Parenting Catch-all

Awesome. Eliminating the peanut allergy will make the rest of his life so much easier: one fewer ingredient to have to watch out for and less stressful for those around him to have to monitor their own foods. Good luck.

Keithustus wrote:

Awesome. Eliminating the peanut allergy will make the rest of his life so much easier: one fewer ingredient to have to watch out for and less stressful for those around him to have to monitor their own foods. Good luck.

Thanks. The doctor, who we've had a bad experience with, is very dramatic and basically told us (well me) that he can never eat peanut butter again and we will have to eliminate all trace of it from our lives. When we brought the info to our family doctor and told her that he's been consistently eating peanut butter his entire life our doctor just said to keep giving it to him. We have an emergency epipen but he's not had any reaction other than a slight rash.

Between my 5 year and 7 year old the same doctor gave different direction on allergens. For the older one - no strawberries or nut based foods until 2 years old. Just 2.5 years later she said new studies indicate that we should be introducing those foods in small amounts once the child starts eating solids.

Along those lines my mom had children between 1976 and 1984 and the advice on crib positions went from on belly to on side to on back.

First night in the big kid bed for my 2.5 year old. It's only been 3 hours, but so far she's doing well! I try to do the best I can to guide her on her path, but it still feels weird to have her grow up so quickly. It's a strange feeling, like immense pride because she's so amazing, but there's something there that's almost like a loss. Like I've lost that little thing that needed a certain something from me, but now she gets it somewhere else. I guess that's just parenthood in general? I know my wife has been experiencing this feeling even more than me.

How have my fellow parents dealt with this? Or is it just as simple as being proud and moving on?

MathGoddess wrote:

Sometimes pickiness can be due to a food allergy or intolerance as well.

Our youngest turned 3 last September and we've been all over the map. Trying to switch from breast-milk to solids at 6months felt impossible. Somehow, my wife caught some (very) early Sensory Processing Disorder and we started therapy right away. (Therapy includes spinning her on a swing on the X axis back and forth, rocking her on a rocking-chair and bumping mid-rocking, playing with a life-time's supply of shaving cream and other similar fun activities).

I was raised with "don't play with your food" as a soundtrack set on repeat. Seeing my daughter make a mess with her food still grinds my nerves. I saw her go from throwing everything on the floor, disgusted, to eating just about anything we put on the table. My daughter needed to feel the texture with her hands before she'd try putting food in her mouth. Eventually she grew confident that pretty much anything we gave her to eat was worth tasting. Sometime she still spits food out if she took too big a mouth-full.

LeapingGnome wrote:

There is a well documented development phase of pickiness around that time. Just keep serving normal food and they will get over it. Don’t force them to eat or make them clean their plate or eat stuff they don’t want, that just sets up problems later and lifelong food problems. They will eat when hungry enough and the pickiness phase will go away after a little while. It can be frustrating though because you will be throwing away a lot of food.

General rule to remember is the parent picks what to serve, the kid chooses what to eat. If they don’t want to eat what you serve, that is their choice but they don’t get anything else. No pressuring no badgering just here you go up to you what you want to eat.

Kids and diet development research has come a long way in the past 20 years.

This. 1,000 times this.

Hobbes2099 wrote:

my wife caught some (very) early Sensory Processing Disorder and we started therapy right away. (Therapy includes spinning her on a swing on the X axis back and forth, rocking her on a rocking-chair and bumping mid-rocking, playing with a life-time's supply of shaving cream and other similar fun activities).

That’s our house. EverBlocks have been great as he’s always building and rebuilding structures and then climbing and hopping around on them.
IMAGE(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1b/c7/c3/1bc7c3d9a338d1d1e334b92c63e130e9.jpg)
(Google image stock photo)

IMAGE(https://secure.img1-fg.wfcdn.com/im/02511284/resize-h800-w800%5Ecompr-r85/1111/111170590/Jaylyn+Swing+Chair+with+Stand.jpg)
Similarly, a swing chair which I modified with a free-rotation piece to smooth out free-spinning motion and reduce noise has been our best furniture purchase in years. What with work and school being from home, it’s been in near-constant use by either the kids or adults. (This isn’t precisely the one we have.)

IMAGE( https://img.tttcdn.com/product/xy/377/377/p/gu1/Y/B/Y14941B/Y14941B-1-5afa-tXtJ.jpg) (This isn’t precisely the one we have.)

