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Here's a trick I used at times like that (be forewarned it doesn't always work): "Let's do it together!". Then you just let them put their hands on top of yours while you do all the work. When it works, it's amazing. When it doesn't, well, they were going to tantrum anyway so at least you tried, right?
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Jul 20, 2014 10:36
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This thing can be used as a baby gate in a whole bunch of shape variations- each of those 6 pieces comes apart, or can be rotated to various angles in relation to each other. You can use 3 or 4 pieces to just surround the base of the stairs. We bought one of these to block off our radiator in our apartment when my eldest was born (had I known I was going to have a baby I wouldn't have picked a vintage apartment with radiators and all-wood/tile floors) and it saw use every year after that for many years defending various dangerous places in random apartments we lived in.
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Aug 1, 2014 17:36
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When my oldest first got tubes put in she complained that everything was too loud and hurt her ears because she was so used to having her ears full of gunk that it was like she'd spent the past year+ wearing earplugs. It only took her about a day to adjust but that first day was miserable. Of course, it didn't help that she had tonsils/adenoids out all at the same time either. Once she recovered though they definitely were the best thing ever. The tubes lasted about 2 years and by the time they fell out she had grown enough that her eustachian tubes were finally draining right, so she's never had a single ear infection since getting the tubes.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:37
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Yeah pretty much as soon as your kids get mobile until they're about 7-8 years old they're just gonna have a bunch of self-inflicted bruises and scrapes from random poo poo. It's pretty normal. Hell my oldest daughter had a black eye in her preschool graduation photo- she got that by running headlong into another kid on the playground. They bounce back pretty fast though if you can resist the urge to freak out over it.  e: actually revise that, for some kids it may be older. My youngest is 8 and came home from summer camp with both elbows and knees covered in scrapes because she was hiking with her head in the clouds all the time. Big sis Sofia tells me the counselors were good about it and every time it happened they'd ask Julie if gravity was still working right, in response to which she would laugh and give a big thumbs up. Marchegiana fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 12:04
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I went back to work part-time when both my kids started elementary. Since I work a lovely retail job I'm usually the one who takes off/leaves early when the kids are sick. I have a pretty sweet gig in that I share a position with another woman who has no kids, and is always looking for more hours so she loves to cover for me when I have to take an extra day off. My manager doesn't care as long as someone is there to balance the books. I also have the advantage that my kids are surprisingly healthy. We got over the hump in preschool and now my kids generally only have to stay home on average about 3-4 days a year. We actually had more snow days than sick days last year, which is a lot easier because I have a neighbor I can pawn the kids off on for non-sick days. I actually started going back to school this year because gently caress retail. I'm just doing prereqs now while still working part time, so although my schedule is a bit tighter I still can take a day or two as needed. By the time my school schedule ramps up to the point where I can't afford to take a day for sick kids both my girls should be old enough to stay home alone for a few hours and stream netflix from the couch if they're sick.
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Sep 19, 2014 03:01
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I dunno, if the kid likes wasabi peas I'm thinking taking cheese in the other direction, towards stronger umami flavors might be what's needed. My youngest hated string cheese and all the other cheese that kids usually love because it's bland. Then my dad offers her some gorgonzola and she tore that poo poo up. Now she eats cheese, but only the strong(ish) stuff. Pecorino romano is her favorite. Keep in mind you should only try this with stuff that you'd actually enjoy if the kid won't eat it, naturally.
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Oct 3, 2014 02:11
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Yeah, my oldest started playing with the neighbors kids directly across our street at about 4. We went with her the first few times to show her how we stop at the edge of the street, look both ways, and then cross when it's safe. Then we watched her from the porch for a while, but that stopped somewhere around 5 or so. By the time my oldest was 7 and the youngest was 4 they were going out together unsupervised with the understanding that they stay together and the little one follows her big sister's lead. We also have the advantage that we live on a dead-end street with basically no traffic (only neighbors driving home) and all the neighbors are like-minded in letting kids be kids- there's a lot of kids in the neighborhood and they all play outside together a bunch. It's pretty awesome.
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Oct 13, 2014 15:20
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Alterian posted:"Kitten Party" on Netflix is toddler crack. My kids are not toddlers and will probably watch the hell out of that now that we know it exists. Too Cute has been a regular feature on our netflix lineup. It drives me crazy that we have actual, live kittens in the house (we foster for our local SPCA) and they will still watch kitten shows on top of that.
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Oct 21, 2014 19:53
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Basically my understanding is that they warn you about anesthesia on little kids because they just don't know for sure what (if any) the long-term developmental effects are. There could be nothing, or there could be risks but they just don't know because there's no way to safely test that on baby humans in a controlled trial. Obviously if the kid has something life-threatening they're going to put them under because any unknown risk from the anesthesia is lower than the known risk of foregoing a critically necessary procedure. But for an elective procedure, they warn you about any and all risks that may or may not occur because of the whole informed consent thing.
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Nov 8, 2014 03:07
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I just wanted to post and say to all you folks with babies/toddlers that they will eventually actually sleep through the night in their own beds without disturbing you. Someday, you will once again sleep a full night's sleep on a regular basis. It may seem like a distant impossibility at this point, but it does happen. Hang in there. 
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Dec 4, 2014 21:24
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At two they really shouldn't be nursing 4-5 times a night. I had the same thing happen with my oldest, I kept nursing her to get her back to sleep because it was the fastest way to get back to sleep myself. Well then when I got pregnant again my milk dried up, but she still wanted to nurse all the time at night so I knew it wasn't because she was hungry, she just didn't have any other tools to get to sleep because she'd never been taught another way. It was not easy those first few nights when I cut her off from the boob, but it did get better. I transitioned by holding, cuddling, and rocking her just as I would if I was nursing, but with no actual feeding. She was PISSED the first few times but I just kept calmly repeating "no nun-nuns, it's sleep time" over and over (and over and over and over). Eventually she got the hint and stopped asking, which then turned into less waking me at night because what was the point if no boob? She won't be traumatized if you're still being loving and supportive, but you've got to get her off the breast at night- for your own sanity and for your marriage if nothing else. Oh and BTW, my daughter's night nursing at that age turned out to be super bad for her teeth. By the time she was four she ended up having to go under dental anesthesia and having one tooth pulled and two teeth get pulpectomy & crown combos because her night nursing had triggered awful dental decay.
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Dec 7, 2014 11:53
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Yeah seriously if you want educational games websites don't pay for what you can get for free. My kids occasionally used starfall when they were pre-K for their alphabet and phonics games. The one they really like now is cool math games which they still play all the time without my even prompting them (the games there are p. fun). I think coolmath has a section for pre-k stuff too. Don't be thrown off by the late 90's look of the websites, the design overall may suck but the games are sound.
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Dec 12, 2014 12:58
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I have two that are almost 3 years apart, and I think it's been pretty awesome that they do things together. I think it's a good spread in that the oldest was old enough to understand when the baby came and help out, but the gap is still small enough that they can do things together. Having said that, when my best friend asked me whether she should have another kid I didn't gush about how awesome it is and how she should do it, because everyone's circumstances are different. My BFF had a hard pregnancy and her daughter is extremely precocious, and the thought of going through challenges like that again called for serious consideration. She was feeling a lot of the guilt about "depriving" her daughter of a sibling and I straight up told her that's a bunch of bullshit. Her daughter is always going to have friends, and my daughters even consider her as a sister (they call her their "god-sister" because I'm her godmother and my best friend is their godmother). She's not going to be deprived of a good childhood based solely on whether she has siblings or not. If she wanted to have another then by all means she should, but I didn't want her to do it out of some misplaced sense of obligation.
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Dec 30, 2014 03:17
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Count me in the "has an awesome family and had a great holiday" camp. My family traveled here to spend the holiday with us, which is a 2-day drive for them. So I had my parents in the guest room, my sister on my couch, and my Uncle Jim had a hotel room. My husband taught my uncle (who is in his 60's) how to play M:TG which was fun to watch. Unrelated, but OMG puberty has really kicked in for Sofia. She loving STINKS. If she doesn't shower every day it starts smelling like I have a 5-foot gym sock walking around my house. God drat.
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Jan 2, 2015 13:47
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Yeah once the babies can roll themselves around the "sleep only on the back" advice no longer applies the same way. Start them on their back, keep out stuff that can smother them from the crib, and don't sweat it when they inevitably migrate all over the crib.
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Jan 6, 2015 19:33
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For those of you in the US who want to try something close to leverpostej look for braunschweiger at your grocery store. It's a very similar German liver pate that I know for a fact is made here in the US by Oscar Meyer because we always had it in my fridge growing up. You might have to live in a region with a lot of German descendents to find it though- I know they have it in the Chicago area at least. Also my kid totally went on (and technically I guess still is on) a cheese kick too, but her preference was for the most expensive cheeses. Forget cheddar or mozz, she just wants grana padano, pecorino romano, and gorgonzola. Thank god they sell reasonably priced pecorino at Costco.
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Jan 22, 2015 22:15
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Re: walking- funny enough I just covered this in my developmental psych class the other day. If they're standing and cruising they're fine and right on track developmentally- they just need a little more time figuring out how to shift weight from one foot to the other without falling or hanging on to something, which if you've never done it before is kinda a big deal when you think about it. Personally I had the same experience with my oldest when she was about 12 mos., every time I tried to coax her to walk she'd either ignore me or get frustrated. She started walking on Easter day, when everyone was too busy with holiday stuff to fuss over her. No amount of coaxing is going to speed up the development of those neural connections, just give them time and you'll have two toddler terrors running around before you know it.
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Jan 23, 2015 12:47
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I thought HFMD was a rarity too until my kids caught it in elementary school. Symptoms started right at the beginning of our beach vacation.  They had a pretty mild case, where they just has about two days of fever and general blah. It was only after the fever broke that I noticed the palms of their hands and soles of their feet looked weird. They got just a handful of spots on their hands and feet, and somehow managed to escape the worst of the mouth sores. It's kinda like Fifth Disease, where if the rash isn't prominent a lot of people are likely to write it off as just another virus.
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Feb 13, 2015 13:21
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Ron Jeremy posted:Looking for some advice. My son came home from 4th grade with a referral for dropping the n-word on one of his classmates who had "been mean to him." It's highly likely that your son doesn't know the context behind the word. For a lot of kids these days that's the ultimate bad word- way worse than the f-bomb was when I was a kid. They know it must be real bad because of how everyone reacts to it, but because no one really uses it or talks about it they don't know why. I came to this realization a few years ago when my neighbor told me about some kids in the neighborhood who were bullying her son. They were calling her son names using that word, and her son didn't know what it meant, just that it was bad. Her son was white, and the kids calling him by that name were not. I actually had a conversation about the n-word about a month ago with my 11 year old daughter- thankfully not because anyone we knew had used it. I had been taking about this story with my husband when the subject came up. Funny thing is my daughter knew all about slavery and Jim Crow as they had covered that in school, and she knew that the n-word was really bad, but she had just never put 2 and 2 together. It's not exactly something they teach to the younger kids. So I guess the first thing you need to do is ask your kid if they actually understand why the word is so bad. My bet is that they don't. Then go from there on teaching the history of the word, and why it's so horrible.
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Feb 28, 2015 14:23
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Sofia still gets called Sofia at home- it's usually just her friends that use the short version Sofie (or Fifi in the case of one friend). Juliana we always called Juliana, and still do about half the time. Usually we start with Julie and move to Juliana when she's not paying attention 9which happens a lot). She started preferring Julie in about first grade when she realized if she could get her teachers to call her that she'd have to write fewer letters when she wrote her name.
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Mar 28, 2015 23:07
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Yeah, my kids used to watch MLP when they were younger (as in, actually the target demographic for the show). Now that they're older, the couldn't care less because that's baby stuff. Just pretend that bronies don't exist and let your kid enjoy a show for kids.
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Jul 15, 2015 20:51
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My kids are 12 and 9, and pretty much always get a sip of whatever me or my husband is drinking. They also get a small amount of wine at holidays, heavily watered down. My oldest actually quite enjoys everything she's tasted, my youngest doesn't care for wine or beer but likes hard cider and mixed drinks. We've always made sure to explain to them not only that it was an adult beverage, but why: we've told them the alcohol can have bad effects on your liver and brain, and the smaller you are the easier it is for those organs to get hurt. They understand that this is true even for adults, and know that their dad and I never drink enough to hurt ourselves. I grew up in an Italian household, so that's just the way I was raised and what my family has always done. The whole cultural attitude is different- when I was in Italy years ago they had no problems offering wine to my 13 year old sister and pregnant cousin, and were bewildered when they both turned it down. You can also get alcohol at the Autogrills there- those are basically like rest stops on the toll roads where the only way in or out is by car- so I'd imagine their attitudes towards drinking and driving are quite a bit different. But you also don't see people getting so rip roaring drunk that they end up puking in the streets like they do here in the US.
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Jul 31, 2015 05:30
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Hah- coffee is another thing my kids love. My oldest got her first taste at just over a year old- unintentionally of course. We were at a local festival so I had her in a front carrier, I was so busy trying to navigate the crowds I didn't realize she had leaned forward to start sucking on the straw for my Starbucks frappucino until I heard nummy noises. She started asking for and drinking coffee regularly in Kindergarten at breakfast, I'd make her a "caffe latte" which was about 1/4 coffee and 3/4 milk. Now that she's in middle school she drinks it black. They only get regular in the mornings, if we get coffee anytime after lunch I always make sure they have decaf. I dunno, I guess I just never really restricted what my kids could or couldn't eat- if they wanted to try something I never told them "you probably won't like it", I just let them at it. Now they eat the weirdest poo poo, like lemons. Seriously, we went to the grocery store and let the kids pick out what fruit they wanted, they come back with a bag of lemons. They slice it up and put salt on it before eating it like an orange. My oldest even eats the peel sometimes. But it's awesome in that we can take them out to any restaurant we want and they'll be gung ho for it. They love pho, goat curry, and sushi (actual fish sushi, not just veg stuff like california rolls). We're considering a trip to Italy next year and my kids are all excited, saying"I'M GOING TO EAT ALL THE THINGS"- which apparently includes horse, since my oldest found out that they eat it over there.
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Aug 1, 2015 13:43
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If your baby is under 24 months you can't make any judgements about how fat/skinny they are or are going to be, because it's all going to change, and as long as they eat healthy foods and stay active it should all balance out in the end. My oldest was a real chubster- Michelin Man baby. She was 7lbs 7oz at birth but by 6 months she was over 20lbs. She had rolls everywhere you can possibly have rolls, but she was 98th percentile for both weight and height so it was just the way she was meant to grow. She's super skinny now, but after years of gymnastics in elementary and now track in middle school it's cause she's pretty much all muscle. She's at about 60th percentile height and 40th for weight, but I expect her weight will start to balance closer to her height percentile now that she's started puberty. (!!!) Which reminds me of another thing- you'd be surprised how young the obsession over weight starts in kids, mostly thanks to us adults and our weird preoccupation with all things bathroom-scale related. I constantly hear from my 9 year old (who is super petite, about 40th percentile height and 30th weight) about how she needs to weigh herself to make sure she's not getting fat. Nine! and I still have to reassure her not only that she's not fat, but that the most important thing is how healthy and active you are, not what a scale says.
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Aug 6, 2015 12:54
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sheri posted:I dunno, maybe a good solid "being fat isn't a bad thing" would help too. Just reassuring her she isn't fat seems to imply that being fat is bad. Just a thought. I usually don't word it as "you're not fat" but just tell her she has no need to worry about how much she weighs and that she just needs to keep doing what she's doing to stay healthy.
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Aug 6, 2015 17:39
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I think it'd be fine. The concentration of saltwater pools is probably pretty close to isotonic, so it'd be no different than letting your kid swim in saline. If anything it might help her feel better.
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Aug 29, 2015 22:31
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This book is pretty much the go-to for explaining death to kids.
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Sep 16, 2015 03:24
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I ended up having two girls so it was moot in the end, but my husband and I did have the circumcision conversation when I was pregnant. His input was basically that it's a medical procedure, which always has risks of complications, and since he didn't see the necessity of it he didn't feel like he was willing to undertake the risks. He is circumcised himself, but doesn't feel like "kid looking like me" was enough of a reason to modify his potential son, and in fact has stated that if he had been given a choice about the procedure he would have chosen to not be circumcised. And that's what it basically came down to for us- we felt that having our child undergo a irreversible surgical modification with no medical necessity was not our choice to make, when we could have no idea how our child would feel about it when they were old enough to decide for themselves. It's for that same reason that I never pierced my daughters' ears (I know it's nowhere near the scale of circumcision, but it's pretty much the only body modification for girls that American culture condones). Both my daughters have piercings now, but we waited until they were old enough to make their own choice, which for us also meant old enough to take up the responsibility of cleaning and caring for the fresh piercings during the healing process. Even then we made the girls sit on their decision for about 6-9 months before we got them pierced to make sure they hadn't changed their mind.
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Oct 8, 2015 12:39
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Earlobes continue to grow slightly throughout your whole life, that's why a lot of older folks seem to have these huge ears. It's faster in kids and slows down in adulthood, of course, but it's still measurable growth. Wearing heavy earrings can also cause the cartilage to sag and throw piercings off too. The good news is that a misplaced piercing is a lot easier to fix than a misplaced foreskin. 
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Oct 8, 2015 17:28
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I have also asked for cash in lieu of gifts, and it went over fine. Generally as long as you have something big that you can justify asking for cash on people just go "oh yeah, sure, sounds great" and that's the end of it. Our cash request on her birthday went towards paying for my daughter's week at Girl Scout equestrian camp. She loved that way better than whatever Barbie poo poo she might have otherwise gotten.
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Dec 18, 2015 01:31
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Weird eating kids are the best.  My youngest always hated string cheese or any processed "cheese" type food but will throw down on some gorgonzola. They also beg me for smoked fish every time we go to Trader Joe's.
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Jan 15, 2016 14:05
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I've always been told that when evaluating the eating habits of toddlers, you have to look at what they've eaten over the course of a week instead of a single day. As long as what they're eating is nutritious and not junk, there's not much reason to limit them (obv. eating til they're so stuffed they vomit is one reason to limit, rarely happens though). They have a ton of stuff going on not just with their bodies, but in their brains, and it needs fuel. Some days they become ravenous eating machines, some days they decide they ate enough already and aren't hungry. If you look at the bigger picture it all balances out to where they need to be.
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Feb 4, 2016 13:19
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Yeah some parents just really shelter their kids. Like really, REALLY shelter their kids. I have a girl in my scout troop who is now 10 and has never seen anything other than animated G-rated movies from what I can tell. Other kids in the troop (my daughter included) are talking about Minecraft and Pokemon and she just can't relate because she has never been allowed to play a video game. Or even use a computer from what I can tell. She's going to be in for a rough ride come middle school. From my perspective it seems a little off, but then my kids are wildly corrupted in my house- to the point that I joke that society won't corrupt my kids because I've gotten to them first. A lot of making friends with other parents for playdates, parties etc. comes down to finding other parents who raise their kids similarly to yours so you don't butt heads on stuff like your example of birthday party themes. So for example, while I like the sheltered girl and her parents, and will chat at the scout meetings, I would never invite them to a party or playdate because I know there'd be a whole lot of bridges getting torched. Now the mom who makes off-color profanity-laden jokes on facebook all the time and let her daughter shave one side of her head, yeah she's at the top of my invite list. I don't think the sheltering mom is doing it wrong, she's just doing it different from me and I recognize that we wouldn't mesh.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:58
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Good news is all the physical illness stuff tends to taper off right about age 8-9 or so (after a sudden increase in illness rates every time kids enter a new school setting and get introduced to new germ pools). Eventually you'll burn through every illness a kid could possibly get, plus a few bonus. My favorites were the time my kids came down with the symptoms of hand foot and mouth on day 1 of our beach vacation we'd planned a year for, and the time my youngest daughter got a petechial rash that caused a huge freakout that resulted in nothing but days of tests that showed she was fine and they had no idea why she got it. Oh and the time the kids got Parvovirus (aka Fifth disease) and we found out my husband had never had it as a kid, and by the way this is way way worse if you get it as an adult than a kid. Kids were fine after 5 days, husband was miserable for 3 months. So yeah, buckle up for a hell of a ride.
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Mar 9, 2016 15:14
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It sounds like the problem is more of a lack of stimulation and interaction, which isn't solved by flash cards. We humans are hard wired to learn by interacting with our environment at a young age, and it's not really until we're older (like 7 or so) that we begin to truly understand how abstract concepts like written language and math work. Until then, we learn by taking these concepts and relating them to concrete things we've experienced. So you can't teach a preschool kid by drilling him with a flash card, it has to come organically through his other experiences. So you play with your kid, say building with blocks, and you count out the blocks. Tell the kid "let's stack up three blocks" then demonstrate as you count out one, two, three, and let the kid follow. Same thing with colors, you can tell a kid "this is blue, let's find the blue blocks" and they learn colors that way. Not by looking at a card with a bluebird and the word "blue". This isn't something you can just do in a sitting, it's a long involved process that happens everywhere and every time you're with the kid. Go out driving, and point out the colors of the cars. Shopping, count out the apples you put into the bag. Et cetera. Basically, teaching a preschooler by methods that adults or school age children use is doomed to fail. If you want the kid to learn, then just interact with him as a kid, let him follow his own interests, and give teaching moments throughout. That's basically the Montessori method in a nutshell anyway, which is pretty well supported by child psychology theories. No one, not even adults, are going to truly learn and integrate information if it's not interesting to them, and flash cards are the least interesting thing for a 3 year old.
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Mar 30, 2016 17:32
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Yeah, every manual I've owned is the same way. It was really fun as a teenager messing with my kid sister's 12-year-old friend who insisted she knew how to drive. I told her "OK, get it started and I'll let you drive around the block" and then I laughed my rear end off because she had no idea what the clutch even was.
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May 13, 2016 15:05
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First thing I'd do is check the school policy on handing out invitations, and see if there's anyway to get parent contact info from the PTA- some schools (like the one my kids go to) don't allow invites to be handed out in class. Luckily the PTA for my kids school knows about this policy and made a workaround where they keep a semi-public roster of all the kids in a given class and their parents contact info that PTA members can access. It's limited in that they only have the info that parents shared with the PTA but it's something. If your school does something like room parents then that person may have contact info for other folks in the class as well, they usually have a list for email chains for planning class parties.
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May 16, 2016 15:08
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I'm also in the parent of older kids group, my two daughters are 13 and 10. I had to teach my oldest how to use tampons the other day, that was fun.
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May 22, 2016 14:20
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Seriously. My kid got a black eye at daycare as a toddler, because another toddler headbutted her in the face. Anyone who knows anything about kids knows they get themselves into all sorts of weird injuries at that age.
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Jun 7, 2016 16:13
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 15:23 |
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Could be worse- my goddaughter is allergic to corn. Try to find a kid-friendly food these days that doesn't have corn, corn meal, corn syrup, or corn starch in it, I dare you.
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Jun 17, 2016 02:17
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