Parenting Catch-all

Yeah, i just needed to get things off the chest. We are in a great situation. We have wonderful support, and good jobs. I think my anxiety comes from a desire to protect my wife and family. It isnt some macho thing that I think she is weak. It's that she is so important to me, and I want to take of her. I cant do anything to protect her from a virus and issues with this pregnancy. Due to certain complications, fibroid the size of a large child' shoe, they have been recommending a hysterectomy after the birth. She is hesitant to do that. The damn tumor is causing issues for the baby though.

So everything went well at the hospital. Micah came into the world 5-13 weighing in 9lbs 6 oz. There were some complications but they didn't hinder things to much, just really resulted in a protracted labor. Mom and baby are healthy. Dealing with the Covid issues at the hospital didn't hinder to much, just made some aspects a little more awkward. Obligatory baby picture behind the spoiler.

Spoiler:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/43Wm3B4.jpg)

Congratulations! Glad that mom and baby are healthy and safe!

I have a 2 year old who has recently starting hating the bath. Hates getting her face wet, hates being in the room. Just cries for the towel to dry her off the entire time. It is heartbreaking, but I can't seem to console or distract her with anything now. Any tips?

Shower instead?

Things you could try:

Small amount of water in the tub, not a fully immersive bath.

Water in a bucket that she blows bubbles into to get her comfy. And drip the water onto her head so she gets used to the feeling of wetness.

Shower with you so she's not scared of the water.

We ran into this with kids in our swim program and the big thing is to show them that water isn't scary.

Mixolyde wrote:

I have a 2 year old who has recently starting hating the bath. Hates getting her face wet, hates being in the room. Just cries for the towel to dry her off the entire time. It is heartbreaking, but I can't seem to console or distract her with anything now. Any tips?

I have no practical experience, but, here's a story... When she was quite young, my parents used to send my sister out to pick things from the garden, and she would gripe about how much she hated it, but my parents chalked it up to her just not wanting to do a chore. Then, one day, when she was bringing in the veggies, my mom noticed her hands were a little more red than they should be. Upon closer examination, her hands were absolutely covered in bumps. She had been having an allergic reaction to something in the garden and didn't really have the means to express what was happening to her.

Have you recently started using some new product in the bath? Something that could be making her uncomfortable?

We caved and introduced an iPad when our daughter started to rebel against bath time. Still use it now but she's spends about half her 10-15 minutes bath playing with her bath toys. She's 4 years old now.

Have you tried completely switching up the routine? My wife went from bathing our daughter to myself and she was thrilled when it became daddy time.

Mike's question is very good, though.

The “hates getting face wet” stands out to me. Because even to this day I do not like getting my face wet, particularly in unexpected or uncontrolled (by me) ways. It’s a sensitivity I have and my daughter is the same way. I’ve been able to help ease her into it with bath time over the years, but at 2yo it was hard.

We kept the water level very low, kept the time in the bath short, and did a lot of talking to her about every thing we were doing before and while doing it so nothing was sudden or surprising. We had some play time in the bath that she enjoyed—it was only the washing, mostly face and hair, that she hated.

Also, it may be worth considering how slippery the tub is for your kid while sitting—one even small slip can be terrifying at that age. My daughter felt much better about baths when we soaked a washcloth and let her sit on it so she slid around less.

Dunno if any of that helps. Good luck!

Has she historically liked baths? Indifferent to them?

My daughter did the same around that age, not rebelling against bath time but freaking out whenever her face got wet and demanding to be dried off. We just keep a little towel next to the bath and dabbed her eyes and she was fine. She just turned four and is mostly over it now. I think it is just an age and control thing and maybe some kids have more sensitive eyes.

I suggest next time don’t fill up the bath so much, introduce a new toy, and proactively physically offer a washcloth to dry her face off when it gets wet. Play it up like you know she doesn’t like it when her face gets wet so tonight we have a new solution!

Both my kids hated showers for the water in the face reason, and really for us it was a shampoo in the eyes issue. One thing that helped was using the most gentle shampoo we could find but those still will irritate some.

For our older son we used this like reverse upside-down visor thing to keep water off his face and transitioned to lots of "close eyes, head back, count to 5" practice. Our younger son won't wear the visor and refuses to close his eyes so it's still an ordeal.

Shower visor thing

At 18 months bath time is still a party here. We are using an inflatable tub that we sit inside the big tub and fill up with water. My wife has her looking up at this doll that we sat on a shelf to do hair rinse and keep it out of her eyes, like a little game. And she takes a plastic animal toy and splashes around a lot. Also does some kick splashing of us and laughs. So far so good.

Also been meaning to share for a week or so now that we are halfway there... Stele 3.0 is on the way!

We're having another girl, due in October. So we'll have 2 under 2 for a month or more.

Anatomy scan looked good. Doctors are worried because our first was 6 weeks early so they're having my wife come in every 2 weeks. Of course that's a little stressful with the virus going around.

And we're hoping the local hospital will allow doulas again by the time we're ready. It was really helpful with the first birth for both my wife and I.

The kids are in daycare today.

Temperature check. Small classes that do not mingle. Grown ups wearing masks at drop off. Frequent hand washing, monitoring, and sanitizing.

On the one hand the quiet is bliss... on the other I get to dwell on how I'm the worst parent ever and have sent my half-feral kids into a room with all those other kids.

