So my nearly 11-month old son has had maybe two colds in his life so far because he's not in daycare (mother-in-law takes care of him during the week), but he's had a persistent runny nose for at least three weeks at this point. She was taking him to a bunch of library baby/toddler events before, but now she's keeping him at home to avoid spreading germs. I'm just not sure when this boy's nose is going to stop running (he's acting fine otherwise), at what point it's socially permitted to just let him go again, or if we need to go to the doctor for something that is more gross for us personally than anything else.
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Aug 21, 2023 05:47
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We're the first ones in our immediate friend group to have a baby. We have free childcare from my in-laws on about one weekend a month (and on weeknights), so we're better off than most for getting out without the baby. But sometimes it's hard to get some friends to understand that if we are offering up a baby free outing, it means that's all we have for the month and they can't expect us to make other plans. We also keep getting invited to events after hours or at not baby appropriate venues by one couple, and we have to turn them down a lot. Even when folks are down to hang out with baby, at 11 months it's still nerve-wracking to take him out in public in spaces where he can't crawl everywhere. He actually naps okay in public (before 6pm) and eats what we eat right now, but keeping him contained and content when awake is a little harder. I haven't really been good at making new friends since I made most of mine in 2016 or before, but making friends whose kids are in the same stage as our son is such a narrow group. I assume it gets easier when he's older and a few months don't make such a big difference in experience. It was probably callous to say, but I did suspect before I had our kid that the one positive to being pregnant/having a newborn in 2020 was not missing out on life outside your house. I was sick for so much of 2022, and post-Omicron wave all kinds of things opened back up and everyone I knew (who had been more cautious) was socializing and going to gatherings like there was no tomorrow. The nausea and vomiting kept me inside for the beautiful spring, then the summer was just so bad I just kept inside until the birth. Mistaken Frisbee fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Aug 23, 2023 |
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Aug 23, 2023 06:08
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nachos posted:Worse than childless couple friends are those who have so much loving help from nearby in-laws, grandparents, etc that they schedule as if they were a childless couple and wonder why everyone complains that it’s hard to raise children or make time once you have them. This is partially us because my mother-in-law lives with us for half the week and one weekend a month (lives hours away, but drives to us), but I definitely recognize the privilege and flexibility we have and we try to avoid leaning on her outside of our work hours and that weekend. I always say that parenting doesn't prevent you from doing things you used to enjoy doing, but every time you get to do those things it's because someone showed you mercy. The kid was chill, your friends or family babysit, your spouse took over and you went alone, etc. I don't know if I would've had kids at all if I thought we wouldn't have her help (and she desperately wanted a grandchild to help raise). I kind of feel like I don't have a REAL PARENTING EXPERIENCE because we have so much support from my in-laws (starting at 6 months, before that we were mostly solo) and because we actually both parent our kid. In my due date mom groups, it seems to be full of women whose husbands won't do poo poo with the kids ever and whose extended family is also useless, and that seems to be what's considered the way motherhood is supposed to be. It's also obviously almost all straight people, and I'm in a same-sex marriage. We both share the title of "mother", so a lot of the intense beliefs around how no one else is special to the baby or intuitively knows and cares about the baby except the mother doesn't really fit us.
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Aug 23, 2023 20:19
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ExcessBLarg! posted:The bride/groom might have a large extended family with lots of kids that they feel obligated to invite, which then limits the number of non-family/friends/acquaintences/etc. that they actually want to invite. Having a child-free wedding means you can cut your extended family list quite a bit--even further with expected "no" RSVPs. When we were planning our wedding - my mother-in-law has nine siblings, father-in-law has three, they all have adult children, many of whom have children. My side isn't that small either. It gets into this mess where if you invite some relatives, you have to invite every member of their family and you get over 200 people before you even get to friends. And most won't even come, but you have to factor a percentage of them in just in case. And you aren't allowed to invite people in waves. I feel the same way with plus ones - if I have to add 1-4 people to every guest I have to account for their kids or their new SO MAYBE coming, it means I can't invite almost anyone. I wouldn't have cared if someone privately saw a limited invitation and asked to add more people, but doing it by default screws up the count really badly and hurts the feelings of people you can't invite. The pandemic happened and we ended up with a tiny ceremony in a 100+ person venue, so these issues went out the window. My kids nieces/nephew were the best part of my wedding - no one enjoyed it more than them. But we had a very chill fiesta-themed wedding.