I recently switched cell carriers to Xfinity Mobile, which has the useful feature of not charging a line access fee as long as you're an internet subscriber too. While my wife and I both have our phones, we were thinking it might make sense to add a new line to be a backup/emergency line--basically so that if my wife and I both leave the house while my 9 year old is home, she can have a way to call us or 911 in the unlikely event of an emergency, rather than my wife or I being forced to leave our phone behind as backup. Do any of you all have a cheap phone you use for a similar purpose, and if so, what brand/model? If there's something in the $100 range I could pick up that I could pop a sim card in and designate just for texts and phone calls, I think that would be a nice option for us.

If you didn't trade in an old phone you can use it to call 911 even without a SIM. I'm sure old phone battery is probably bad so could just leave it plugged in somewhere accessible.

mrlogical wrote:

I recently switched cell carriers to Xfinity Mobile, which has the useful feature of not charging a line access fee as long as you're an internet subscriber too. While my wife and I both have our phones, we were thinking it might make sense to add a new line to be a backup/emergency line--basically so that if my wife and I both leave the house while my 9 year old is home, she can have a way to call us or 911 in the unlikely event of an emergency, rather than my wife or I being forced to leave our phone behind as backup. Do any of you all have a cheap phone you use for a similar purpose, and if so, what brand/model? If there's something in the $100 range I could pick up that I could pop a sim card in and designate just for texts and phone calls, I think that would be a nice option for us.

We did similar with Sprint /TMobile. We ended up buying a low end iphone since everything else on the low end was missing something I wanted. I would have just used the previous phone, but had given that away already.

Yeah one of the old phones is Plan B, I'm hoping to find a cheap, reliable, non-fancy phone with a fresh battery. But not sure if rolling the dice on eBay is any better than just keeping one of our aging phones for the purpose.

If it's for emergency use only, you can just leave it plugged in somewhere so an iffy battery isn't much of a deal.

Tycho the Mad wrote:

If it's for emergency use only, you can just leave it plugged in somewhere so an iffy battery isn't much of a deal.

For us, emergency use is also I have to drop a kid off at practice or something and want them to have a means of calling us. So battery is necessary to an extent.

My home phone backup is free Google Voice number + Obihai box + $25/year 911 service + cheap wireless POTS phone.

Interesting suggestion, Poder, I'll take a look. Thinking we are likely to just hold on to my wife's iPhone 8 as the backup though... the $125 we'd get on trade-in was appealing but it's not an unreasonable price to pay to have a pretty reliable backup phone. Her battery is in vastly better shape than mine was.

The advantage of using a POTS phone is it is relatively fixed to a charging base to one place so everyone knows where to go. At one point I had a satellite phone on each floor just in case but was definitely overkill and the kids were playing with them so now it's just the one.

But if you can just plug in an iPhone8 somewhere and it isn't going to get lost then that should be good.

So we switched from a crib to a toddler bed for our 2 weeks shy of 3 years old daughter. She loves the bed (it looks like ours) and plays in it a lot. However, since the switch, she has been waking up between 430 and 530am, climbing into our bed and not going back to sleep. She'll watch a tablet or play with dolls, but I can't fall back asleep with her like that. She used to sleep from about 9 at night until 8am. We put the gate at the top of the stairs so she won't go down them at night and still has access to the bathroom. We don't want to put a small potty in her room, because she generally thinks they are toys now and would probably dump it and/or make a huge mess with it.

Any tips on dealing with this or getting her back on schedule would be appreciated.

Mixolyde wrote:

So we switched from a crib to a toddler bed for our 2 weeks shy of 3 years old daughter. She loves the bed (it looks like ours) and plays in it a lot. However, since the switch, she has been waking up between 430 and 530am, climbing into our bed and not going back to sleep. She'll watch a tablet or play with dolls, but I can't fall back asleep with her like that. She used to sleep from about 9 at night until 8am. We put the gate at the top of the stairs so she won't go down them at night and still has access to the bathroom. We don't want to put a small potty in her room, because she generally thinks they are toys now and would probably dump it and/or make a huge mess with it.

Any tips on dealing with this or getting her back on schedule would be appreciated.

I was going to say put the gate at her bedroom door, but the potty thing. Not sure there's much else other than learning to be a morning person for a while. I went through that with mine.

My daughter started doing that when she was 4. Luckily I was able to talk to her and she now understands that she can not come to our bed that early. The big motivating factor for us was her attitude became terrible. Wasn’t getting enough sleep.

I have friends that used an "OK to wake" clock that glows green when they can go into their parents room. Worked great for them so got one for my older son.... aaaand he completely ignores it.

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00EAHSB...

