parenting – Page 7

Pregnancy the second time around

Published on June 20, 2014 by a.simple.mama4 Comments

To preface this post, I love being pregnant. There’s something so magical about the whole process. I missed being pregnant. Which is probably why we didn’t wait very long before we decided to try for baby #2… There are many many positive experiences that pregnancy brings. It is a feeling that many many women long for and only some are lucky enough to experience.

Now that I’ve cleared that up…

Some days, especially these days during the middle part of the first trimester, I wonder why I would want to do this to myself all over again. MORNING SICKNESS = the shittiest way to start off such an otherwise wonderful experience. How your body is supposed to think it’s a good thing that you feel like total crap is a mystery to me.

“You have that pregnant lady glow”

“You try throwing up all morning, you’d have that glow too”

– Friends

If you’ve had to experience morning sickness, you will wish that the first trimester moves at the speed of light…There’s nothing fun about the first trimester outside of learning you are pregnant and hearing the heartbeat for the very first time somewhere between 8 and 12 weeks…

With J I don’t remember my MS being quite this bad…but then again I was getting a full night sleep, and had a few extra pounds on me too. These days I’m being sucked dry by a voracious 1-year-old and still being waked 1-2 times a night by said little monster. I guess that’s part of why people said I was crazy for wanting another baby when the first doesn’t sleep through the night yet…

With J I did have crazy awful heartburn…bad enough I had to be on Zantac for 75% of my pregnancy. And I remember having some nausea with J until my 14th week or so, but it was never bad enough to keep me from functioning. This time around I’ve had a few days where I’ve struggled to get out of bed. On a really bad day I’m lucky to be functional before 10am. And on those days I fight strong nausea all day long. Eating helps (assuming I have enough energy to get food down) and water helps too. I make sure to keep lots of snacks at the office so that I don’t get too hungry, and I suck on Jolly Ranchers like they are going out of style. I’m just at 9 weeks now, so I’m readying myself for another 4-6 weeks of MS hell…hoping that this is the trade-off for not having heartburn this time around. I think that’s a fair trade!

I am also going to continue to breastfeed J through this pregnancy. If he self-weans in the meantime then so be it, but otherwise I don’t have any real ready to wean him otherwise. My midwife is supportive of this, which is awesome, but she did warn me that I need to really watch my nutrition (since I should basically be eating healthy for 3) and that I will be extra tired. Oy, well nothing like preparing myself for 2 babies right from the beginning huh?!

We’ll go in at 12 weeks for our first ultrasound and will get to hear the heartbeat then too. Most docs will do an ultrasound at 8 weeks, but mine waits until 12 for the first one. And sometimes you are lucky enough to hear a heartbeat at 8 weeks, but my uterus tilts back towards my spine and would make it impossible to hear a heartbeat that early on. So 3 more weeks till we get to see/hear all that fun stuff.

Sticky Fingers

Published on June 20, 2014 by a.simple.mamaLeave a comment

We have officially entered the age of the Sticky Finger Baby. Nothing is off limits, at least in his eyes, and everything is within reach…tabletops are no longer safe! Anything below counter height is fair game. J’s even learned how to climb or step onto other things in order to get those few extra inches he needs to reach whatever-it-may-be that is surely taunting him just out of reach.

He also loves paper. Like has a weird addiction to it…I may have to stage an intervention…Every time I turn around he’s found some kind of paper to chew on. Little stinker! Do babies have Pika? I’m not kidding you, he’ll rip off the corner of a cardboard box, tear through envelopes like they’re nothing, and bite off an entire corner of a 3 ring binder before you even know he has access to any of those things!

That begin said, an office is like a haven for this little paper eating monster…envelopes, paper, tissues, sticky notes galore. I do my best to keep them out of his reach, but you try and keep tabs on every piece of paper in an office space…uh huh.

My desk is rather large, but the usable space is now limited to only the area 6 inches from each edge…otherwise it’s fair game for Mr. Sticky Fingers!

And you can’t possibly be mad at that little face!

I finally had to yell at him the other day after he’d not only pulled every file off my desk, but also pulled out all the files’ contents and spread them all over my office in the course of about 30 seconds. He just turned around and looked at me with a scrunchy nose.

I imagine he was thinking “what do you mean “NO”? These delicious paper items are for me, aren’t they?!”

A little Torticollis, a little Flat Head Syndrome

Published on June 10, 2014February 6, 2020 by a.simple.mama1 Comment

As new parents there are and will be many many things that you’ll do wrong. Or that you’ll be totally unaware of. Or that you’ll have no idea even exists as a potential problem, until you do that thing and it affects your child.

As new parents ourselves, we had no idea how hard surfaces and a tendency to turn his head one direction would cause not only a giant flat spot on the back side of J’s head but that it would also affect the muscles in his neck. When he was really tiny I’d lay him on my desk at my office (which was the best place to keep an eye and a hand on him)…this is way before he started rolling, don’t worry. Who knew that this hard surface would lead to such a flat area on the right-back side of J’s head?! And who knew that you had to pay close attention to the side of the head your little one likes to lay on?! Well, these are all things that you learn ONLY if these things happen to your kid!

We’d only just noticed that J’s head was a little flat right before we headed to his 3 month appointment. Of course the Doc noticed as soon as he walked in the door. Dead giveaway is when the baby isn’t looking straight up at the ceiling…for further reference. Apparently what happens is that when they tend to turn their head only to one side (J preferred the right) that the neck muscles tighten on that side, and stretch on the other side. So to resolve this you have to stretch the neck the other direction to loosen that side and even up the lengths and strengths of the muscles. So began the many weeks of neck stretches. BTW babies don’t particularly like this. You have to hold them down and gently tilt their head the opposite direction of whichever way they normally tend to tilt it. Then you also rotate their neck from side to side. Yeah…so much fun to do this while they are screaming at you. Makes you feel like you’re torturing them.

The flat spot on his head the Doc described to us as when you push on one corner of a cardboard box and the opposite corner also tilts out-of-place. J had “plagiocephaly” as shown in the pic below.

To correct this and avoid needing a helmet, we had to very closely watch which side of his head he laid on at all times. For the first few weeks we had to do everything in our power to keep him from laying on the right side of his head. Not so easy, let me tell ya. It involved tilting his body to one side when he was laying or sleeping, and using extra padding around the head support in his car seat. We also used the Tortle – a hat or sorts that was created specifically to help with torticollis and Flat Head Syndrome in infants. It worked pretty well when J was still little enough not to squirm too much, but we had to stop using it once he could wiggle his head enough to get the “tail” of the hat moved around. Another product I learned about much later was the Baby Elephant Ears – this product would really help towards prevention of torticollis and FHS, and is super cute too!

Luckily for us it only took a few weeks of doing the exercises and making sure to even out which side J laid on to get the flat spot to mostly go away and for the neck muscles to even out. By his 6 month appointment he was as back to “normal” as we would be able to get him.

Such a silly little oversight, but something that I warn all my new parent friends about. J will always have a slightly flat spot and misshapen head to go with it, but luckily we caught it early enough to correct it enough that you can’t tell unless you know what you’re looking for. Even after years of childcare for infants, I’d never seen either Torticollis or FHS…but hopefully now you can share this information with your fellow first-time parents and avoid a little headache 🙂

Water Play

Published on June 3, 2014 by a.simple.mamaLeave a comment

I’m so excited that it’s warm enough outside to break out the water play outdoors! I think J is gonna be a water baby! He loves bath time, fountains, and sprinklers. But water play can be just a bunch of kitchen tools and a tub of water. Easy peasy and keeps the little ones entertained for quite a while. J especially loves the baster brush and kept using it to splash the water or paint the patio.

What a fun simple way to spend an afternoon, and it’s totally FREE too!

Other Kids Parents

Published on June 2, 2014 by a.simple.mamaLeave a comment

Every parent is guilty of judgement of other parents. Whether it be their parenting style, their discipline methods, their hygiene or dietary prerogative, etc. We are also all guilty of judging other people’s kids – but that’s a whole other blog… We all find ourselves at one point or another saying “I love how they did that _____, I want to remember to do that with my kids”, or “eesh I’ll never treat my kids like that.” Guilty as charged. We all do it. But what happens when the words of a parent appear just plain mean? Not when spoken to the child necessarily, but when spoken about that child to another adult or other children.

I was a teacher in childcare for 5 years or so, and now being a parent there have been several “habits” of other adults – not always other parents – that have really started to hit a sore spot for me. Mainly I am finding it very hard to accept anyone speaking ill of a child. Especially when this person should be the one that is supporting and standing up for the child. To be very specific I have two examples that I’ve come across – both recently and as part of my teaching experience.

When I was a teacher there were always those “problem children”. Unfortunately these kiddos seem to struggle in a number of tasks and are forever deemed as “problems” or “pain-in-the-asses”. Even as teachers we fall into the trap of not being able to like every kid that crosses our path. It’s the unwritten rule though that teachers of all people should love all of their students. And we do, each in their own way, but as Kate Hudson puts it in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days – “I love you…but I don’t have to like you right now.” Same goes for teachers. And really for parents too… Anyway, it’s silly to think that every person will get along with everyone right? So why would you expect every child to get along with every adult and visa-versa? Sometimes people just clash. Yet in the teaching profession it is not acceptable to mock, speak ill of, or degrade a child in any way. Not acceptable. Now it obviously happens, but I’ve found it increasingly annoying to hear any of these types of disrespect towards a child coming from an adult who should be someone in a supportive role for that kid. You may not agree with the way that child has been brought up, you may think that child needs to learn how to sit still or how to listen better, and that child may get on your very last nerve. I’ve been there – I know that some kids just drive you crazy, and I’m sure that I’ve been one of the guilty ones who’s talked badly about this child or that child. But there is just something about listening to another adult speak ill of a child that gets to me.

The most specific example I have of this occurred recently and is really probably a better way of explaining why this particular type of talk gets to me. In this instance the parent is a step-parent. Now I know nothing about the relationship between a child and a step-parent. So excuse me if I am totally off base here and over-judging. But as a parent on any level, how can you complain about a child? How can you complain about a child that you are caring for? The role of a parent in this case differs from the role of a teacher, so in my mind it is completely wrong to place judgement on your own child. In most cases, children are doing the best with what they have been given in life. Yet somehow the blame for the child’s actions go punishable onto the child themselves. So why does this parent feel the need to speak ill of this child to me? Or why does any adult/parent/teacher feel that it is OK to speak ill of any child to anyone else?

This is something that I’m really struggling with today. How do you react to a comment made about a child that you know nothing about, but whom probably doesn’t deserve to be degraded in this way? And worse is knowing that I’ve done this myself as a teacher and been fed up with certain children. Do we think that we will get support for feeling this way? I feel like that is really the only explanation for needing to air such dirty laundry to other people. But how do you not almost take it personally when someone speaks badly to you about a child you know nothing about?

Do other parents struggle with this? How do you react without placing further judgement onto the child or the adult themselves? How do you mind your own business while supporting your friend or fellow parent with their struggles?