Self indulgent parent thread

I was buying the kids Halloween costumes today, and after seeing what costumes are being marketed towards little girls, I was so glad my daughter asked to be a ninja.

EverythingsTentative wrote:

I was buying the kids Halloween costumes today, and after seeing what costumes are being marketed towards little girls, I was so glad my daughter asked to be a ninja.

+1

I'm also glad mine are into Skylanders and My Little Ponies.

Yeah, it's pretty outrageous what kinds of things they expect little girls to wear. It's borderline pandering to the pedophile demographic.

On an unrelated note, my nine month old daughter has recently started sounding less like a baby and more like a demon-possessed, brain-munching zombie child. She produces growls and grunts and hisses that I, a 33 year old male Dutch speaker could only aspire to. Seriously, it sounds straight out of The Exorcist or perhaps The Walking Dead. It's awesome! She still 'talks' in her normal voice, and makes all of the prerequisite baby sounds, but sometimes her bedroom sounds like it's hosting a feeding frenzy involving some of horror's more grisly characters. Does anyone else have this experience?

Rallick wrote:

On an unrelated note, my nine month old daughter has recently started sounding less like a baby and more like a demon-possessed, brain-munching zombie child. She produces growls and grunts and hisses that I, a 33 year old male Dutch speaker could only aspire to.

Have you tried telling her to schtopp?

Maq wrote:
Rallick wrote:

On an unrelated note, my nine month old daughter has recently started sounding less like a baby and more like a demon-possessed, brain-munching zombie child. She produces growls and grunts and hisses that I, a 33 year old male Dutch speaker could only aspire to.

Have you tried telling her to schtopp?

That would be the Germans. Especially if you add 'Schnell!' to that while grimacing.

I'm yet to be convinced that Dutch is anything other than English in a comedy German accent.

Dan ken jij duidelijk te weinig Nederlanders!

I am pretty excited about halloween. My wife did not want to spend money on a costume our daughter would only wear only once. I responded with "I plan on dressing her up in the costume all the $%!@#$ time until it does not fit her anymore!" I won and bought this costume. http://www.amazon.com/Infant-Toddler-Costume-Months-As-Shown/dp/B0057M5222/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349972711&sr=8-1&keywords=owl+costume

Bonnonon wrote:

I am pretty excited about halloween. My wife did not want to spend money on a costume our daughter would only wear only once. I responded with "I plan on dressing her up in the costume all the $%!@#$ time until it does not fit her anymore!" I won and bought this costume. http://www.amazon.com/Infant-Toddler-Costume-Months-As-Shown/dp/B0057M5222/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349972711&sr=8-1&keywords=owl+costume

That is pretty awesome.

Start putting money aside for her therapy now

Rallick wrote:

Dan ken jij duidelijk te weinig Nederlanders!

What about the wiener Ned Flanders?

Rallick wrote:

Yeah, it's pretty outrageous what kinds of things they expect little girls to wear. It's borderline pandering to the pedophile demographic.

On an unrelated note, my nine month old daughter has recently started sounding less like a baby and more like a demon-possessed, brain-munching zombie child. She produces growls and grunts and hisses that I, a 33 year old male Dutch speaker could only aspire to. Seriously, it sounds straight out of The Exorcist or perhaps The Walking Dead. It's awesome! She still 'talks' in her normal voice, and makes all of the prerequisite baby sounds, but sometimes her bedroom sounds like it's hosting a feeding frenzy involving some of horror's more grisly characters. Does anyone else have this experience?

Yup, Our's is 7.5 months and he growls like a little monster. It's pretty awesome. My wife said that it is quite normal for babies to do this.

My 9 month old little girl has the keen of a highlands banshee.

My 6.5 month old has been saying "Mum" for the last few days... so proud! (were Canadian so it means mom. )

wordsmythe wrote:
Rallick wrote:

Dan ken jij duidelijk te weinig Nederlanders!

What about the wiener Ned Flanders?

Hens love roosters, geese love ganders,
Everyone else loves Ned Flanders.

Not me!

Congrats! It's a pretty amazing feeling, isn't it? And the good part is, it just gets better!

