We were sent in for an induction since she is considered "at risk" due to being 35 and so far everything is going super smooth, nurses have been great and no IV complications - @maraji that sounds terrible. I'm sure I'll turn into a quivering mess later but right now it's just Netflix and chill in a hospital room.
Huh. My wife was a few months shy of 35 on our second, and there was never any talk of that. But we went with a midwife, and they tend to be more "let nature take its course."
For a more safe "joke": on that second birth, the nurse went to open one of those sealed packets containing things like the IV bits and such. Usually like paper on one side and see-through plastic on the other, or paper on both sides glued together. So she pulls them apart with... a bit too much force. It was literally something you'd see in a movie. Everything went flying up in the air and across to all corners of the room.
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AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
So how do y'all deal with sick kids staying home from daycare? The wife and I both work and I'm not sure how we could keep baby home for several days. We don't really have anyone who could help watch him for us, and I don't think our jobs will afford us more than a day or 2 off work.
So how do y'all deal with sick kids staying home from daycare? The wife and I both work and I'm not sure how we could keep baby home for several days. We don't really have anyone who could help watch him for us, and I don't think our jobs will afford us more than a day or 2 off work.
Not helpful, but we would basically alternate who took time off. Both of us had the ability to work from home, so we could still be productive depending on how the kid was doing.
My wife was 31 when we had Charlie. She was in labor for a day and a half and didn't dilate, so we ended up having to C-section. Basically for the first day of the labor, we played Fire Emblem Heroes and watched a Harry Potter marathon. When shit got real, I just started having the health care staff direct me around as untrained labor. For the C-section I was up by her head to keep her calm (but still to this day will tease her about getting to see her womb and such). After she slept solidly, I conducted the most essential operation of the whole ordeal: arranging for a 20 pack of Taco Bell tacos to appear with her name on it. Also, be prepared to watch New Baby so Momma can get some much needed rest.
So far we've watched the Pete Davidson comedy thing on Netflix, Power of the Dog (snooze fest but watching Benedict cumberbund finger pick was fun), and now watching War Dogs. For the record, the movies she tried to download that failed for some reason were Girl, Interrupted, Leon the Professional and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, so... yeah.
The nurse showed me how to read the TOCO print outs so I'm now just basically staring at that.
I'm just waiting for a professional to start giving me instructions. So far the most useful thing I've done is scheduled the champagne and caviar drop off for tomorrow.
"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'."
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AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
I weep for those not fortunate enough to have nearby parents. Sending a kid to their grandparents is a cherished privilege.
Yeah unfortunately 3 out of 4 grandparents already kicked the bucket, and the one that's still with us is in hospice. At least she got to meet her grandbaby, but we have little to no help with our newborn.
I weep for those not fortunate enough to have nearby parents. Sending a kid to their grandparents is a cherished privilege.
We can’t do this, but enough people at our daycare did do this with unfortunate COVID based results that I suggest not doing this unless you have to.
Yeah, it was more of a comment for childcare when your kid is sick in general in our sucky American system than it was about COVID. (Poster I was replying to was asking about advice for sick kid, not COVID exposure.)
I weep for those not fortunate enough to have nearby parents. Sending a kid to their grandparents is a cherished privilege.
We can’t do this, but enough people at our daycare did do this with unfortunate COVID based results that I suggest not doing this unless you have to.
Yeah, it was more of a comment for childcare when your kid is sick in general in our sucky American system than it was about COVID. (Poster I was replying to was asking about advice for sick kid, not COVID exposure.)
Yeah, I’m with you. We’ve just seen a few folk at daycare send their snuffly toddler off to grandparents (because the system sucks and they have no choice!) and then it turns out the toddler is positive for COVID, and brought it to the grandparents . Which sucks! It’s a weird thing you have to think of now that you didn’t before.
*That said*, you absolutely do what you have to, because the system sucks. We ended up giving up one of us for days the boy was home, and that person had to make up their work at night .
Yep, we've been basically solo. One set of grandparents on my wife's side is helpful, but we have to drive hours to them. My dad tries, but is up there in age so keeping up with our hyperactive 7 and 5 year old is just not doable.
We actually have our first night away from the kids this weekend as my sister is coming to change out with everyone.
My kid has seen her grandparents once or twice for the past few years. And while its partly because both us and them are being careful during Covid, its hard because my step-nephew would be visited by them on a bi-weekly basis throughout his childhood, despite them living the same distance away from him as they now live from us. They send gifts, text, and call on a regular basis, but I've noticed that the only time they want her around for an extended period of time, its coincidentally when extended family or friends show up so they can show her off.
(It doesn't help that the moment both me and my brother left the nest, they immediately packed up to live five minutes from my stepsister and her son.)
This sort of talk is why I mostly avoid this thread. If I think about what's ahead it all seems like way too much.
It always is. At least for me with 3 kids I always feel like I'm drowning.
But the kids seem to be flourishing so maybe that's just part of parenting.
Fully. A neverending project in which you barely control most of the variables, and can only speculate on the results you're getting. Rife with confounding feedback and unreliable team members who have perverse incentives and a strong desire to ignore milestones and derail timelines because they're actually working on a related but ultimately different project.
I feel like ultimately the best thing you can do is recognize that there's a separation between what you're trying to teach your kids and what they're learning from you, and try your ass of to do three things:
- deeply and fully understand what it is you want them to take on. I mean fundamental, root concepts like "be kind to people" or "rebounding from failure is critical to success" or whatever it is.
- recognize that over the next 10-15 years the things you do speak louder than the things you say
- work constantly to reduce the distance between what you say to them, and what you do around them
Welp, sitting in the hospital waiting on the arrival of our first. Everyone is doing great but lord do I ever feel useless. What did you all do to pass the time?
We uhh... went grocery shopping during early labor. Walking around helps advance contractions and she treasures, to this day, the look on the cashier's face when she answered "How are y'all this evening?" with "in labor! Probably having a baby any time now!"
We are very lucky in that my mom is retired and utterly adores her granddaughter, so she donates one to two days a week to helping us retain our sanity.
So how do y'all deal with sick kids staying home from daycare? The wife and I both work and I'm not sure how we could keep baby home for several days. We don't really have anyone who could help watch him for us, and I don't think our jobs will afford us more than a day or 2 off work.
We did.... poverty. Also probably not helpful.
More seriously, what we did was elect to be a single-income family and make the necessary financial sacrifices to maintain that stance. Later on, Belasco was afflicted with a set of health conditions that left her unable to work, but at that point we wouldn't have changed the setup anyway.
It was not easy - in fact it was quite hard a lot of the time - but it does have distinct advantages, if you can put it together. I don't have an opinion about which configuration is better in general, but we're proud of our path and I really do think that a comprehensive financial review & a long conversation about whether dual income is the right setup should be on the table for consideration - even if you ultimately decide against it. Doing so absolutely takes sacrifice but so does every choice in parenting.
My mom had me at 23 (her third and last) and lived in the same rural area as all my family. I was fortunate enough to have two full sets of grandparents nearby (though one set was divorced, and one from the other set was a step-grandfather). So much time was spent at their houses growing up, both during the day and on sleepovers.
I had my first child at 36 and second at 40. I moved 1,000 away from where all my family lives. We have one very overworked grandma (my mother-in-law). Really looking forward to my mom visiting next month.
(Though now I write that, I realize that my kids actually DO have both sets of biological grandparents living, even though I started later. But it feels like much less, because both grandfathers are hermits and don't really keep in contact and my mom lives so far away. My eldest is 10 y.o. and my father-in-law has never met him. And they've spent a maximum of 1-2 hours a year with my father, pre-COVID.)
I got a job with an insane amount of sick leave and a flexible enough schedule.
And lucked out with kids who didn't get sick frequently.
A lot of families I know developed relationships with sitters who would be OK with looking after sick kids. Most of these relationships were formed pre-COVID, so I don't know what that landscape looks like now. But it may become more of a thing again soon (but it is $$$)
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
We lucked out with a combination of things. All of our family lives far away, but my in laws have visited for months on end multiple times. My wife's job was flexible to the point of she didn't really have to be there a lot of time and then Covid happened and we both transitioned to working from home for a while. That was both a blessing and super stressful at times while simultaneously saving a lot of money on childcare. Then my wife got a job teaching, so had to go out. We hired someone to help out a few hours a day just to save my sanity. Working while watching the kids was getting to be too much
Currently our childcare is a combination of pre-school, my in-laws helping out (a ton!) and me working from home. We make decent money overall, but paying for full-time childcare would be a huge sacrifice for us. So we've been very fortunate.
We juggle caring for the kid and work as we both have the ability to work from home. Those days we synch up schedules, and if we both have meetings at a common time, we schedule the screen time for then. Early COVID we were at barely 50% productivity, if that as we had to facilitate school as well.
My daughter's 9th birthday party is today. And we just found out my 3 year old has pink eye... Which means several people will be canceling on us. Which really sucks because we spent a ton of time cleaning and preparing food. Ah well. Better now than tomorrow when the pediatrician is closed.
From what I recall, those eyedrops really sting. In fact my eyes are watering right now just thinking about it
"Please stop mommy! Owie owie owie!"
Ugh. 3 times a day now too... But I've told her she gets a piece of candy each time.
Oof, yes, this is one thing that gets SO much better as they age (at least, usually).