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Sep 13, 2023 20:10
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El Mero Mero posted:If your pediatric practice isn’t recommending that you get your kid vaccinated as soon as they are eligible then you probably need a new pediatric practice. If your pediatric practice can’t deliver the vaccine that’s another red flag. Yeah, that's really weird. The COVID-19 vaccine was presented as a given at my son's 6-month appointment. It's on the recommended vaccine schedule by the CDC, so your pediatrician should be offering it. The newest update is probably not out for that age yet, but it's at least the bivalent vaccine. slave to my cravings posted:Do your kids go to daycare or is he the primary caregiver while you are at work? I can see why he would be upset if he has to take care of two sick kids on his own while you are at work. The first exposure to lots of cold-like viruses usually are pretty miserable for kids (fever, congestion, etc). However, at some point or another they are going to get exposed to all the germs. Might as well do it before they start kindergarten. What I don't understand is why my immune system doesn't seem to be good at fighting any of the poo poo my son brings home. I've seen the lower immunity from sleep deprivation floated, and that's probably it. My son isn't even in daycare yet, but he goes to a couple of baby playgroups in a week and that's enough to get him sick with something new.
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Sep 26, 2023 16:14
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Is it the brand new COVID-19 vaccine they can't keep in stock at pediatric offices y'all are seeing, or just the regular bivalent has not been regularly available since it came out? My son got the bivalent vaccine back in March/April, so I haven't been worried about getting him the updated one yet.
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Sep 27, 2023 00:48
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I love my friends, but I think this weekend has burned me out on not-parents. We had friends visit from across the country and stay with us this weekend. It's a whole other deal in addition because it was our sperm donor (genetically the father of my wife's and my son), his sister, and his boyfriend. Donor asked to visit to meet my son, procrastinated for months and had to be followed up with constantly to actually follow through...didn't seem to understand how planned out our life has to be with child care. They asked to stay for three nights at our house. There's a lot of complicated and angsty dynamics here, but more to the point... First full day was great, very engaged with him, amused, all that. (Hanging out with them when he was asleep was also great on the other days.) Day two, visitors hadn't slept well. Boyfriend barely slept and was just not functional, spread across to everyone being in a poo poo mood. No one really wants to interact with the 1-year old anymore, but he's still there...wanting attention from all the grown-ups who decided to hang out in the living room, his playroom. He's getting distressed because my friends aren't really engaging with him, I'm having to constantly drag him away from the boyfriend or the other two to a lesser extent because they're doing other things. And so he's getting upset about being redirected constantly, which his screeches seem to be more annoying than cute that day. My wife and they pick a restaurant that we later learned had a toddler play area, but I only stumbled on after close to two hours at this place. She thought it'd be a short line and he'd be fine, but it took an hour and a half to get our food. So I'm just managing a toddler in this space for over a hour and they're, again, not really engaging him at all. My wife and I alternate a little bit, but I'm so upset so I mostly just focus on him and avoid everyone else. I get it. If he's not your kid, you don't have or want kids, and you've never really interacted with a toddler before, you'll wear out on them pretty quickly. He's relentless, even when he's happy. You might feel awkward. But there's a special kind of misery to policing your toddler's behavior in his own playspace with adults who are supposed to be there to meet him and who are the ones who asked for the visit...for hours at a time. More generally, I'm extra extra exhausted when managing my toddler in any space or with people not geared towards toddlers. Even when they're nice, even when they're your friends. It's too much.
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Oct 16, 2023 21:06
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I definitely changed my mind about having kids when I saw my newborn second niece the day she was born. My first niece made me love being an aunt, but the second one came three years later and made me want to have kids someday. I do wonder how often I unintentionally made things harder for a parent. I like to think I was pretty understanding and helpful, but the amount of thought that has to go into my baby's needs is probably not understandable before raising a little one.
