Load of Shit Ignorant Fucks (in re: parenting)

I love these!

I was also thinking they’d sell a lot fewer copies if those books were located in the Horror department where they belong. Is that kind of mischief illegal? I always used to hide the hunting magazines.

Some kind souls have taken the time to write lengthy and descriptive criticisms on Amazon; hopefully people will be detered.

And it’s not like anyone can do the responding thing perfectly, either; I know we don’t jump up as quickly now as we used to, but OTOH our babies don’t get upset all that quickly anymore, and I can soothe them verbally for a minute or two. It’s a dance, a dialogue; some days an endurance test to see if they can drive Mommy crazy. But I always try.

Thanks for sharing this info, I’m so glad you posted as we’re going to be looking into feeding solids in the next couple of months. What you say makes so much sense - plus, have you ever tasted baby food? They gave me some at one of my showers - bleech!

So, LordVor, you froze the results & then reheated how?

Any other suggestions out there?

I started eating solids with super mushy spaghetti including sauce at a month old. Seemed to give me no real adverse effects, although I do now really love spaghetti.

Apparently, freak that I am, I also refused to play with, smush around, wipe on my face or otherwise ‘experiment’ with food also. I wanted it on a fork and presented with as little mess as possible. Mom was highly dismayed to have no ‘baby playing with first birthday cake’ pictures.

I think I must’ve been the weirdest baby ever.

Well, we’re pretty off-topic now, but…my mom got me one of those little Braun hand mixers a few years ago. It has a long neck and you can either put it directly into a cup (to stir chocolate milk, say, or scramble eggs) or you can use it as a mini food processor with the little blade/cup attachment.

When I realized the thing liquified onions (I had meant to chop them), I started using it to puree regular people food into a formless mass for my eldest (he was around 5-6 months, I think). He loved spaghetti goo and chicken goo. He hated baby food bottled carrots, but loved the ones I steamed and processed. This also meant I knew there were no fillers or preservatives or artificial colors/flavors. I’ve tasted baby food. Baby food is GROSS…and I’m not putting anything in my kid’s mouth that I’m not willing to eat. Well, except for that Gerber Rice/Banana cereal flakes. That stuff was the BOMB when he got a little bit older.

The best part of the processor was that I didn’t have to make different foods - just pop what we were eating in there with a little bit of water (if necessary).

Oops…here’s what I was talking about. Mine didn’t come with the swell little whisk attachment, but it’s also over nine years old (and still working beautifully).

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I had no idea that this even had a catchy phrase that went along with it. I raised both of my children that way, and they were near perfect babies. (now, when they became toddlers, WELL, it was a whole new game :D).

They rarely cried, because like the joke goes, when they got hungry, they ate, when they were tired they rested. And if they needed changing or cuddling, they got it. (this is not to say that I don’t realize that there ARE some infants who go through a real, and dreadful bout of colic, what I DO think is that a lot of those are likely just misparenting).

From the first night home from the hospital they slept for at LEAST 3 hour stretches, and went right back to sleep after being tended to. I did not spend one single night “walking the floor” with them. My mom says that she and my aunts had the same experiences with my sister and I, and our cousins, respectively. Oh yes, they’re 24 and 13 now, with the 24 year old married, in a nice career and trying to start her own family, so I must have done okay somewhere along the line. :smiley:

I’ve never visited a parenting group online, but I’ve met some like you describe IRL, and I have to agree with most of what you say, it’s the parents, not the babies that are the problem in those cases.

Well, to be fair to moms, doctors and nurses don’t ALWAYS know everything about childrearing. Not feeding cereal “too early” is subjective and, at least from MY pediatricians was a recommendation, not a “DO NOT DO THIS”.

Again, referencing my kids, who are a very healthy 24 and 13, I did this when they were a few months old. I did NOT spoon feed them, I thickened their formula with it a little bit. I breast fed, and was so sparse on production that I had to supplement with formula. Both of my kids were at 95 percentile for height, and only 50 percentile for weight.

The addition of cereal as a thickener helped them gain weight and stay more content.

And my mom, grandmothers and aunts did the same thing in their day. Sometimes knowledge from those who have gone before trumps the high falutin’ medical community. After all, that same medical community once tried to steer moms away from nursing at all.

Yeah, I had actual real colic when I was a baby and my pediatrician apparently told my mother it was her fault that I cried 24 hours a day for days on end without sleeping. Hell, my mom had to enlist other members of the family to carry me around because even when I was being fed, held, allowed to rest, I still howled and howled and howled until I would throw up bile.

I now think that my total inability to see the world around me may have played a serious part in my frustrations, yet another thing that when my mother pointed it out to a doctor she was told that she didn’t know what she was talking about. She told that doctor he was full of shit and that when she’s feeding her kid, the kid’s eyes should at least point in the same damn direction and not be looking at opposite walls.