You know the really annoying thing? For most pinkeye, the drops do nothing. They're just in case your child has the less rare bacterial pinkeye. Most pinkeye is viral and not affected by drops. And even bacterial pinkeye usually goes away on its own.
Forcing eyedrops on your kid that they hate and probably won't do anything to help is some kind of Prime Example of what it's like to be a parent.
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lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
sigh
I need to vent.
I'm not sure if I'm looking for advice or commiseration or anything at this point in this post. Maybe I'll be more clear on it by the end of the post.
Ellie is fighting sleep. It wasn't until almost 11pm last night. The entire bedtime experience was horrible. She's stressed about us apparently abandoning her. Due to the preivously mentioned 'no grandparents' we have only ever left her at a friends house for a play date like 2 times ever. And last night was her agonizing over whether we would abandon her there the next time. Or forget to come pick her up. And then several minutes of wailing that she's not important enough for us to spend time with her (at least one of us is with her the entire day) and so we should just let her put herself to bed so that we could spend time together without her because she's not important.
This then spiralled into her not having any friends and all her friends not wanting to play with her at school becuase they want to do one thing and she wants to do another and so she's always going to be alone.
And then finally, how lonely she is. She wants a brother or a sister but knows that we can't have one, so she wants a pet because she's so very very lonely and sad.
This is at least once a week that we go through this.
We are planning on getting a cat later in the year to try and help alleviate some of the loneliness felt by all of us. But it's been a hard year for Ellie in particular. Her best friend since daycare got held back a year in school, so she's having to adjust to not having him around. She was meant to still see him at After school care, but they were still in their bubbles beginning of the year so that's been an adjustment. And then her Gigi (my mom) dying while so far away has been very hard for Ellie.
I'm just trying to figure out if I should be looking into counseling for her? She's almost 6.5. She really only falls apart at bedtime. and I'm never sure if it's actual anguish and distress or just manipulation to stay awake and get extra cuddles. Do I talk to her teacher and see if she's noticed something?
We went through a bout of severe anxiety in my eldest when she was sevenish. A really excellent psychologist helped, (note, psychologist, not psychiatrist, so no drugs involved.). She's a pretty well adjusted teenager now, or at least as adjusted as any teen can be if she just showered a little more often and stopped mumbling her answers to me all the time!
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
Just want to wish all you guys Happy Father’s Day, even if you don’t celebrate it at this time in your neck of the woods. Mr. Muzz received a hand made card, some alcohol (from mommy), and some beef jerky from mini muzz (who promised to get him stuff after she ate his entire stash last week.
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Huh. My wife was a few months shy of 35 on our second, and there was never any talk of that. But we went with a midwife, and they tend to be more "let nature take its course."
For a more safe "joke": on that second birth, the nurse went to open one of those sealed packets containing things like the IV bits and such. Usually like paper on one side and see-through plastic on the other, or paper on both sides glued together. So she pulls them apart with... a bit too much force. It was literally something you'd see in a movie. Everything went flying up in the air and across to all corners of the room.
Not helpful, but we would basically alternate who took time off. Both of us had the ability to work from home, so we could still be productive depending on how the kid was doing.
The capitalist system in America is basically hell for people with young children. There are no good options. Do what you have to to survive.
We can’t do this, but enough people at our daycare did do this with unfortunate COVID based results that I suggest not doing this unless you have to.
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The nurse showed me how to read the TOCO print outs so I'm now just basically staring at that.
I'm just waiting for a professional to start giving me instructions. So far the most useful thing I've done is scheduled the champagne and caviar drop off for tomorrow.
Yeah unfortunately 3 out of 4 grandparents already kicked the bucket, and the one that's still with us is in hospice. At least she got to meet her grandbaby, but we have little to no help with our newborn.
Yeah, it was more of a comment for childcare when your kid is sick in general in our sucky American system than it was about COVID. (Poster I was replying to was asking about advice for sick kid, not COVID exposure.)
Yeah, I’m with you. We’ve just seen a few folk at daycare send their snuffly toddler off to grandparents (because the system sucks and they have no choice!) and then it turns out the toddler is positive for COVID, and brought it to the grandparents . Which sucks! It’s a weird thing you have to think of now that you didn’t before.
*That said*, you absolutely do what you have to, because the system sucks. We ended up giving up one of us for days the boy was home, and that person had to make up their work at night .
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but they're listening to every word I say
Oh I thought you were going to release a bunch of red back spiders in to their room.
we've got grandparents that live nearby.
they dont even know how old she is and haven't been physically seen by us in 2 years.
but yes it would be useful to have helpful grandparents.
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We actually have our first night away from the kids this weekend as my sister is coming to change out with everyone.
(It doesn't help that the moment both me and my brother left the nest, they immediately packed up to live five minutes from my stepsister and her son.)
WoW
Dear Satan.....