Soo, this happened last week:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/t3Q2Q.jpg)

So...uhh...yeah. I helped make a thing! And it moves, has toes and everything! It's probably the most exciting and freaky thing I've experienced. The wife and I are still kind of in shock about it, and it's already been 12 weeks!

Rallick wrote:

And the good part is, it just gets better!

It does! Except for the times when it gets really bad. But it will get even better after that! Congrats, Cpt.

To wit: sleep training. Of all the minefields of conflicting advice from "experts", this has got to be the worst.

Little 7314 got in a bad habit over the last couple of weeks of going from going down at 10-11pm and sleeping 5 hours at night, to not really going down at all and sleeping 1-2 hours then demanding to be fed, plus all the rocking and bouncing and soothing and not-sleeping (for any of us). At first we thought it was the three-month growth spurt, and maybe it was, but it kept going on for days. We were talking about starting to sleep train her soon, but things weren't going well and we were reaching the end of our rope. So finally last night we said we can't take it anymore, we're starting now, moving her to the crib in her own room, on a Sunday night, after I just took a week's vacation. We'd spent all weekend discussing our approach and building up the resolve to start controlled crying—next week—maybe she's still too young, she needs to get used to the nursery, maybe she should learn how to suck her thumb first or go un-swaddled. No. It's tonight.

So Mrs. Gravey feeds her, and we give her her bedtime routine at 6:30, a little earlier than we've been doing for a couple months, and now in the nursery (i.e. my now ex-mancave). We put her in the crib at 7pm, and try to eat dinner. Crying. Wait five minutes. I go in and soothe—no effect, of course (I think I just made her madder). Back to dinner. "What's the longest she's cried for?" "A forty-five minute car ride." "Okay. The books say it could be up to two hours." I set my phone to alarm in ten minutes when I'll check on her again.

After five minutes... silence. Did she die? Did she break out to look for nicer parents? After another 15 minutes I go in and look. My god—she's asleep. The longest she naps without being held is 20-40 minutes. She sleeps for three hours. She feeds again. Mrs. Gravey puts her down awake, and she cries (the baby I mean, though the crying wasn't easy on Mrs. Gravey either). Check in five minutes. Soothe—makes her mad. Play Forza and intend to check again in ten minutes. But after five, silence, again. For five hours.

Mrs. Gravey feeds her again at 3am. No crying. I can't help it, and check: wide awake but silent. After twenty minutes I still can't sleep and check again: well she's asleep.

My alarm goes off at 7am for work. Still silence from the baby monitor. I fall back asleep. In fact, I sleep in for an hour. 7314 is now slowly waking. I'm frantically rushing to get ready for work, rested, happy, incredulous. Two five-hour sleeps in one night. Twenty minutes of crying in 13 hours. Unreal.

Maybe it will all go to hell tonight. If that's all 7314 can do, well she's only 3.5 months old, so you can only thank her, not blame her—we'll keep trying. But what an unbelievable start.

IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/s/rvi0vvgck6ruidp/Photo%202012-10-15%2010%2051%2030%20AM.jpg)

IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/s/z5ay386pexaaxps/Photo%202012-10-15%2010%2051%2009%20AM.jpg)

Oh man, we just stopped swaddling the girls a week ago. The first night was bad but now they're getting used to it. The worse part now is putting them down initially because we're trying to put them into these fleece... things with sleeves. Trying to get a sleepy baby into sleeves isn't fun.

They're doing ok though. We haven't gotten to the point of self-soothing yet but that will probably be this week.

/sigh

They're just going to keep waking one another up.

I may be jinxing it but they both started taking naps longer than 20 minutes this weekend. We'll see if they can keep that up.

CptDomano wrote:

Soo, this happened last week:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/t3Q2Q.jpg)

So...uhh...yeah. I helped make a thing! And it moves, has toes and everything! It's probably the most exciting and freaky thing I've experienced. The wife and I are still kind of in shock about it, and it's already been 12 weeks!

I see a baby looking up and giving a high 5. If you imagine the white in the middle being the top of his face (his body goes down to the right and the thing going up as an arm (it almost looks like he's wearing a shirt) with a hand stretched on the top.