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Oct 17, 2023 05:21
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Endings posted:My 10mo daughter gets a bath every night… (only soap every other night, though.) With my near-13mo son, we've been doing baths nightly since his umbilical cord fell off...so a little over a week old. We tried to only soap every other night or less, but we just couldn't keep track of the nights so it's every night now. He's so messy when he eats that it's probably for the best. At this point, I'd be afraid to drop any part of his bedtime routine. He enjoys the water, did well in baby swim class. That said, I'm not really sure how we'll get him off the bottle. He hasn't taken to a sippy cup, even with milk in it (he transitioned from formula to milk easily). Baba (and the milk baby sign) is his favorite word, he demands them. He actually quit breastfeeding and pacifier use on his own without any prompting, but he self-soothes with a bottle, even an empty one. The pediatrician at the 12 month visit said he was more focused on getting our son onto milk than dropping bottles at this age, but I know we have to at least work on it over the next few months. We're also supposed to drop the bedtime bottle after teeth-brushing. We've tried watering down the milk bottles, but I suspect he'll revolt once it's completely water.
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Oct 25, 2023 03:34
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Our 13 month old son decided to take what we're going to call his first steps tonight because he made it to a third step before deciding to sit down. He was a cowboy for the photos this year (easiest to assemble from existing clothing), but he went to bed by 7ish while I handed treats out at the door for a few hours. Grandma didn't let him have any candy because it was too close to bedtime. It's still better than last year's Halloween for him, when we placed him inside a pumpkin for photos...and he's screaming his head off in all of the photos.
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Nov 1, 2023 08:24
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Koivunen posted:Good morning parents! What time were you woken up this morning? I’ll start! I am shocked, because it was 7:30am for the 13mo (not counting his wake-ups where he went back down). He has been waking up at 7:30am more lately instead of his usual 6am, but I figured this would undo it. He did skip his second nap and get put to bed late (on purpose) yesterday, so we'll see if it sticks. But I woke up earlier because we're dogsitting for my in-laws and their chihuahua mix whines to be let out at like...5 or 6am, and has had accidents in our house before (our chihuahua mix does too, so I take it seriously).
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Nov 5, 2023 16:04
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Alterian posted:I am one of those late diagnosed women. Looking back, it should have been obvious. ADHD can manifest a lot differently for girls. I was aways successful and I had a fear of getting in trouble which kept me in line. I would also say it didn't really start coming out until I hit puberty. A lot of other women have similar experiences. My ADHD also gets worse right before my period as an adult. One of the ways it manifested is extreme anxiety. I've been extremely anxious more or less all my life. I had a lot of anxiety starting in middle school over getting good grades. The problem? I'd procrastinate. I'd get all my work done on the bus or in homeroom. The only thing that has worked to make my anxiety go away has been starting stimulants. My husband was diagnosed as a kid, but his parents never had him treated. Our oldest was diagnosed with ADHD (and eventually autism too) and if he had never started therapy and got medicated, he probably would have been kicked out of school for his behavior. His little brother started kindergarten this year and he is probably going to end up with a diagnosis as well. Same on this. I never really got in trouble for acting out as a kid because I was terrified of getting in trouble, but concentrating was always hard and I've always been fidgety, talking fast, overtalking, full of pent up energy, late to everything...pretty classic ADHD signs, but I think all of them got chalked up to anxiety and depression because I was a girl. I still haven't gotten a formal diagnosis, even though multiple other people have pointed out I'm a textbook case, because it all just gets attributed to depression/anxiety (to be fair, is also present for me). I have a master's degree now, but I did struggle A LOT in school because I was undiagnosed (for everything) and had zero accommodations. I'm sure there's certain groups that get overdiagnosed and overtreated, but for some of us there's a real reluctance from adults to intervene at all. Even when you manage to succeed and keep your grades up, everything is so much harder and wondering why you're not like everyone else is really distressing.
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Nov 7, 2023 16:34
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Sunday and Monday were still 7:30am wakeups after DST, but the last couple of days my son has woken up during the 6 o'clock hour again. Getting him to bed a little later did not fix that today. I thought if we made it past the first day post-DST, we'd be okay. Guess it was a fluke.