It turned out that I had colic and was blind as hell. From what I’ve been told the normal ‘pick me up’ ‘feed me’ crying had nothing on my ability to wail. It went away when I was around 2 years old, which interestingly enough is also when I got glasses so that I could learn to see.

A kid like I was is definitely the exception at least judging by all the other ones in my family.

Microwave, about 30 seconds. Make sure you stir good to avoid hotspots. If I get it too hot, I just dump a bit of ice into it.

I highly recommend the book *Whole Foods for Babies and Toddlers * from hereMy sister-in-law got it for us at one point in time, and it’s since passed through just about every house in the kid’s playgroup. Very good, well researched, and well INDEXED book describing when it’s safe to introduce just about every fruit/vegitable/animal/grain there is.

At nine months, the kid eats 2-3 ice cubes of stuff twice a day, in addition to either oatmeal and fruit (tip, you have to get oatmeal too hot to eat in order to cook it properly, so after it’s done drop a bit of frozen fruit into it) or a pancake and fruit for breakfast, bread/cherios/rice chex for an afternoon snack, and the occasional grahem cracker for desert, in addition to nursing 3-5 times a day. The “gerber moms” we know can’t get their similarly-aged kids to eat more than a few spoonfuls of the crap.

The kid did, in fact, start sleeping better after solids, but for a completely unique reason. When nursing, he’d drink so fast (and mom’s letdown shot it out so fast) that he’d end up with massive gas problems at the end of the day, no matter how much we burped him. It took about a month for us to realize it (“Oh, so THAT’s why he’s crying his head off at 3 am”), and then for the next three months I’d have to get up at 3 am and pump his legs until he farted it all out (apparently I was “better at this” than my wife was). This decreased when he started eating more solids, primarily because we could feed him slower.

-lv

Hmm… I’ll have to check that book out.

I have started Caterpie on rice cereal (he liked it, the second time and most of it went down to his tummy, not his front), but I do plan to feed real food, not the canned baby stuff. I’ve tasted and it’s gross, I’d rather give him stuff I made and know what is in it.

One reason to start with rice cereal is that practically no one is allergic to rice. So it gets the baby used to eating solids, and doesn’t make the immune system freak out, while nutriets are still supplied by milk. People with allergies in the family may want to take that into account. We wound up introducing new foods veeeeery slowly and carefully, so rice, and then oatmeal, was a big part of DangerBaby’s diet at first.

I like to start with veggies first after the cereal. That way, they don’t get used to sweet-tasting foods before being hit with green beans. We were also having problems with constipation, so bananas were out and green beans were in. This strategy seems to have worked well for us, since we now have two girls who will eat pretty much anything with enthusiasm.

Did you know that the entire concept of SIDS was originally based on a series of misdiagnoses?

Okay, I don’t think I’m alone in asking for a cite, am I?

If Jeff Olsen modifies his claim quite a bit to “the concept of SIDS being a genetic disorder that often afflicts multiple infants in the same family was based on a misdiagnosis” , I won’t ask for a cite. Because I have one -The Death of Innocents ( Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan). But that’s very different from saying SIDS itself is based on a misdiagnosis.

I was referring to a case mentioned in the book. I couldn’t remember the name so it took me a while to track down a link.

The reason I said SIDS itself was based on a misdiagnosis is that the Noe’s family doctor was an instrumental part in its conception, not just the genetic part. I did have a cite for that somewhere on the boards but it’s not turning up in search.

People who rely on the “we all survived” argument, or who ignore scientific information in favor of anecdotes and old wives’ tales drive me nuts.

For instance, the cereal issue. Before about 6 months there are lots of good reasons why babies shouldn’t have cereal (can’t swallow well, cells of the intestinal walls are still widely spaced, risk of diabetes and obesity later) and, aside from possibly reflux, no good reason they should have it (it’s never been shown to improve sleep, and logically shouldn’t because it’s less caloric than milk and formula).

Yet the myth persists that you should give, say, a two month old cereal to help her sleep. And if I weren’t a skeptical hardass and I’d tried that, I might think it worked too, and sing its praises to everyone and educate everyone with the “proof” - that my daughter started sleeping 8-10 hours at a time. Of course, in reality, she did that even though she ate nothing but breastmilk. It was just a phase in her neurological development. Now she eats a variety of solids, and wakes up twice a night. It’s so hard to parse out what cause is creating what effect in babies, you really can’t rely on anecdotal evidence at all.

Chotii and LilyoftheValley really said most of what I was thinking as I was reading, I just had to put a word in, since with a 10 month old, this stuff largely consumes my life right now.

Oh, and I post at a breastfeeding board that has a board certified lactation consultant on call. They have great feeding info, and pretty good general parenting information (though they do tend toward that earthy-crunchy, no vaccination, organic cotton clothing crowd, which I take with a large shaker of salt myself - nothing’s perfect).