A friend of my husband and I had taken offense at my husband’s joke that children aren’t raised when young, but domesticated. Said friend is the father of two little girls, then about 2 and 3 years old or so; my husband and I have no children but he did help raise one niece when he was living at home in his early 20s, and his sis and her daughter moved back in.
His friend told my husband some time later that he was right about domestication. He’d caught his two delicate little flowers gleefully trying to beat the hell out of each other with a plastic bat; he compared it to a scene from “Lord of the Flies.” This was some time after he’d hidden the bat when they discovered that you could play ball in the house without fear of the ball hitting anything… if you omitted the ball and instead underhand-tossed big handfuls of jelly from the warehouse store-sized jelly jar.
So I think the warnings are that even loving siblings may eagerly attempt to become an only child at times, and that even girly-girls will surprise you with what they can get into.
As a parent of a girl, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve entered a room only to hear a happy voice saying “I’m way up high!” followed by me removing her from some precarious perch. Girls are just as much trouble.
Which reminds me - I need to check the wall anchors for the bookshelves to make sure they’re up to scratch in case the rapidly-growing one decides to climb them. Again.
It’s not just heights, either! I thought we were pretty safe with a not-interested-in-climbing baby, but she’s got a teeny-tiny, almost invisible scar on her forehead…from when she face-planted into the edge of the china buffet.
(She turned into a freaking mountain goat when she was 4, though. So all those bookshelves I never bothered anchoring 'cause she “wasn’t a climber”? They’re a much bigger pain in the ass to put anchors on when the shelves are full of books. Save yourself a headache and do it before the baby comes.)
Start now installing shelves and cabinets in the upper reaches of every room. You can not believe how precious the highest real estate will become. A tone point every cleaning agent lotion and potion in my house was crowded into the same 2x2 foot cabinet.
There comes a time when there’s no place in the house they can’t reach. Start now getting accustomed to the non-toxic cleaners, and get the really poisonous stuff out of the house.
When Grandma visits (or you visit Grandma), it will be Open Season on your parenting. Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!!11!!! It will shake your confidence in your own parenting skills, but if it’s working, keep doing it. And don’t show weakness to Grandma; they smell fear.
No kidding! I remember thinking that no kid could be more active than my son or more daring. Then I had my daughter. Unfortunately, in addition to being a natural daredevil/Tazmanian devil, she has a great role model for danger in her brother.
For example, my son never would’ve thought to try to climb on the counter at 18 months. But after she saw him pull a chair up to the counter to get something, she immediately followed suit.
Also, my mom had told me that girls are far more laid back than boys. My daughter is evidence to the contrary. When my mother visits, she always shakes her head and says, “Oh, my God. You girls weren’t this busy. How do you stand it?” It’s the only thing she’s ever admitted she was wrong about.
Every kid is different. Mine have two speeds: run and sleep. If they’re awake but quiet, they’re either extremely sick or into something they shouldn’t be (like up to the elbows in the toilet).
Other people have said variations on this and I’m sure you’ve heard it elsewhere, but I don’t know if anyone can hear it enough . . . some things are just not going to work the way you want, or the way that makes sense, or even maybe any way you thought you could ever live with, and flexibility will save your life.
I was sooo committed to breastfeeding. My breasts didn’t cooperate. They sort of grudgingly kept my kid from going hungry until about the fifth month, when they started to taper off. No amount of nursing, pumping, stimulating, fenugreek capsules, rain dances, etc. would change their pointy little minds. My doctor thinks maybe it was because I’m a such a geezer for a first-time mommy at 41.
We loved the idea of a family bed. We used a co-sleeper (sidecar bassinet thingy). It all started to fall apart after a major growth spurt in the seventh month or so, and we learned that our son just sleeps better in a separate room. I think my husband may still be mourning that, and takes as many naps cuddled up with him as he can. We had the biggest fight of our marriage over putting the crib in my old home office before it was cleaned out of office stuff and revamped as a baby-friendly space (something that still hasn’t happened, BTW). My husband felt so strongly that putting the baby in there as is would be “baby storage” and not welcoming and six kinds of neglectful. But one night, my parents were visiting, and my mother up and put my son to bed in the office, where he slept perfectly for thirteen hours. Turns out babies don’t care how their rooms are decorated – or, rather, turns out OUR baby doesn’t care how his room is decorated. Yours might!
Before she could walk Celtling discovered that she could pull out the drawers in a cabinet, desk, or bureau and use them as a staricase to crawl up. :eek:
And don’t forget that Grandma A and Grandma B are different people - you can’t win.