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Nov 8, 2023 17:13
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space uncle posted:I do hope the next kid bucks some gender stereotypes, because as much as I love my first son, I am tired of talking about trucks. This kid loving loves trucks and I really was never a truck kid at all. Maybe I need to model different behavior but it’s not like I own a truck or am constantly turning wrenches so not sure what happened there. We're a two mom family and neither of us owns a truck (but father-in-law does though), but my 13mo son basically only gives a poo poo about cars and trucks and nothing else. We took him to a play center this weekend, and his favorite part appeared to be staring out the window into the parking lot. His favorite words include cars and vroom. We blame my mother-in-law (who takes care of him during the week) who bought him some toy cars, saw him become obsessed, and then has leaned in to go full car enthusiast with his clothes/toys/books. It's hard to expand a toddler's interests because he's just so happy and focused when he sees cars and trucks. I hate reading so many books about construction vehicles though. He will play with other toys, but his passion is with cars and trucks. Mostly I'm just hoping he does play with dolls when he's older to balance this out. He's just now getting the concept of hugging dolls.
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Nov 16, 2023 19:17
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We've decided to wait until my son reaches 18 months old to enroll him in daycare (when my MIL will stop coming into town to care for him during the day). He'll reach 18 months at the tail end of March 2024. We live in a big city, and at 18 months there actually seems to be a lot of daycare options. We're hoping to get him into one of the church-based ones because they all cost half as much as the regular daycares and are shorter days, which we think we'll be fine with as we both mostly WFH. It seems like a lot of these daycares follow the regular school year and aren't open during the summer. Those of you all who don't have a year-round daycare, what do y'all do with your toddlers during the summers? I'm also debating enrolling him in one for the fall and finding a temporary daycare until the fall vs. only looking at year-round daycares. Man, we were worried we'd have no options, but there seem to be quite a few once you hit toddler age.
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Nov 17, 2023 21:02
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Academician Nomad posted:This seems ambitious! We'll see. Right now, we have him every Friday-Sunday without any help, but that's a fraction of the time we're considering. My wife's current job is usually not very time consuming, and mine usually has enough free time to cover any gaps. Right now, he plays surprisingly well independently. But yeah, no way of knowing his personality in 4 months and what things might look like if we were balancing it all for half the day five days a week every week. I think the church-based one that goes until 2-2:30pm is very doable with our schedules (going until 5-6pm), but some of the others make me a little nervous.
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Nov 18, 2023 03:04
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Tamarillo posted:My nearly 2 year old daughter, except trucks instead of cars, and we're still working on our "tr" pronunciation where "f" is apparently easier, and we were walking outside our house and she sees a truck and screams "FUCKIN' VROOM VROOM! FUCKIN' VROOM VROOM!!!" Haha, that is amazing. It captures her passion well. I was grouping trucks in with cars, but he is equally obsessed. He has a cozy truck, and is obsessed with his grandpa's truck. He will just sit in his cozy truck and wait for someone to push him, but he will also just hang out in there quietly for a bizarre amount of time. But for some reason he's started calling trucks "dada". He does not have a father, so I guess that's a fair replacement.
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Nov 21, 2023 18:29
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We're still considering daycares, and I'm really wanting to send my 14mos son to a part-time Spanish immersion school in a few months. But beyond scheduling issues, his current caregiver/grandmother is worried how he'll adapt to both preschool and full Spanish language schooling at the same time. Because she takes him to Spanish storytime and reads to him a little in Spanish (she's fully bilingual), but we're not consistently speaking Spanish to him and it's mostly just her. My wife and I both know conversational basic Spanish, but just don't speak it in front of him right now. Also, he keeps crying every time I read to him in Spanish, but I think only when I do it? So maybe my Spanish is just that bad. So that might be an obstacle. Mistaken Frisbee fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Nov 24, 2023 |
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Nov 24, 2023 16:53
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Sweeper posted:We had trouble with bottles up through about 7.5 months (either no drinking or like .5oz) when we found the magic combination of formula (Kendamil, can get at target), making the formula hot (like 110F), and using a bigger nipple size on our comotomo bottles (went up to 3). She didn’t like reheated breast milk as much, wouldn’t finish it. We also had to try a bunch of bottles to find one she liked. We also tried open cups, straw cups, soft nipple sippy cups, everything. Upside is that she can use a straw well at 10 months I guess. I really hope it starts to click for you guys, very frustrating having the baby not want to eat! Just throwing out here to warn new parents off Phillips Avent bottles. My son was born 93rd percentile, dropped some weight in the hospital, but barely drank any milk and dropped to 2nd percentile by six weeks. We tried a bunch of different nipple sizes before we switched to a free drip Evenflo bottles and he gained weight faster. He started solids at 4 months, per doctor's advice, and that 14mo kid is well above average size now and eats everything. I sort of wish we'd kept the bottles though because he likes throwing the free drip bottles around and making a mess, he's definitely strong enough to drink from the harder bottles now. Separately, I keep trying to figure out how to childproof this house to get ahead of my son. He's now tall enough to reach onto my wife's desk and grab stuff, so we put her pills on shelves. He's also able to reach the edge of the kitchen counters, so there goes our ability to use the front burners. Our furniture is already all urine-proof and sturdy because we have a cat that used to urinate on all of our good furniture, but making shelves, pet food, and litterboxes more childproofed is the next step.
