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My daughter, our first, is going to turn 5 months old in about a week. Things over here have finally settled down enough that I've found some time to post about it here. There were a few hurdles at the start: I wasn't able to attend the birth due to COVID precautions, and hospital rules wouldn't let my wife use her phone to talk to me while she was in labor. With nothing to do but worry, I ended up sleeping through the birth at home. I got woken up at 7am by a phone call from the hospital telling me there had been an issue during the birth. I was told that my daughter had been transferred to a hospital with an NICU and to go ask the doctor there for more information. My wife was resting after labor at the birth hospital, so I couldn't really learn any details until I rushed over to the NICU hospital, in panic mode the entire time. When I got there, though, the news was good: the baby was mostly healthy, but my wife's water had broken early and our daughter had gotten an infection at some point before birth, and she just needed to stay in the NICU for a week to get some antibiotics. Apparently our daughter's vital signs were concerning enough during and immediately after birth that they whisked her away from my wife before she even had a chance to hold her. When I went to visit the NICU hospital, I ended up holding our daughter first time before my wife, when originally I wasn't even supposed to see her until they came home from the hospital. After a few days of antibiotics, our daughter was discharged, and I brought her back to the birth hospital, where she and my wife were also discharged together a day later. She's perfectly healthy now and meeting development milestones right on time, but I do have a few questions. I'm an American living in Japan, and my wife is Japanese, and I've noticed that the advice on how to raise children from English-language (both American and UK, etc.) and Japanese sources can different pretty significantly at times. This has resulted in a few disagreements between me and my wife, and I'd like to ask the thread's opinion on a few things. First, in regards to bedding and sleeping arrangements. Nearly every English source I've read has said something to the effect of "IF YOU DARE TO USE A BLANKET AND OR PILLOW YOUR BABY WILL SUFFOCATE AND IT WILL BE YOUR FAULT". Meanwhile, Japanese sources have very little to say about SIDS or suffocation risk with blankets or sleeping arrangements; most cribs available at baby stores are still side-drop cribs, baby mattress sets usually come with a (relatively) heavy blanket and pillow, and I haven't seen anything suggesting only firm mattresses should be used. Because of this, my wife wants to cover our daughter with blankets while she's sleeping at night, taking a nap, or just awake and playing on her back. This wasn't so much of a problem when my daughter was born since it was summer, but now that it's getting cold my wife is wanting to use more blankets or heavier ones, and it's starting to scare me a little bit. Is it really that bad of an idea to use blankets on a baby sleeping at night, especially one who's 5 months old and able to roll over to her stomach and back as much as she wants? I'm starting to think that maybe the warnings I've seen in English resources were maybe a little overprotective. Second, English sources tend to recommend starting baby's first foods at 6 or 7 months, sometimes saying to wait until the baby can sit up on her own. Our pediatrician, though, suggested we could start with small spoonfuls of rice porridge as soon as 5 months. Obviously I'm going to follow the advice of a doctor over stuff I've read on the internet, but when did other people here start solid foods? I've got more questions, but this post is already long enough and they aren't exactly pressing, so I'll ask some other time. Spoggerific fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Nov 27, 2021 |
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Nov 27, 2021 13:05
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My wife and I sleep on one large futon on the floor of our bedroom, and our daughter sleeps on a baby futon next to but separated from ours by 15cm or so. This is fine while she's still immobile, but I imagine it might cause some issues once she starts crawling. Our house is already mostly babyproofed, except for cabinent locks, but there are a few things in the bedroom (phone charging cables, etc.) that could be a bit of an issue. We really don't have room to put a normal crib in our bedroom or really anywhere else in our apartment. We'll be moving (hopefully to a larger place) around June of next year, but she'll be almost a year old at that point...