My daughter didn’t want to breastfeed the first week, but I struggled through. My mother’s take was “why, get out the bottle.” When at six months my daughter rejected the breast and I started to bottlefeed exclusively, my mother in law was “don’t let her do that, you have to breastfeed for two years!”
And that is the dichotomy. This summer Grandmas are sharing watching kids (some days the kids are on their own). Last week on Tuesday my son was taking the initiative to mow the lawn (in between constant rain) before it got knee high (wonderful as a parent when your kid says “I think I’ll mow the grass”). My mother in law said “oh, don’t do that, it doesn’t need it yet, you’ll waste gas.” On Thursday it was my mother over saying “why did you let the grass get that long.”
One of the many, many reasons I am so glad my parents live 1500 miles away! My mother in law just sold her house and is renting an apartment exactly a mile away though. I’m afraid I’m going to need to check her bags before she leaves our place to make sure she isn’t trying to sneak the baby out with her when she leaves.
I guess another thing I wish I had been warned about is something that seems obvious, but didn’t really sink in until about three months into parenthood. It’s not so much that the work of caring for a baby is so hard, it just goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No weekends, no vacations, no holidays. Babies don’t realize that it is Saturday and you want to sleep an extra hour - the little tummies get hungry at the same time on weekends that they do on Monday morning. And if you want to go somewhere, even for something like shopping, first you have to spend twenty minutes getting the kid ready and the diaper bag packed and then you start getting yourself ready. Then you run your errands, and get home, and have to unpack the kid and get him settled and then you can get in the groceries.
Or breakfast is first get him up/change his diaper/change his clothes/feed him breakfast/clean up and eat your own breakfast in between. Repeat for lunch, repeat for dinner.
heh my sister was a breast baby and died from leukemia, my brother was a preemie bottle baby and is 6’2 and healthy as a horse, I was a full term breast baby and had health issues my entire life.
Life is a game of roulette, all you can do is try to maximize the good parts and make sure that you take care of the kids in the best way to make sure they are healthy and happy, and let everybody else sort their own kids out themselves.
Hm, I cut my own hair. Twice.
I plugged a [luckily] wooden handled carving fork into an outlet.
I climbed up the island counter on the cute little round shelves at the end to get up to the cupboard where the cookies were stashed.
I took a skein of yarn and turned the library into a spiders nest.
I ate deadly nightshade berries and had my first stomach pumping.
I ate a whole bottle of St <whomever> raspberry flavored childrens aspirin and had my second stomach pumping. I now detest the flavor of raspberry anything.
I wandered off <ooh shiney> at a christmasmarket in Wiesbaden and was lost for about an hour.
I decided I wanted to see the water fall up closer at Letchworth State Park and climbed over the short fence and was half way down the rock face before my uncle managed to catch up with me when the family was visiting the US and was on a picnic for the 4th of July.
I managed to get past the age of 4 [which these all happened before…]
If she takes the baby and then takes responsibility for all the undermining she’ll do while raising it, that’s fine…the real issue is that Grandma doesn’t have to live with the results of “who introduced my toddler to soda?!” or “You let her watch what?! That explains why we’ve had nightmares every night for a week.” They spoil them, then drop them in your lap to deal with the consequences. “But Grandma lets us stay up until midnight!” “No wonder you were so cranky all day today!”
When my mother said to me (when my first baby was a week old), “Are you going to nurse him every time he fusses”, my answer should have been yes. Not because that’s the only right answer, but because it was what I knew to be right for us. And because it wouldn’t have screwed up our breastfeeding a couple months later. (Thankfully, I could get it fixed before it went totally south.) It’s okay to be confident in what you want to do. It’s just as okay to try something else if that doesn’t work. It’s not failure, it’s learning your baby (and yourself).
It’s okay to pick up a sleeping baby and hold him. Just because. It might be the only peaceful moment you get that day. (Of course I can say this because my kids slept like they were dead.)
Oh, and one more; the baby you get might not be the baby you expect. They usually aren’t. I think they come pre-wired with distinct personality and you try to change certain things at your peril. Work within it. The day will come when you know it’s a gift.
Yes, I’m waxing a bit nostalgic here. Sorry.
Yes, that’s why you can say that. From birth, if my daughter is comfortably asleep and someone handles her, she begins to howl so hard she runs out of air and doesn’t realize it. That lasts about ten minutes. Then she sobs for thirty more.
Shouldn’t be harmful. It’s basically uncooked dumplings (starch and water) - although it probably has some dubious preservatives in it, too.