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Nov 28, 2023 22:09
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hannibal posted:We use glass Avent bottles but we did move up pretty quickly in nipple sizes. I guess the newer nipples are smaller than their older ones. We had just kept trying bigger nipple sizes with the Avent because that's what was recommended, and it just didn't fix it. He didn't start gaining weight until we just replaced the bottles entirely, and it was pretty scary how small he was. I know all babies are different, but I know it's happened to other families before. If it works for someone, great. But if growth slows down, I'd really look at that because my breasts got blamed (combo-feeding) before we figured out it was the bottle.
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Nov 29, 2023 17:58
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My wife and my apple music wrap-ups are mostly Raffi songs, with mine heavily including Sesame Street and They Might Be Giants for kids as well.
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Nov 30, 2023 18:50
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My mother-in-law, who takes of our 14mo son during the week and is more overprotective than we are, has been fighting us about putting his outdoor toys out in the backyard and having him play out there. It's a boring, small suburban backyard that needs some light work (mostly removing dog poop), but otherwise is kid friendly enough. I bought a toddler slide for his birthday, she keeps it inside (didn't want it to fade). They bought a cozy truck for his birthday, almost entirely used inside. So for Christmas my wife and I agreed that we want to have more outdoor toys for him so he can enjoy being outside and get out of the house. We haven't said "you must play with him outside", but that we want it for weekends when my wife and I take him out onto the deck and he wants to explore. And we've been in this bizarre power struggle with my mother-in-law about it, where she insists the yard can't be made safe, that the weather is too bad (it's a mild Texas winter, best weather all year), that he's not old enough, etc. Is this a weird boomer thing or just my mother-in-law? She used to work in preschools, but she was still shocked to hear that daycare/preschools now have kids outside for longer than 15 minutes a day.
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Dec 6, 2023 18:57
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:It’s an eternal battle against societal prejudices. Someone told me that my son's pretty eyelashes are wasted on him because he's a boy, so I guess it's a thing.
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Dec 11, 2023 22:46
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Doll House Ghost posted:My 10-month-old realized that he can express his dissatisfaction with a blood curling scream and - controversial opinion - I don't love it. Feels like living with a volatile death metal goat. My 15-month old son just learned today that he can do that for the entire day. He was also devastated because instead of reading Ho Ho Ho Toe Truck Joe for the third time today and the bajillionth time this season, we returned it and all the other Christmas books to the library. Adjusting back to life after the Christmas trip is rough. Fun one - he has learned to say "go away", which is one of the rare two words I've seen him combine, and he was saying it when I was blocking him from running into the road. (We think he learned it from my mother-in-law swatting at flies or getting the pets out of her space). On that note, we think my son is having night terrors but the internet says he's too young for that. He's crying and kicking in his sleep in a way he hasn't done before, but he's not waking up from it and consoling him doesn't seem to immediately do anything. He seems to be able to get himself back down. He still has his normal wakeups where he just wants to be held and comforted back to sleep though. Mistaken Frisbee fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 06:00
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Democratic Pirate posted:20 week ultrasound tech: one kidney is a bit larger than the other. Nothing major, will probably resolve on its own. We’ll do a quick follow up to confirm it’s in tolerance. Aw, I'm sorry it's still going on. My son ended up in the ER with a kidney infection a year ago this week at 3 months old, and ended up getting diagnosed later in the year with VUR in one kidney. It wasn't as hard to get a kid under one year old to pee for the scans, but the crying and holding him down for so long was unbearable. Here's hoping it goes away in childhood.