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Nov 27, 2021 15:54
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I'm not really sure whether to post this in E/N, the Japan thread in T&T, or here, but I guess I'll post it here since it's mainly about parenting in my mind. I'm an American living in Japan, married to a Japanese woman. We have a 5 month old daughter, and we're going back to my wife's hometown in rural Japan for the holidays. Long before we ever finalized plans to visit her family at the end of this year, I set a rule with my wife: I wouldn't let my daughter meet or play with anyone who isn't vaccinated against covid. I told her I didn't plan on budging with this rule, no matter who it was. She agreed with me. At the time, positive cases were rapidly increasing in Japan, and especially Tokyo, where we live, and my wife was very worried about our daughter potentially getting infected. Fast forward to about a week before we leave to visit her family, and I've since learned that a significant portion - perhaps even half or more - of her family is not vaccinated, and has no plans to get vaccinated, including her brother. The reasons her family has for not getting vaccinated are varied, but they mostly boil down to thinking that covid isn't a problem in rural Japan and being scared of side effects. Covid cases in the part of Japan where my wife's family is located have always been significantly lower than Tokyo, and they have had 0 new reported cases for weeks on end. There are, however, a few dedicated anti-vaccine people who tiptoe dangerously close to conspiracy theory territory. After learning that we were planning on not bringing our daughter to meet unvaccinated people, the the pushback from my wife's family has been pretty severe; several people are now very upset with my wife - and especially me, once they found out I was the one that brought the idea up. Someone who was planning on lending us their car for a month has rescinded the offer, my wife has now turned around and thinks there's no reason to keep our daughter away from unvaccinated people, and I'm getting put in a pretty precarious position. I'm the only non-Japanese person in my wife's entire extended family, and this being rural Japan, some family members were... disapproving, although not outright opposed, to us getting married. I've managed to build up a decent amount of respect from them, since I speak Japanese fluently and do my best to act as politely as I can. I don't want to lose that respect if I can avoid it, especially since we're entertaining the thought of eventually moving back to her hometown so our daughter can be around family. My wife was also very wary about vaccines in the first place, to the point where I had to strongly urge her to get vaccinated despite living in Tokyo. She's since told me that she doesn't want to get a booster shot, and now I'm afraid some of her family's attitude about the vaccines is starting to rub off on her. This whole thing is threatening to destabilize our marriage, and I'm wondering if it's really worth keeping my foot put down if that's what I risk by doing so. I don't really have anyone that can take my side, since I'm the lone foreigner in this situation. Official case numbers continue to be zero every day in the area of Japan where my wife's family is located (though I suspect that official case numbers are a gross underestimation, but that's not really relevant to this thread), and we have brought our daughter out in public here in Tokyo a handful of times... but I'm also kind of worried that this will be letting the genie out of the bottle, and I won't be able to take things back if cases start rising again.
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Dec 16, 2021 19:05
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Thanks for the advice everyone. I talked to my wife again, and we came to an agreement where we'll meet her unvaccinated family members with some conditions that we'll decide on before we leave. I'm still bitter that I had to give ground, but I guess it's better than completely alienating myself from my otherwise pleasant in-laws. Like multiple people have pointed out, with official case numbers being so low (even if there are probably a not insignificant number of cases going undetected), this is about as good of a situation I can hope for having to make a compromise in. We talked about how she does agree with me that the idea of not meeting unvaccinated people isn't a bad one in theory, so we're a lot closer to being on the same page than I might have made it seem in my previous post. Her main problem was how many people turned out to be unvaccinated, and how close some of them (her brother, etc.) were to her. External Organs posted:At the very least it may help you deepen the family bond and may help bridge the vaccine gap in the future. Yeah, that's one way I'm trying to look at things. Most of the people in her family who haven't gotten vaccinated have only done so because they don't feel the need, so there's a chance I can maybe convince them to get it. ExcessBLarg! posted:Suppose for a moment that your unvaccinated daughter--living in Tokyo where COVID is more prevalent--acquired an asymptomatic case before going to meet your extended family, exposed them, and made them ill. God forbid, what if one or more of the elderly members of your family were to die as a result? How would you view that situation? Your daughter? Your extended family? The majority of the elderly people in her family are vaccinated, and we'll both be getting tested (for free) twice before traveling, once a week before and once two days before we leave. I'm hoping that's enough to help prevent sending anyone to the hospital, but in the end if they're not vaccinated and they get it, then that's on them. I'd probably feel awful about it if it were to happen, but my wife hasn't seen her family in over two years and I think she needs the trip enough that it outweighs the risks, both for her family and our daughter. Hadlock posted:Anyways TL;DR had to make a similar decision, chose the unsafe one, but adjusted the parameters to make it at least partly safe Like I said above, this is probably what we'll be doing. Set boundaries to make things as safe as they can be given the circumstances, and make sure that if people cross the line then we won't hesitate to just leave.
