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Date: 2008-03-27 01:33 am (UTC)2. Read this book. (http://www.amazon.com/Poo-Bomb-Tales-Parental-Terror/dp/0740750453)
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Date: 2008-03-27 11:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-03-27 01:46 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-27 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 01:53 am (UTC)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.)
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-03-27 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 02:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:08 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-27 11:55 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:14 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-28 12:20 am (UTC)Nicely played!
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:26 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-27 11:55 pm (UTC)(Why do I not have a food icon?)
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 11:58 pm (UTC)(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.
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-28 12:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:55 am (UTC)2. Enjoy every day, because you will blink and they are 25.
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Date: 2008-03-28 12:00 am (UTC)2. Thanks.
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Date: 2008-03-27 02:58 am (UTC)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).
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Date: 2008-03-28 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-28 12:01 am (UTC)(Eeee! Lizard!)
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Date: 2008-03-27 03:51 am (UTC)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.)
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Date: 2008-03-27 06:01 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-27 03:58 am (UTC)2. I have to agree with
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.
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Date: 2008-03-28 12:03 am (UTC)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. =>
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Date: 2008-03-27 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 05:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-03-27 04:25 am (UTC)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?
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Date: 2008-03-28 12:05 am (UTC)before your kids show up and mess up all your theories
Heh.
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Date: 2008-03-27 04:42 am (UTC)Also: The Monster at the End of This Book, starring lovable furry old Grover, is the secret weapon of newish-parent gifts.
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Date: 2008-03-27 03:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 04:53 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-28 12:19 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-27 05:03 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-27 03:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-03-27 12:31 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-03-28 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 12:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-28 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-27 12:43 pm (UTC)I have no child rearing advice, unless you have an Asperger's child, in which case, talk to me in a few years.
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Date: 2008-03-28 12:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
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