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Jan 11, 2024 19:40
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I always worry about the Andrew Tate thing too, because I'm sure a lot of parents just kind of lose connection with their preteens and teenagers and the internet/peers can be very influential. My kid is a young toddler though, so it'll probably be a different popular misogynist by then. We're two moms, so there's already a lot of worry about his potential male role models. Mostly right now he is really into vehicles/trucks and just spends time with his grandfather, who is a standard masculine boomer dad but not really problematic in a way I'd worry about. On public schools - it's a minimum of five years away, but my wife and I have been in a disagreement on whether or not we should send our son to a local charter school. We're both public school kids, but we're a same-sex couple and Texas in the past couple of years has become very hostile to LGBTQ people (particularly in schools) and hostile to the public school system in general. All the queer parents in the Facebook groups rave about a specific charter school in town here that is very progressive and has a lot of queer parents, so she is interested in sending him there. But one, sending my kid to a charter school feels like a shot against the public schools (though we have no idea which school district we'll live in by then). Two, more importantly to me, this charter school has the second highest conscientious vaccine exemption rate in the entire county - 23.4% in 2022 vs. most charter and public schools in town being under 5%. Pre-pandemic, it was closer to 35% though, so maybe the culture there is changing? Again, not a current concern for years, but my wife keeps coming back to it. She thinks the risk of something actually going around is low, but I would worry about younger kids we may have by then who aren't finished with their shots.
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Jan 17, 2024 22:28
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chadbear posted:There still is about a 3 percent chance that the vaccine doesn’t confer immunity. Small but not negligible. Vaccines work best in a herd immunity setting. This risk and the need for herd immunity, but also I mentioned that we want more kids and our younger kids would likely not be finished with their entire immunization schedule. So something could be brought home or spread at a school event. Plus I don't know if I'm super comfy with a community that lax about vaccines. RCarr posted:Is there an agreed upon time to start swimming lessons for infants/toddlers? The YMCA starts at 6 months - with parents in the water holding them the whole time. Classes where the parent is not in the class start at age 3. Some programs start earlier, but there's mixed opinions on the survival swimming style of teaching. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that swim classes under age 1 don't lower the risk of drowning, but they don't tell you not to go swimming with your baby. I did 4 months of it with my son when he was 7-11 months old because it was too hot outside to do anything else (indoor pool) and it's just good to get your infant/toddler exposed to new environments and activities.
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Jan 18, 2024 22:34
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:If it makes you feel any better, we are mostly breastfeeding a 9 day old and mom’s milk supply is a little scant especially in the evening. Baby gets pumped milk plus formula from dad for the two night time feeds which gives mom a break and makes them a bit quicker and more efficient. We wanted to fully breastfeed but it doesn’t necessarily work out for various reasons and popping a little formula in the little guy has helped him be less hungry in the wee hours of the morning. We switched to combo on day 5 of his life after he had lost more weight than expected and the pediatrician recommended it. I hadn't been committed to fully breastfeeding before the birth, but the lactation consultant in the hospital was pushing breastfeeding only at first and I didn't really know much about either method. I hemorrhaged at birth and my milk didn't come in for a little while, then it was never in these dramatic quantities everyone else seemed to achieve. There were too many pump parts to clean in between pumping, and it was hard to find the time and energy to set it up just to get a paltry amount out. Controversial, but unless you can pump a lot of milk, I think supplementing is better. Every time I saw someone in my due date groups who was extremely exhausted and stressed out, and doing almost all of the newborn care, they were usually exclusively breastfeeding with little to no bottle usage. It seems like if you supplement, you're supposed to be deeply apologetic about it and also exhaust yourself trying to fix make it work through intensive pumping and other strategies. My son weaned himself at 8 months, 8 months ago, and I do miss parts of breastfeeding (before he had teeth) but the amount of stress to exclusively breastfeed just seemed unnecessary. Our pediatrician said any amount of breastfeeding has benefits, so that made it easier to just accept what he could get from me. You can determine how much milk they're taking in from breastfeeding, but it involves weighing them before and after on a baby scale. Lactation consultants will work with you on that if you ever have concerns on how much they're getting. For apps: we relied religiously on Huckleberry. I'm mostly the only one using it at this point, but it's free and tracks a lot of different baby-related activities...mostly helpful for sleep, diapers, and feedings. Mistaken Frisbee fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 03:59