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Dec 17, 2021 12:50
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His Divine Shadow posted:I'm very sorry for you, I don't know what I would do in that situation, it would destroy my respect for my SO if she had opinions like that. But we're both triple vaxxed now. My first post may have made my wife seem more anti-vaxx than she really is. She's not convinced that it's 100% safe and effective, or that it should be everyone's duty to get the shot, but she'll listen to people when they sit down and explain things to her. She got her first two shots after I talked to her about it, and I'm sure I can convince her to get her third. Unfortunately, she also listens to misinformation and anecdotes just as easily; when news about omicron was first coming out, she saw a news headline that said something along the lines of "antibodies may be up to 40x less effective against omicron", and decided that the vaccine was pointless versus it. When I explained to her that the third shot significantly boosts protection, and that there's more to immunity than just antibodies, and how it was kind of irresponsible for a news article to not properly mentioned it, she calmed down a lot. It's frustrating, but it doesn't mean I regret marrying her or having children or anything. Regardless of how my wife or her family feels about the covid vaccine, we've been getting our daughter all of her regular childhood vaccines right on schedule, and my wife has never doubted their necessity. We've got an appointment to give our daughter her BCG vaccine tomorrow, and from the way the needle and pictures of the scarring afterwards look, I'm not exactly looking forward to putting my daughter through that either. It's not standard in the US, so I never got it. People much smarter than me have decided that all babies in Japan should get it, though, so I'll listen to them. Here's a picture of the crazy 9 point needle that Japan uses to give people the BCG vaccine. Spoilered in case anyone has a fear of needles or something.  It leaves a scar that fades relatively quickly, but stays visible probably for the rest of one's life. My wife still has hers.
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Dec 17, 2021 15:04
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My daughter got her BCG shot yesterday. The baby stabber 9000 was smaller than it looked in pictures, but what I wasn't prepared for was how much force the doctor used when he pushed it into my daughter's arm. It looked like he used nearly all of his strength to push on it, to the point where his arm was shaking a bit, and the plastic lip around the needles left a big mark that's still there a day later. I've also never heard my daughter cry out in pain that much before, and it brought me to tears in a way I wasn't expecting. I've heard her cry from bumping a toy against her face, or from other vaccines, but never anything like that.
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Dec 19, 2021 13:01
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This feels like a stupid question, but will a 6 month old forget about her dad over a week or so? How well are babies at this age even able to differentiate between people anyway? My wife, daughter, and I are currently visiting in-laws for new years, but I might have to go home a week or so before we originally planned to. That would mean leaving my wife and daughter behind for that long, and it's got me a little worried. Ever since our daughter was born, I've been holding her a bit more and sooner after she cries than my wife, since my wife is more on the "cry it out" side of things. This has lead her to becoming a bit of a daddy's girl, where I can often get her to calm down a lot faster than my wife can. I'm afraid that leaving our daughter behind for a week might cause her to forget me a little, or maybe cause her some stress.
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Jan 3, 2022 05:10
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At 6 months, my daughter is now mostly able to sit up on her own, and I was excited at the prospect of maybe being able to get some things done on the computer with her in my lap and both of my hands mostly free. Unfortunately, she still absolutely hates it when I sit down while holding her, and starts crying most of the time when I do. She'll stop crying immediately if I stand up, of course. I know this is all normal for babies, but when, if ever, do they stop freaking out when you sit down while holding them?