Same here. My two younger kids (ages 18 months and 4 years) returned to daycare today. It's a shortened schedule (closes at 4), with scheduled, staggered dropoff times, parents wearing masks and not actually allowed in the building, teachers and older kids in masks while inside, stuff like that. Definitely have some nerves about whether it's the right thing to do, but the staff are being careful and appear to be following all the state guidelines closely and there has been incredibly minimal spread here in Vermont (currently 0 hospitalized COVID cases in the state, and daily new cases have been very low for weeks now, with many days of 0 new cases). And, not insignificantly, state assistance that let us pay only 50% of our daycare costs just ended, so we're gonna have to pay full price to keep our hard-to-find daycare spot whether we send our kids or not, so, might as well use it I guess. I've still got an 8 year old in the house, but it is infinitely easier to keep her busy while working at the same time than it is with the two littler kids. Hope it all works out for all of us!

We're in a similar boat trying to decide on summer activities for our kids.
Our TKD school is doing outdoor classes, so we may consider that in another week or so.
My daughter's gymnastics has a good plan overall, but not as much for a 6yo so we are stepping back from that for now.
The school district has a daily program that we are really on the fence about. The kids so much deserve access to other kids and the plan is pretty good, but it's still two sets of groups (1 per kid) we would be interacting with. Given the events of Minnesota from the last week (let alone whatever continues), we're now less enthusiastic about sending them.
We're lucky that we have an alternative as we have an exchange intern that has been working at their school this year that we may share the time of with one other family from school. The kids don't get the socialization, but it does at least provide time during the day for me to work.

Thanks all for the tips! We will try a few things and report back. It wasn't a sudden dislike of bath time, just slowly gotten worse and worse over time.

lol, kids had a blast at their first day back at daycare yesterday, but last night my 18-month old had a 101.8 temp and so definitely can't go back to daycare at all this week now. One sweet 8 hour period of not chasing a toddler around. Sigh.

I was just commenting to a coworker that I haven't spoken to a kid in hours and I'm afraid I'll spontaneously sing the ABC song.
This quiet is unnatural.

mrlogical wrote:

...last night my 18-month old had a 101.8 temp...

Fingers crossed that it's just the usual temperature yo-yo for a youngster. I know my youngest could spike a temp as easily as farting.

I know it's not much, but recently I started in on the Science Vs. podcast, and from the Sweden episode the anecdotal evidence seems to indicate schools are not as bad as they could be for COVID 19 transmission.

They seem to legitimately vet their sources, and have all the citations available.

Anyone found any decent facemasks for kids? My daughter is 3. We have one homemade mask for her but I'd like to have a few spares and preferably a design she'd be interested in. All the ones I see on amazon either don't have reviews or look like they have delivery dates in late July/August.

Disney just recently came out with kids masks. I am planning to get a couple since I assume they are decent quality.

My wife looked around and found some other sites that have delivered in a reasonable amount of time.

Yeah, I wasn't worried my son had COVID or anything, and his doctor this afternoon confirmed that was ridiculously unlikely given both his individual circumstances and the state of things in our area--he said they'd give him a test if it would make us feel better but that they stopped blanket testing the kids a week or two ago after weeks of testing anyone with a fever because they never got a single positive. Just disappointed that we (understandably) have to keep him out of daycare for a whole week.

We got masks for our 4 and 8 year olds on etsy. We bought from a couple of different sellers, none I can remember, but they were all totally fine, was not hard to find, probably took 10 days or so to arrive.

Currently using a Levana monitor we've had since our first was born 4+ years ago. It's seen better days and we have another kid on the way, so monitoring 2 kids at once (same room) would be nice.

We don't really need the video for the older one, just to see cute random sleeping positions these days or tell him where his sleep buddy is...

So to the point. I have been wanting to get some Nest cameras and now I have an excuse. Anyone have experience with this? Drawbacks? Would I need to get a nest hub for an always on kinda thing overnight?

I'm happy to consider others, but already have some nest things...

EDIT: Looking through stuff, would an Arlo baby monitor be good assuming I want wifi? Any experience with it on the google system?

We used both Nest and Arlo cameras, and still use the Nest.

With the Nest we just have a single camera in the room and use our phones when we want to view it via the iOS app. The camera is always on and streaming, so when you pull it up on your phone it connects within a second or two, so it is easy to pop in and out if you hear something. The downside is it is always streaming so there are privacy concerns... and it uses bandwidth.

You can just leave it up on your phone or tablet or computer if you just want it running to listen but it does suck battery. For us we have a Philips traditional audio monitor that we leave on and we only open Nest to see if she is still moving and hasn't fallen asleep yet or if we hear a noise and want to know what is going on. Also Nest doesn't have temperature, which is nice to have on our Philips because her upstairs bedroom can sometimes be too hot.

We tried the Arlo Pro also, this was a few months before their baby monitor came out so I don't know what changes they made there. I will say the Arlo we used was not always uploading like the Nest, so when you pulled up the app to check the video it had to connect to the camera and start streaming and it was a noticeable many second delay before the feed started coming through. Much more annoying to just dip in-and-out like we do on the Nest.

The benefits to the Arlo at the time were it would save recordings without a subscription plan, unlike Nest. The picture quality was better, and you could set motion control zones and get notifications. Useful if you want to set a zone like the by the door to notify you if your kid gets out of bed, or you want to use it later as a security camera.

Overall we sold the Arlo and kept the Nest.

Apparently those Disney kids masks were pushed back and now are shipping in July. Bummer.

https://www.shopdisney.com/face-mask...

Anyone have advice for a toddler into throwing? She’s 21 months and she tends to throw things when she’s done with them. This is troublesome when the tossed object is a cupcake and the receptacle is our nice grey suede couch, or mama’s lap.

We have a 19 month old who has started dropping food into the floor from her high chair when she's done. Not quite as bad, but getting there.