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nachos posted:Every generation has its stupid baby advice in hindsight and my hot take is that we’ve done the opposite of boomers and made it as hard as loving possible to raise kids between the insistence on breastfeeding and “back to sleep” because of SIDS fears. Sleeping on their backs itself is good, but it is a lot how much it seems like every year, anything that makes it even slightly easier to put your baby to sleep turns out to be dangerous for your baby, and most places where your baby will naturally fall asleep (carseat) are dangerous for baby sleep. Even stuff people used a decade ago seems to be condemned as a SIDS risk now. I met someone who ran a breastfeeding advocacy organization, and she was surprisingly very positive and chill. Had probably been in the field for decades. Any breastfeeding attempts were a success in her book, and she said her group was really frustrated by the AAP's recommendation for 2 years of breastfeeding because it's extremely difficult to even get people to 1 year. And even getting folks to get their babies to sleep on their backs, even if it wasn't in the ideal crib setup, was a big positive improvement to her. That all made me feel pretty good after all of the intensity you get around babycare guidance. El Mero Mero posted:Our kid had formula from day 1 and had a little bit of it in the mix throughout the first year. There are reasons that I won't go into, but there's an attitude out there like you have to justify that when the only outcome that anyone should be laser focused on is "fed baby, best baby." I always feel like even "fed is best" has a bit of a consolation tone to it. Like, you can only fail at breastfeeding, not be failed by it. Mistaken Frisbee fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 06:40
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morothar posted:For us, safety is an exercise in total system optimization: there’s no point in maximizing a theoretical sleep safety number, only to crash the car the next time you drive because you’ve also maximized your degree of sleep deprivation. Or let the baby grab a knife because you were too tired/slow to react. I did some policy advocacy about the impact of sleep on mental health (used to work in mental health advocacy), and it's deeply harmful how much our society dismisses the need for adequate sleep, treats wanting/needing enough sleep as some kind of indulgence and sign of laziness, and ignores the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation. I'm not sure if it hits other parents as hard as it hits me, but if I don't get enough sleep, especially over a long period of time, then my ability to regulate my emotions drops. Driving a car becomes dangerous. I'm a worse parent. Our advice to parents around safety and risk never take parental needs into account. It's just expected you'll bootstraps your way past basic human needs. I don't like when folks act as if bedsharing is better than or just as safe as solo sleep or that solo sleeping is traumatizing in some way. But at some point we started bringing our kid into the bed (usually not starting the night in our bed though) because we both work and need sleep to survive, and he sleeps through the night in the bed. We have a firm mattress and created a clear space, but it is a risky choice. It was really different having advocated about maternal mental health screening and intervention, and then having a kid and realizing how much our systems actively discourage pregnant people and mothers from getting their needs met to help their mental health. Mistaken Frisbee fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 22:11
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Jose Valasquez posted:Big same. Yeah, at some point my wife agreed to take over all overnight duties (not in the newborn stage, much more recently when he sleeps through most of the night) because I just wasn't coping well with switching off every other day and going to work. I am good with diapers and bathtime and tasks that require energy and struggle, but sleep difficulties are harder for me and don't seem to bother her as much. My mother-in-law watches him during the weekdays and gets up early with him, and my wife felt like it was a fair trade if I just take the mornings on weekends and other days she's out. I just try go to bed earlier on those days and she gets to sleep in, and she's good with that. I actually don't think I have it hard at all for a parent, but considering how many things still feel difficult, I genuinely can't imagine being in a one-mom family with an unsupportive male partner and surviving it. I see a lot of moms in that boat and even one kid takes so much teamwork to not just survive it, but actually do the things everyone asks of you.
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Jan 22, 2024 23:47
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Any toddler car seat recommendations for a tall kiddo? Ideally under $200. We bought a Chicco Keyfit 35 carseat that goes to 35lbs and thought we'd be good to go for awhile based on typical growth charts, but I didn't expect the height to cut that short. My son measured around 32.4 inches (and 24.8 lbs) at his 15mos checkup last month, and his carseat maxes out at 32 inches. It's clear that it's getting too small for him already. A lot of these rear-facing carseats I'm looking at now list the weight, but not the height limits. I want it to make it a couple of years, but not get something so versatile that it might be more appropriate for older kids. I also drive a Kia Forte, so it needs to fit into a smaller space. Thanks in advance.
