Soliciting advice

[kate_nepveu]

Okay, if you've been bursting to give us advice related to FutureBaby, here's your chance:

1. Is there any downside to cribs that turn into twin- or full-sized beds?
2. If you could only give me one piece of advice, what would it be?

Nb.: unsolicited advice remains unwelcome.

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

1. I don't know anything about them.
2. Read this book. (http://www.amazon.com/Poo-Bomb-Tales-Parental-Terror/dp/0740750453)

[kate_nepveu]

2. Can I bookmark the website (http://www.ironycentral.com/babymain.html) for later reading instead?

[sargent.livejournal.com]

1. Mainly size, but otherwise, no.

2. For every piece of parenting advice, there is an equal and opposite piece of parenting advice. Take what works for y'all and your kid, and merrily discard the rest.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Plastics!

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

1. Damned if I can think of any. (I'm assuming that if there were safety issues, Consumer Reports or Parents Magazine or some similar place would have been all over it by now.)

2. If your best friend, your favorite aunt, your mother, your mother-in-law, your old college room-mate, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Wicked Witch of the West offers to come over after FutureBaby is born and help out around the house for a couple of weeks . . . say yes. You will be far more tired than you expect, and for about the first six months you're going to be more or less permanently short on sleep. Take help when it's offered.

(In a perfect science-fictional universe, immediately after the baby is born one could pop him/her into a stasis chamber and take a month off at a luxury spa, getting back into shape and catching up on the sleep that one didn't get in the last couple of weeks of pregnancy, then go back refreshed and ready to tackle the whole new motherhood thing. Unfortunately, what we've got is a highly imperfect non-science-fictional universe, in which one is required to adopt a strenuous new lifestyle while already in a state of physical exhaustion.)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

dhole was saying the other day how cold sleep would be used for this and how most kids would probably take about thirty or forty years to get to eighteen. I said I'd had the exact same thought when Z was a baby, and wondered if this was a typical fannish parent thought. Clearly it is.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

2. Swaddling rec: this book (http://www.chroniclebooks.com/index/main,book-info/store,books/products_id,4889/path,1-7-43/title,Baby-Gami/). The "look inside" link is an excerpt, including the diagrams. (Not a tradition thing so much as a many-babies-need-it thing.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Seconded. The book is cute. And many babies do thrive on swaddling. It's like a signal to the baby's nervous system that they can relax now.

[the_rck]

The downside to the cribs that turn into toddler beds (at least the models I looked at five years ago) has to do with the logistics. If you're reasonably tall and have strong arms and a sound back, there's no big deal. If you're 5'2" (as I am) and have to be careful about reaching and lifting, it may be hard to find a bed that converts that isn't an injury risk. Basically, we didn't go with a convertible bed because I couldn't reach down to the mattress without standing on something and was not at all certain that I could safely put a child down or pick it up again, especially not repeatedly.

A bit of advice-- Don't let yourself get dehydrated at the end of your pregnancy. It's tempting because of the frequent need to pee and because of swelling feet and ankles, but dehydration makes a lot of things harder. Especially, stay hydrated during the early stages of labor. I didn't, and getting an i.v. set up was a miserable experience.

[kate_nepveu]

Excellent point, thanks--a crib with a drop side is much more important to me than the possible convenience of converting it to a bed frame later. (I am 5' 3".)

IVs are never fun when one's dehydrated, and must be even worse in labor. I have pre-existing reasons to pay particular attention to my hydration, but I'll keep it in extra mind.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

1. I have no idea. Our babies slept with us till we couldn't stand it and then made gradual transition to their own twin beds: no cribs at all.

2. Be a primate. Let baby climb on you, hang on you, babble at you, follow you around. Hold the baby more than other people think is reasonable. Do give the baby a little practice in waiting to get got, but let the baby know you're going to get them later.

Fooey on one piece of advice. The other one is: it's never too early for empathy education. Talk to baby about how the baby feels and how other people feel, encourage sharing and cooperative play, remark on it when you see it.

Oh yeah, one more thing. (I'm loquacious, you know that). Know that you're the grownup. And for a long time, if your child is doing something dangerous or unwise or rude, the bottom line is that you could, if necessary, pick that child up bodily and remove them from the situation in which they are doing that thing. Not that you should always do this. But knowing this, you don't have to be fierce, you don't have to get angry, and you don't have to engage in complicated reward and puinishment systems to get the kid to do right.

I'm getting ahead of you by years now, but bribes have a place: when the intrinsic reward of doing the thing is nonexistent or the kid can't perceive it.

Back on topic: babies talk to you all the time. You learn their dialect by looking at them, touching them, listening to them, even smelling them.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

If that's too many pieces of good advice from ritaxis, please consider any one of them my piece of advice.

[publius1.livejournal.com]

2. I wouldn't dare. You hate spoilers!

[dlganger.livejournal.com]

Oh, you bastard. I totally wish I'd thought of this response first.