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Jan 28, 2022 06:56
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My 7 month old daughter is able to get up on her hands while on her tummy, and then turn around at will. When she tries to get up on her knees and crawl, though, she ends up slipping and moving backwards instead. When we put a toy down on the ground near her and encourage her to crawl towards it, she'll turn towards the toy and try to move towards it, only to continually move away from the toy, no matter how hard she tries. Then she usually starts crying while reaching out for the increasingly distant toy. I feel like this is a metaphor for life or something.
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Feb 9, 2022 03:12
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My daughter was born during one of the COVID peaks where I live, and the hospital was refusing all visitors for any reason. I couldn't be there for the birth, couldn't visit after the birth, and couldn't even see the baby through a window or something. We had already cleaned the house and prepared everything before her due date, so I was stuck at home worried sick about my wife but with nothing to do... so I played video games.  Pretty much all day for a couple days. I felt like I was the worst husband and father in the world for doing so while my wife was in labor, but there was literally nothing that I could do to help.I couldn't imagine the kind of horrible guilt I would feel, or how incredibly angry my wife would have been if I had continued to do that after they were discharged from the hospital.
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Feb 14, 2022 03:19
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I'm an American living in Tokyo. There's a lot to complain about when it comes to working in Japan, but for the most part (excluding the first half of 2020), they've dealt with COVID pretty well. Nearly everyone wears a mask, even outside, and even traditionally stubborn Japanese companies are being fairly flexible with remote work. I could bitch endlessly about small details and how individual people/companies deal with COVID, but this isn't really the right thread. To be a bit more on topic, parental leave is one other thing I can't complain about. Mothers get leave from a month before their due date to 2 months after at full pay, and then 2/3rds pay until the child turns 1 year old. Fathers can also take the 2/3rds pay leave if they want to. On the other hand, childcare is a total bitch. It's split into daycare for kids up to 3 years old, and preschool for kids 3+ years old who aren't in elementary school yet. Spaces in daycare are limited, and unless you provide proof that both parents are working, you straight up can't put kids into daycare, even just a couple days per week. Even then, sometimes there will be a huge waiting list and not everyone can get their kids in. Some preschools will let even stay at home parents put their kids in, but spaces can still be pretty limited. I've been thinking about being a stay at home father to help make sure our daughter learns English, but zero daycare for the first 3 years will be pretty tough...
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Feb 14, 2022 04:58
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D34THROW posted:But not even being allowed at the loving hospital? gently caress that, I'd be a disgusting and awful wreck and very very unreasonably angry at hospital staff. Sorry for the digression Believe me, I was angry as hell. I still kind of am, since they didn't let me attend the birth of my first child. I argued with them, my wife argued with them, I offered to fly to the US and get vaccinated before the birth (it was at a time when vaccines were freely available in the US but nearly nobody had them in Japan), but nothing worked. Other hospitals in Tokyo were allowing fathers in for the birth, but my wife had decided on her hospital because it was the only one relatively close to where we live that offered epidurals. Epidurals are fairly uncommon in Japan, and hospitals generally can't perform them without an appointment in advance, so we chose a hospital that would give my wife an epidural over one that would let me be there for the birth. Of course, her water ended up breaking a few days early and she gave birth before her appointment, so she never got an epidural anyway.
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Feb 14, 2022 16:54
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I think the kids are punching holes in paper for fun and collecting the little round scraps?
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Feb 18, 2022 03:48
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BigBallChunkyTime posted:Parenting sucks. There is no worse feeling than fearing for your child's safety. I was eating dinner with my 1y9m old daughter and wife one evening about a month ago when our daughter started choking on a too big mouthful of rice. I was up away from the table grabbing something from the kitchen when I heard my wife asking our daughter if she was okay, and I turned over to see her drop her spoon and reach her arms out to her mom. I ran back over to the table, and noticed our daughter wasn't making any noise. When I saw her face, she looked completely terrified and had tears starting to well up in her eyes. It's a look I never want to see again, and one I will never forget. I ripped the table off her high chair, practically throwing it across the room in the process, yelled at my wife to call an ambulance, and put our daughter over my knee and started hitting her on the back. Luckily, the rice came out and our daughter started crying after only a couple of solid hits, before my wife had even picked up her phone. I picked her up and tried to tell her it was okay before I started crying myself, with my wife joining us soon after realizing what had just happened. The whole incident probably took less than 30 seconds, but even a month later I still find myself playing it back through my head. Our daughter has (understandably) mostly entirely stopped eating rice afterwards. It kind of sucks since we live in Japan and it's basically guaranteed to be in every lunch at her daycare, and she would have some rice at dinner half the time.
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Apr 17, 2023 13:46
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My two year old loves washing her hands. We have a bathtub with a faucet that she can reach while standing up from outside the tub, and she will constantly ask to go wash her hands. Normally I think a parent would be happy about a toddler wanting to wash her hands, but she gets her clothes wet every time she does it, and then she'll demand to change her clothes even if it's only a tiny spot that's wet. I've been able to keep her requests mostly at bay by telling her that her hands are already clean, but yesterday she finally found a way around that. "Wanna wash your hands!" (she calls herself "you") "No, you just washed your hands. Your hands are already clean." *sticks both of her hands in her mouth* "Mamma mash mor mands!"
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Aug 17, 2023 06:23
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Hell hath no fury like a toddler screaming "WANNA DO MYSELF!!!!!". My god. All I did was hold the mug while you tried to put the lid on to keep you from spilling it, and me having to throw away the ice cubes would have made you cry even more.
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Aug 21, 2023 17:44
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My daughter wants to be carried 80% of the time, but the 20% of the time she decides she wants to walk, she'll mostly behave and follow along... until we stop. One time a few weeks ago, after we had stopped for a moment, I saw her wandering away and asked her "where are you going?". Now every time we stop while I'm not holding her, she starts slowly walking backwards while looking at me, and when I look back at her or call her name she replies "Where are you going?" while continuing the walk backwards.
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Aug 22, 2023 07:02
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When it's time for me to put our 2 year old to sleep, I play around with her a little bit before going to bed - pick her up and spin around a bit, roll around with her on the bed, etc. She absolutely loves it, and giggles like mad every time. My wife, however, is almost 8 months pregnant, which means she hasn't been able to do anything even approaching roughhousing with our daughter for a while now. This has lead to our daughter refusing to go to bed with mom, and throwing a tantrum every time we try, including a similar reaction every time she wakes up in the middle of the night. I was already prepared to do basically everything in the house once my wife started approaching the third trimester, so it's fine, but I miss the small amount of free time every other night I managed to finally claw away from our daughter. I know that's all going down the gutter once the baby comes, but it's still a little bit of a bummer for it to happen a month or two earlier than I expected.
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Aug 24, 2023 16:36
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The two year old is running around the living room after dinner, when she suddenly stops and looks at her foot. "Oh! Udon!", she says, and before I realize what's happening, the piece of noodle is already in her mouth. I tell her "that was on the floor, so it was dirty. Please don't eat food off the floor." She stops, and you can see the gears turning in her little head. "Wash the floor! Wipey please!"
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Sep 5, 2023 15:39
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Brawnfire posted:Kid observations are the best. My 2 year old got ahold of grandma's phone and had somehow started scrolling through lock screen presets. She had been going through them silently until she ran into a picture of a football sitting upright before a kick, at which point she yelled out "POTATO!" and started tapping it a bunch.
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Oct 14, 2023 15:49
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I live in Japan, and over here daycares are split into public and private ones. Anybody can get into private daycares, but they're very expensive (in Japan terms). The one my daughter goes to costs around $800 a month for 3 days a week, 9 to 4. Public daycares are subsidized and thus insanely cheap compared to American standards. How much depends on where you live and your income, but they can be under $300 a month for 5 days a week 9 to 6. The issue is that they almost all have wait lists, and your position on the list is based on a points system. Single parent families are almost guaranteed to get in, children with disabilities get more points, etc. In general, both parents need to be working a full time job in order to have any chance whatsoever of getting a spot in a public daycare. The hosed up bit is if you have a second child and either (or both) parents take paternity leave, then they may kick your first child out of daycare because a parent is now at home instead of working and able to take care of the child, so there's no need for them to take up a spot at daycare!
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Oct 31, 2023 02:50
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There's no trick or treating where I live, but my daughter's English language daycare did have a special trick or treat event earlier this month that cost $50 to attend. I was looking forward to teaching her about halloween and getting her a costume, but then hand foot and mouth hit the daycare and enough kids got sick that they cancelled the event. We somehow managed to dodge it, at least.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:03
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A tantrum. A tantrum is always what's next.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:47
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My 2 year old has decided she can change her clothes all by herself. She can't. God help us.
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Nov 3, 2023 00:41
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I live in Japan and my wife is Japanese, so my 2 year old speaks a mix of the languages. It's kind of 50/50 whether or not she latches onto the English or Japanese word for certain things. A lot of Japanese words are borrowed from English, though, which helps her out... unless the term borrowed from English is something that nobody actually says in English, which can be very funny sometimes. The Japanese word for "stroller" is "baby car", so whenever my daughter sees a baby in a stroller she loudly yells "There's a baby in a baby car!". Another funny one happened when she pointed at an electric outlet and proudly told me "Don't touch the consent. It's dangerous." while nodding her head. The Japanese word is "konsento", from "concentric", back when plugs used to be round.
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Nov 21, 2023 20:38
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Bought a new brand of wipes this time because the ones we were buying before were kind of cheap. I went with a brand that was a bit more expensive and also had cute designs on the package, thinking our two year old would like it. The first one we took out had a big firetruck on the front. The two year old loves firetrucks, so she was very happy. Success! I opened the package up and put our reusable one-touch-open lid on top. That was a mistake.
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Nov 27, 2023 14:25
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The baby has started crying when people take things out of her hands. The toddler has entered her "mine!" phase. 
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Apr 14, 2024 11:41
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Toddler: Daddy, listen to me. Me: Yes? I'm listening. Toddler: <baby sister's name> is old, so we need to buy a new <baby sister's name> with a white face.
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Apr 24, 2024 12:10
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Was it kanpo (traditional Chinese medicine, but ＪＡＰＡＮＥＳＥ〜), or was it normal medicine in a powder form? I can't stand the taste of kanpo, but the powders we've gotten for our kids have all been normal medicine and all fairly sweet.for pediatric medication powders, I think they mix it up in the pharmacy, so there's probably a lot of variation in taste.
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Apr 25, 2024 12:09
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They always recover fast enough to be bouncing off the walls again right as you start feeling sick from whatever it was they had.
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Apr 25, 2024 14:53
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Playgrounds raise the surrounding land value, though! It's like they've never played sim city.
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May 7, 2024 02:55
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Did you use a playpen, and do you still have it around? We used one of those modular ones with plastic panels you can arrange as you want, and it has since turned out to be a great building block for blanket forts.
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May 12, 2024 15:10
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:51 |
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harperdc posted:Today I learned about Roseola, and it suddenly made the last week of illness for Ms 2 Years Old all make sense. Our daughter got it when she was about a year and a half old. We brought her to the doctor for the fever, and she told us "your daughter is going to get very irritable after the fever subsides in a few days". Apparently the disease is nicknamed "cranky disease" (不機嫌病) in Japanese, and my god if that isn't an accurate name. We had to hold her constantly from morning to night after the fever went away. Nothing else would console her. Instant full volume screaming until one of us picked her up again. Spoggerific fucked around with this message at 23:59 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 23:53
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