DeThroned wrote:

I see a baby looking up and giving a high 5.

...Aaaaand now that's all I can see.

Actually, that's the baby in the process of flipping over somersault-style. The little bit at the top are actually its feet. It was really weird watching it in real time.

Congrats Cpt! That is great and it is good!

Congrats CptDomano. Enjoy the ride =)

And just because this is the self-indulgent thread:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/jjkfw.jpg)

He turns one on Halloween. A dragon costume has been ordered =)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/NjWLS.jpg)

3 weeks and sleeping like a rock most of the night. So far so good.

That picture has a dangerous amount of 'Awww!' in it, padriec.

Has anyone ever run into problems with the back of the baby's head going flat? We give our girl plenty of tummy-time, hold her lots, use the chest carrier, etc. and the back of her head is still flat as if we left her in the crib all the time. She does have a big head (apologies to Mrs. Hoppa are constant), but it bothers me that nothing we've done in the last two months seems to have made a difference.

bighoppa wrote:

Has anyone ever run into problems with the back of the baby's head going flat? We give our girl plenty of tummy-time, hold her lots, use the chest carrier, etc. and the back of her head is still flat as if we left her in the crib all the time. She does have a big head (apologies to Mrs. Hoppa are constant), but it bothers me that nothing we've done in the last two months seems to have made a difference.

A friend of the family(who is a neonatologist)'s daughter had a similar condition. They had to make her wear a foam helmet for a few months that was progressively tightened in order to form her head correctly, kind of like braces for the skull. The kid was actually pretty OK with it. Have you asked your pediatrician about it yet?

Parenting advice go!

We just switched the Kid over to his big kid bed after he escaped from his crib early one morning. He's almost two years old and has no problem falling to sleep in it. After some books and some good night hugs, he runs right under the covers and falls asleep. The problem is the morning; he's been getting up increasingly early. Current average wake-up is about 4:30 AM. Prior to this, he was sleeping in the crib until about 5:30 or 6 AM.

We've tried letting him into our bed. However, he just tosses and turns for 90 minutes and no one gets any sleep. Also, we've tried to put him back into his bed. No good - works for about two minutes before he hops back out.

I'm assuming we just need to be persistent about getting him back into his bed and that *eventually* he'll figure it out. However, any tips? If us parents could get that extra hour of sleep, everyone's life would be better.

bighoppa wrote:

Has anyone ever run into problems with the back of the baby's head going flat? We give our girl plenty of tummy-time, hold her lots, use the chest carrier, etc. and the back of her head is still flat as if we left her in the crib all the time. She does have a big head (apologies to Mrs. Hoppa are constant), but it bothers me that nothing we've done in the last two months seems to have made a difference.

We are dealing with the exact same thing with our daughter (also big head, like 95% percentile big... poor missus). Our doctor said it was purely cosmetic (this was around month 4, but we had been keeping the doc updated each visit about it) and she said it is much more common now that the Sleep on the Back thing is universal. The Doc said we could go to a specialist to verify if we felt unsure, so we went there around month 5.

The specialist pretty much measured everything and said even worst case scenario that it stays that shape, it will not impede any normal brain growth. They have a baby helmet you can get that they wear for 23 hours a day for a few months (depending on how bad) and you go back occasionally to get it adjusted. It was purely out of pocket and not covererd (around $4000 for the bare bones model), so we decided against it after our fears of a Rocky-esque baby girl were eliminated. My nephew had the helmet for 4-6 months when he was an infant, but he was more pronounced and since boys (typically) have shorter hair styles, it may be more noticeable as they grow.

Fast forward to now (she is almost 10 months) and the flat back of the head is getting better, but still noticeable. But my girl is as bald as I am, so once the hair starts to grow we will see if we were terrible parents or not. Once they start crawling/sitting up it helps tremendously.

One final anecdote - My wife's cousin (a girl) had an extreme case and she turned out just fine w/out the helmet.

Sorry for the long-winded response, my wife and I struggled with our decision for quite some time. They do suggest that if you are thinking helmet to get them into it by 6 months, since their heads are still mushy.