Yeah we use the ok to wake clock, have been since we switched her to a real bed and it works great for us even now that she is almost 5. The key is consistency. She is getting into your bed and playing because she is allowed to. If you don’t want her to do it, tell her and take her back to her bed and to stay there until it is time to get up (aka the light goes green or you get her up if you decide not to use the clock). You’ll have 3-5 days of hassle but be consistent and she will learn.

Also 9:00 is a pretty late bedtime for a 2-3 year old. It is counter intuitive but you might try moving it back in like 10 minute increments over a week to be closer to 7:30-8:00 and see if she improves. Not enough sleep can weirdly cause sleep problems.

We just got one of the rest lights. I kind of like it as a white noise machine but wife said it's for moving the toddler to real bed soon.

What is a rest light?

Also, thanks everyone for suggestions and your experiences.

Stele wrote:

Rest light

Ha, we literally bought that one last night. Wish us luck! Ideally before I have a psychotic break from lack of sleep!

OK to Wake clock is a good pull - we're still using it at 7 years old.

That said, the worst thing you can do is let her stay in your bed playing. That's teaching the wrong lesson - "come on in whenever you damn-well please and you'll get toys".

The right lesson is "mommy and daddy's bed is for mommy and daddy to sleep in". So when she comes into your bed, you've got to drag your sleepy ass out of bed, put her back in hers and calmly tell her it's not time to be awake yet.

You'll be doing this multiple times a night to start with. She might cry a bunch. It will suck. But stick with it, and she'll get the message after just a few nights.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Also 9:00 is a pretty late bedtime for a 2-3 year old. It is counter intuitive but you might try moving it back in like 10 minute increments over a week to be closer to 7:30-8:00 and see if she improves. Not enough sleep can weirdly cause sleep problems.

This was the big thing for us; figuring out what was the best times for our kids. My daughter stopped napping when her brother was born (3 years old). Before then she was going to bed at 8pm but to compensate we moved her bedtime up at 7pm. Now she's 4.5 and she goes to bed at 7:30pm and sleeps through the night until around 6:30pm, visits us, and then we all get up around 7-7:15am. My wife and I are not morning people.

Jonman wrote:

OK to Wake clock is a good pull - we're still using it at 7 years old.

That said, the worst thing you can do is let her stay in your bed playing. That's teaching the wrong lesson - "come on in whenever you damn-well please and you'll get toys".

The right lesson is "mommy and daddy's bed is for mommy and daddy to sleep in". So when she comes into your bed, you've got to drag your sleepy ass out of bed, put her back in hers and calmly tell her it's not time to be awake yet.

You'll be doing this multiple times a night to start with. She might cry a bunch. It will suck. But stick with it, and she'll get the message after just a few nights.

Totally. We still have the clock, but at 5 our kid will just play alone for a bit before coming in to get us.... or the baby is awake so it doesn't really matter.

Vector wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

Also 9:00 is a pretty late bedtime for a 2-3 year old. It is counter intuitive but you might try moving it back in like 10 minute increments over a week to be closer to 7:30-8:00 and see if she improves. Not enough sleep can weirdly cause sleep problems.

This was the big thing for us; figuring out what was the best times for our kids. My daughter stopped napping when her brother was born (3 years old). Before then she was going to bed at 8pm but to compensate we moved her bedtime up at 7pm. Now she's 4.5 and she goes to bed at 7:30pm and sleeps through the night until around 6:30pm, visits us, and then we all get up around 7-7:15am. My wife and I are not morning people.

Ours dropped naps right after turning 4 (she turns 5 in May). She has always needed a good amount of sleep and it is really obvious when she doesn't get enough... At 3 years old she had an hour of rest time (or longer if she went to sleep) and at night she was 7:30pm to 7:00am. Like we started the bedtime routine at 7:00 and she was lights out by 7:30.

Since she dropped naps we moved her bedtime up and she has to get up a little earlier for pre-school so she is currently sleeping 7:00pm to 6:45am which is when her clock lights up. Consistent bedtime is really important, if she is up even 30-45 minutes later we can tell the next day by her behavior. It is a bit of a pain for us because that means she is having dinner at like 5:15-5:30. Some nights we all eat together, some nights she just eats by herself and then my wife and I have dinner after she goes to bed.

If anyone has or is expecting a newborn, Loop Hero might just be the perfect one handed game for playing while holding or feeding them. My second is due imminently and I expect to be playing it that way a bunch.

Mixolyde wrote:

If anyone has or is expecting a newborn, Loop Hero might just be the perfect one handed game for playing while holding or feeding them. My second is due imminently and I expect to be playing it that way a bunch.

Good point.
Civ 5 was my go-to at the time.