Nicely played!

[prince-eric.livejournal.com]

Well, a bit of advice, before I toddle off to bed.

After you get home with the bundle o' joy, if folks want to come over and visit feel free to impose on them to bring a pizza, or some takeout.

[kate_nepveu]

Foooooood!

(Why do I not have a food icon?)

[dhole.livejournal.com]

2: Babies are more robust than you might expect.

[kate_nepveu]

A good thing to be reminded, thanks, though I imagine that it'll be like the dog, having to experience it for ourselves.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

2. Stop reading childraising books. They will make you feel insecure and depressed. Unless some emergency happens -- and you'll know it -- your baby will teach you what s/he needs you to know.

[kate_nepveu]

Hah! We haven't *started* reading childrearing books!

(I haven't even read all the way to the end of my pregnancy book yet, because I am A Worrier and am trying to manage the amount of information I have to worry about.)

I plan to ask for recs for _sensible_ books later, not go off into parenting-advice land without a reliable guide. I will at least want an infant health-type book, for the stuff analogous to "no honey" that we don't know yet.

[paoconnell.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, we didn't baby talk to our daughter when she was little (Karen didn't do babytalk with her other kids from previous marriages either). Once Katy started talking in sentences, we could understand her perfectly well and she never did baby talk. She's 24 now...

[dlganger.livejournal.com]

Ditto. We talk to our kids using real English. When they were younger, that meant a lot more explaining than we have to do now, but they caught on fast because we didn't set a low expectation for them. As a result, we now have kids who trust us enough to know that when we can explain the reason for a request/demand/order to them, we will -- even if it's not until after the request has been met.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

1. I think it may be a safety requirement now (it wasnt back in the day) but make certain the crib slats are too close together for a small head to fit through. Not everybody made sure of this many years ago, nuff said.

2. Enjoy every day, because you will blink and they are 25.

[kate_nepveu]

1. Yup, safety standard now, no more than 2 3/8" gap.

2. Thanks.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

f you could only give me one piece of advice, what would it be?

Take good care of yourself; get as much sleep in the first six months as you can; don't be pressured into things that make you uncomfortable (eg. some people hate nursing in public, some like it; most pediatricians understand that if you, as the mother, are grossly uncomfortable with something, it affects everything to do with child-rearing).

[kate_nepveu]

Happy parents are good for kids, check.

[kate_nepveu]

Highly sensible, thank you.

(Eeee! Lizard!)

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

If you could only give me one piece of advice, what would it be?

Don't panic. And no, I'm not being a smartass. This was the advice my doc gave me when Alex was born. It's a nice little mantra when you start to panic, like the first time your kid gets an ear infection or needs stitches...or you put him on a bus bound for somewhere out of your sight.

(Repeated it all the way to dance rehearsals tonight after putting Alex on a bus to Virginia Beach. He's never been that far from home without me. It's weird.)

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Don't panic.

Heh. My parents like to tell stories about how, when not too long after they took me home, the cord fell off, my dad freaked and tried to put it back on over my belly button. They called the hospital, which reassuring told them everything was fine, not to worry.

And apparently when I first started pooping, they called the doctor to ask to make sure the color didn't mean anything was wrong. I don't know if this means they called him every day for a few days. He probably said as long as it wasn't bright red or dark black, it was all good.

[cvantien.livejournal.com]

1. I bought regular cribs and twin beds for the first three, the last one I had to buy a convertible crib because of size constraints in the bedroom she was sharing with her sister. The main issue with the convertible crib is that they don't have sliding sides, or at least mine didn't, so it makes it harder to reach into the crib when the base is on the lowest setting if the baby doesn't choose to sit up to be picked up. On the plus side once you take the sides off to make it a toddler bed it is lower to the ground so they are less likely to hurt themselves if they fall out - although mine all slept through falling out of the twin beds so that's not necessarily a selling point. They are much of a muchness for me so unless you have space issues it's probably not worth bothering with a toddler bed, you'll only eventually have to buy a twin anyway.

2. I have to agree with sargent, just smile and nod while people give you advice then choose what will work for you and do that. My GP always told me that mothers know their babies better than any health professional so the choices I made for my children was most likely to be the best choice for us.

One other piece of assvice though, don't be afraid to talk a lot to your baby, describing stuff or filling in both sides of the conversation. I didn't do that with #1 and since his father was away with the Navy my son didn't really hear a lot of speech during his 4th to 8th month or through the days when I wasn't working. He was the only one of my children who didn't talk at a young age because by the time the rest came along he was talking and there were always people talking around them. Even if you aren't making sense babies learn from hearing the way language should sound.

[kate_nepveu]

1. Yeah, looking around, it does seem that ones with drop sides are a lot harder to find, and drop sides are much more of a priority for 5' 3" me.