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Jan 24, 2024 06:14
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How important is socialization between 20 and 23 months? Our now 16 month old son will start a 3 half-day/week preschool in April, but it's closed for the summer. My mother-in-law takes care of him during the week right now, but she'll be out in April-May, then back for the summer, then out again in the fall. My mother-in-law is great with him, but doesn't take him out to toddler social events more than once a week right now. She's a retired preschool teacher so she's pretty educational and focused on him, but I think expecting her to take him to a lot more social stuff (when we can even find it) might be a lot. (We don't pay her and she helps us out a little financially, so I don't like making demands.) I also wonder if she's wearing down since he's getting more active and sleeping less - she has him for at least 8 hours a day if we exclude the nap. She and I do talk about them going out to library events more, but she hasn't been so I'm not sure she has the energy. A nearby church-based program is doing 2 half-day/week program over the summer that'll cost $290/month for two months. That's around $600 we'd be spending that isn't necessarily required since we have childcare, but would ease her burden for 9 hours a week and ensure he's spending more than an hour with other kids each week. We have a lot of costs coming up around trying to conceive another kid, so it might be worth saving the money. But I also don't want him to regress over the summer and my mother-in-law is not the type to acknowledge if she needs help or a break. My wife and mother-in-law are slightly concerned about money, but are otherwise neutral. We have to decide by next month, before he even starts his regular preschool. On the note of seeing other kids, we took our son to the park this weekend. Once he was willing to get on the playground equipment, he watched a preschool-aged girl repeatedly jump off the platforms. Then he saw a slightly older toddler jump off a platform, and he decided to replicate that. He can't jump yet, so he fell and landed on his hands in front of everyone. He was fine, so it was just very precious and funny. I was not aware he could already be influenced by other kids. Mistaken Frisbee fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 8, 2024 22:09
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ExcessBLarg! posted:Honestly I think you're overthinking this. If you have an outstanding offer for free reasonable-quality childcare for the summer I'd take it. If you have concerns that your MiL watching your son full-time isn't good for her health then you should have a frank discussion with her about that so that you don't feel you're unreasonably taking advantage of her. Okay thanks, this is reassuring! I think I was wondering if just being in those social spaces and seeing other kids for 9 hours a week for school would be best. My mother-in-law and wife felt like three months out of school wouldn't be a big deal at this age, but I know the social benefit of school starts to kick in at 18 months so I wasn't sure if staying home would be detrimental or if the social need is still pretty low. It sounds like the weekly library and some weekend playground time could be enough here. Honestly, she's better at taking care of him than most daycares would. Just constant attention, educational activities and reading, and bilingual Headstart teacher background. I don't want her to think us doing this would be telling her she's doing a bad job, but I'd want to make things easier for her since he's becoming more of a toddler. I just don't know if she'd acknowledge needing it if she did. Our only friends with a kid around my son's age moved states recently, so it's also just been a general anxiety because we don't have other parent friends for playdates now. Making friends is hard.
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Feb 9, 2024 04:36
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I just got my first "no" and "don't" from my 16mo son on Friday over trying to keep his toy boat tethered to the bath tub wall. So it begins! Yesterday morning, I left him with my wife because I agreed to judge a high school debate tournament, and I felt a little guilty about not spending the day with him, and I swear he said "don't go" (he has started combining two words together fairly recently). Why did he learn that word now!? (He was fine, obvs.)
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Feb 18, 2024 17:13
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killer crane posted:Housing demand, and prices skyrocketed in the last couple years, and with that assessed value and actual property tax coming in. Right now schools get a percentage of property tax, instead of some fixed amount. Right now our schools are seeing a huge increase in money because of property value. Some morons think this is a problem, that schools have been operating on XYZ budget "just fine" and that the extra money would be better served in other capacities. Yeah that's how the state of Texas operates on the whole. We cut off alternative sources for tax revenue, complain endlessly about property taxes, then the legislature caps property taxes and dramatically reduces revenue for the schools. Last night, almost all the pro-public education Republican legislators got primaried out or forced into runoffs because they voted against school vouchers. It's just getting worse next year - the ultimate stated goal is to effectively defund public schools.
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Mar 6, 2024 19:20
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