Fully. A neverending project in which you barely control most of the variables, and can only speculate on the results you're getting. Rife with confounding feedback and unreliable team members who have perverse incentives and a strong desire to ignore milestones and derail timelines because they're actually working on a related but ultimately different project.
I feel like ultimately the best thing you can do is recognize that there's a separation between what you're trying to teach your kids and what they're learning from you, and try your ass of to do three things:
- deeply and fully understand what it is you want them to take on. I mean fundamental, root concepts like "be kind to people" or "rebounding from failure is critical to success" or whatever it is.
- recognize that over the next 10-15 years the things you do speak louder than the things you say
- work constantly to reduce the distance between what you say to them, and what you do around them
We uhh... went grocery shopping during early labor. Walking around helps advance contractions and she treasures, to this day, the look on the cashier's face when she answered "How are y'all this evening?" with "in labor! Probably having a baby any time now!"
We did.... poverty. Also probably not helpful.
More seriously, what we did was elect to be a single-income family and make the necessary financial sacrifices to maintain that stance. Later on, Belasco was afflicted with a set of health conditions that left her unable to work, but at that point we wouldn't have changed the setup anyway.
It was not easy - in fact it was quite hard a lot of the time - but it does have distinct advantages, if you can put it together. I don't have an opinion about which configuration is better in general, but we're proud of our path and I really do think that a comprehensive financial review & a long conversation about whether dual income is the right setup should be on the table for consideration - even if you ultimately decide against it. Doing so absolutely takes sacrifice but so does every choice in parenting.
I had my first child at 36 and second at 40. I moved 1,000 away from where all my family lives. We have one very overworked grandma (my mother-in-law). Really looking forward to my mom visiting next month.
(Though now I write that, I realize that my kids actually DO have both sets of biological grandparents living, even though I started later. But it feels like much less, because both grandfathers are hermits and don't really keep in contact and my mom lives so far away. My eldest is 10 y.o. and my father-in-law has never met him. And they've spent a maximum of 1-2 hours a year with my father, pre-COVID.)
And lucked out with kids who didn't get sick frequently.
A lot of families I know developed relationships with sitters who would be OK with looking after sick kids. Most of these relationships were formed pre-COVID, so I don't know what that landscape looks like now. But it may become more of a thing again soon (but it is $$$)
Currently our childcare is a combination of pre-school, my in-laws helping out (a ton!) and me working from home. We make decent money overall, but paying for full-time childcare would be a huge sacrifice for us. So we've been very fortunate.
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"Please stop mommy! Owie owie owie!"
Ugh. 3 times a day now too... But I've told her she gets a piece of candy each time.
Oof, yes, this is one thing that gets SO much better as they age (at least, usually).
You know the really annoying thing? For most pinkeye, the drops do nothing. They're just in case your child has the less rare bacterial pinkeye. Most pinkeye is viral and not affected by drops. And even bacterial pinkeye usually goes away on its own.
Forcing eyedrops on your kid that they hate and probably won't do anything to help is some kind of Prime Example of what it's like to be a parent.
I need to vent.
I'm not sure if I'm looking for advice or commiseration or anything at this point in this post. Maybe I'll be more clear on it by the end of the post.
Ellie is fighting sleep. It wasn't until almost 11pm last night. The entire bedtime experience was horrible. She's stressed about us apparently abandoning her. Due to the preivously mentioned 'no grandparents' we have only ever left her at a friends house for a play date like 2 times ever. And last night was her agonizing over whether we would abandon her there the next time. Or forget to come pick her up. And then several minutes of wailing that she's not important enough for us to spend time with her (at least one of us is with her the entire day) and so we should just let her put herself to bed so that we could spend time together without her because she's not important.
This then spiralled into her not having any friends and all her friends not wanting to play with her at school becuase they want to do one thing and she wants to do another and so she's always going to be alone.
And then finally, how lonely she is. She wants a brother or a sister but knows that we can't have one, so she wants a pet because she's so very very lonely and sad.
This is at least once a week that we go through this.
We are planning on getting a cat later in the year to try and help alleviate some of the loneliness felt by all of us. But it's been a hard year for Ellie in particular. Her best friend since daycare got held back a year in school, so she's having to adjust to not having him around. She was meant to still see him at After school care, but they were still in their bubbles beginning of the year so that's been an adjustment. And then her Gigi (my mom) dying while so far away has been very hard for Ellie.
I'm just trying to figure out if I should be looking into counseling for her? She's almost 6.5. She really only falls apart at bedtime. and I'm never sure if it's actual anguish and distress or just manipulation to stay awake and get extra cuddles. Do I talk to her teacher and see if she's noticed something?
I don't want her to hurt so bad.
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(I mean if you have the financial ability/insurance support.)
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Dear Satan.....
But y'all should have a good day too! You all deserve it!
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