2. Considering how much I talk to the dog when Chad's not home, I don't think I'll have trouble with this one. =>

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

2. I dunno. Find a good book on how to teach the baby a little bit of signing, since signing can be done much sooner than talking, and thus give the baby more agency, earlier?

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

This also makes sense in case of unforeseen things, such as the child turning out to be autistic (as darkforge's brother is) and preferring not to speak much, period.

[ejmam.livejournal.com]

1) If you end up having more than one kid, you'll need a crib and a bed anyway. And the look of the room will change a lot between crib-sized and twin-sized kid; you may have a different idea of what it should be. One of my kids ended up sleeping with us anyway so it would have been a waste. Seems like unnecessary moving parts.

2) Don't take yourself too seriously -- good enough is good enough, and all best all the time wouldn't be a good idea anyway. I think parents tend to drastically overestimate their influence -- kids turn out pretty much the way they would have as long as conditions are fairly reasonable.

Personally, I liked reading childcare books, and either nodding wisely along with the bits I agreed with or shaking my head at the folly of the world at the bits I didn't. I guess I treat advice/stories from others the same way. As expectant parents, this is also your chance to expound on all parenting philosophies and wisdom -- it's much better to do that before your kids show up and mess up all your theories. For instance, I have only a few years left to give out advice on handling teens -- anyone interested?

[kate_nepveu]

2. I'm an adopted kid, so some time ago decided that it was nature AND nuture and not useful to try and separate them out. But that does take a different cast when one's thinking about it from the other end . . .

before your kids show up and mess up all your theories

Heh.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

My only offer for question 2 is: come to a peaceful place of understanding with the fact that your child and your dog will chew on each other's toys on a regular basis. And it probably won't kill either of them.

Also: The Monster at the End of This Book, starring lovable furry old Grover, is the secret weapon of newish-parent gifts.

[cofax7]

::glomps book rec::

[dgillmore.livejournal.com]

1) We didn't do this because we couldn't find one that wasn't obviously a twin bed folded up into a little crib bed, and felt like one when you tried to move it. We did get a crib that lasted through her being 2 - it has all sorts of variable settings like height settings for both the mattress and the railings. We're still using that same crib for our second daughter. We bought a full bed when our daughter was old enough to need one.

Which itself could be another potential downside - if you have a 2nd kid in a couple years, you'd have to buy another crib since the one you would presumably recycle would be the toddler's bed. Of course, you're either buying a bed or a crib. But how long will FutureBaby sleep on said conversion bed once it's full/twin size anyway?

2) I would say the most important thing is scheduling. There's a lot of modes of thinking out there, but for the first couple of months, with a colicky and then with an outright finicky baby, we have found that when either one was put on a schedule that allowed them to adapt to their most likely pattern, once they were on it things became significantly smoother for all parties involved.

[kate_nepveu]

1. But how long will FutureBaby sleep on said conversion bed once it's full/twin size anyway?

What, as opposed to moving to a *bigger* bed? Hell, I slept on dorm twins all through law school; *Chad* slept on a twin until he finished his PhD! As far as I'm concerned, if FutureBaby gets a full bed, it should consider itself _lucky_ . . .

2. Makes sense, thanks. The daycares we talked to were very emphatic about this too, which was reassuring.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

1. I'm pretty sure there was a reason we didn't buy one, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is. I realize this is unhelpful. I will see if my wife happens to remember.

If you're not sure you want one of those, because I am incredibly lazy about putting things up on Craigslist I'd be happy to sell you our Childcraft crib cheap next time you're near Boston. :)

2. You probably already read Making Light thread (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006120.html), but my advice is to read it again.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

My wife says she found the convertible cribs that were available at the time (9 years ago) awkward. There may well be better ones available now. At the time it was also possible that we might decide to have a second child, in which case the convertible crib would not have been that useful.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

1. I have no idea about these beds

2. The best advice I have heard from anyone that hasn't already been given to you here is: If the baby is asleep when the schedule says it is time to feed the baby, let it sleep; rest means more than food just then, and waking the child up will not result in a happy, well-fed child, but in a child that is (at the very least) cranky and not in the mood to eat. When your child is ready to eat, you'll know about it.

[kate_nepveu]

2. Heh. We both do poorly when woken from a sound sleep, so FutureBaby is probably even more likely to be that way . . .

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

2. Get sleep whenever you can. It'll be hard, but you won't be able to handle anything else without the sleep.

[kate_nepveu]

Check!

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

We went with a straight up crib, which is still making rounds among the wife's siblings (keep the spare parts, the manual, and manufacturer info...parts are cheap). Toddler beds use the same mattress size as the crib, so don't skimp on a mattress. You wouldn't sleep on something cheap that you hated, why make your kid? Also, if you go the toddler bed route, you already have a good mattress for it.

I have no child rearing advice, unless you have an Asperger's child, in which case, talk to me in a few years.

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks.