"No", "Careful", and "Gentle": top 3 words of toddlerdom

So my son is 19 months old and I talk to him a lot, but the three words that I seem to say the most these days are:

1. "No" as in "no hitting", "no biting", "no throwing"
2.  "Careful" as in "careful when you climb onto very high pieces of furniture and start jumping you are probably going to fall and hurt yourself"
3. "Gentle" as in "gentle with the cat, if you pull his tail really hard he is going to get mad"

These are just examples of the countless ways in which I use these words each day. Is it just me or do all parents of toddlers find these words coming out of their mouths way too often?

So my question for parents of other active toddlers is when do these three words start to fade from your vocabulary?

Travel tips - use an overnight diaper

I just got back from a trip to Chicago with my 18 month old son and consequently have a long list of travel tips, some of which I knew in advance and some of which I learned the hard way.

Not sure where I first heard this tip about overnight diapers, but it works beautifully so I want to share it. If you are traveling with your baby/toddler instead of using a regular diaper on the airplane, put them in one of those special ultra absorbent overnight diapers right before you get on the plane.

My son sleeps in these types of diapers at night and they can hold a lot of pee without getting uncomfortable or leaking. We use the Pampers brand and they advertise that they last for 12 hours and I would say that is about right.

I will do anything to avoid changing my son in those tiny smelly airplane bathrooms!

Nusery University - warning do not watch if you live in NYC

So if anyone is in a mood to procrastinate, has a toddler, and a netflix streaming account then check out this documentary about parents trying to get their kids into "elite" preschools in NYC "Nursery University"

Either it will make you feel good about the price and options for  pre-school in your neck of the woods or if you live in New York and are a Type-A personality it might make you start to freak out about your child's chances of getting in to an Ivy League university. In fact if you live in NYC I would not advice watching this movie at all, it is a little too disturbing.

The impression I got from watching most of the parents in this documentary is that even two year olds are old enough to enter the rat race.

Some of the parents come across as pretty scary. They seem convinced that a good pre-school would feed into a good elementary school, then acceptance into an elite private high school and then a spot at an Ivy League university, a good job and then ultimately a chance to shepherd their own children through the crazy school admissions game.

However, the pre-school staff and other parents seem to realize that this much hype about pre-school is crazy and that nursery does not seal your fate! Chalk this one up as one more reason not to live in NYC.

The Fourth Trimester theory

I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that newborns really need a "fourth trimester" of pregnancy, hence their first three months of life they are essentially not ready for life on the outside. Pregnancy.org has an article written by Dr. Karp explaining his theory about the "fourth trimester" and its relationship to colic. ParentMap has a shorter explanation of this fourth trimester phenomenon.

For a while we tried to follow the advice from the book Happiest Baby on the Block, by Dr. Karp. While his theory of the "fourth trimester" makes perfect sense, his advice on getting babies to calm down only helped us sporadically and it was a lot more work than simply putting baby in a baby carrier and walking around - which had a 99% success rate. I am sure if we were more studious and serious about his methods we would have had better luck. Basically his advice calls for using five techniques to calm your newborn - the 5 S's:

1. swaddling
2. side/stomach position
3. shushing
4. swinging
5. sucking

The thing that seemed to help my son most was being held stomach down, we got the most bang for our buck out of that technique. Other things, like sucking, were pretty unhelpful. He did sometimes suck on a finger but he never was interested in pacifiers.

Any feedback from readers on this theory and whether using the 5 S's made a big difference to them?

Thousand dollar stroller?!

Could someone please explain to me what prompts someone to spend $1049.99 on a stroller?


Seriously, I am speechless!!!

Here are the details - Stokke stroller.

News that is not news: young mothers eat poorly and exercise less than non-mothers

Common sense: young mother + young child = no time for healthy cooking or exercising

So why did someone bother writing this article in the NYT Health section about how young mothers eat less healthy foods and exercise less than other people?

Seriously when you are sleep-deprived and exhausted and your baby or toddler finally lays down to take a nap what are you going to do?
a. wash and chop vegetables and cook a healthy meal
b. get on the treadmill or take out the yoga dvd
c. lie down on the couch/bed and try to relax and hopefully sleep

I'm guessing even non-parents can guess which answer is correct. Okay, enough being snarky. Obviously the issue is a little more complex than I am making it seem. However, I always chuckle a little when I see these kind of findings and file them away in my brain under "news that is not news to anyone".

Babies and technology: ipod boy

I had no idea that my son ever really noticed my ipod until last weekend when he went over to my desk, stood on his tiptoes, grabbed my ipod, and proceeded to stick the earbuds into his ears (or try to). He then walked around holding the earphones to his ears and looking ridiculously cute until I turned the ipod on and then put the earphones back up to his ears - which he loved.

The only time I really wear the earphones around my son is when I take him on a long walk or run in the stroller and I will sometimes bring the ipod. Clearly he noticed! Here is a pic of him holding the earphone up to one ear. You think Apple will want to use him for their next set of advertisements, they could start marketing to a whole new set of consumers ;)

iToddler

2x Roseola

It is scary to see your baby have a fever, but after two bouts with Roseola I can say if he has to have a fever this is the one I would choose.

My son has had Roseola twice, once at about 10 months old and again at about 13 months old.
The fever got pretty high, around 103, and stayed high for 4-5 days. In general my son was acting fairly normal. The fever worried us, but we called our pediatrician who told us Roseola was going around and said the fever was a good sign that his body was fighting the infection, and unless he seemed to be in pain or discomfort we did not need to give him any medication.

There were a few nights we gave him Tylenol because he was having trouble sleeping, but in general he was his regular happy self, just with a fever. By the fifth day, just as his temperature was dropping,  I saw tiny red spots on his tummy and back, they got brighter and then disappeared over the course of maybe a day and half.

Apparently the days when a fever was considered dangerous (my mother's and grandmother's generation) have been replaced by the contemporary medical wisdom that the fever is the body's way of fighting off an infection and you should not interfere with it (of course if your baby is under six months old I think different rules apply). All things considered if your baby has to be sick this is a pretty easy illness to handle.

Memories of childbirth - the broken bed

For some reason I recently remembered one of the most stupidly grueling parts of my labor and delivery experience and I thought it would be a nice start to a series of blog posts on childbirth.

Not sure you have the patience to read my birth story all in one sitting, let's just say it's hard to summarize quickly. But a few days ago I remembered a low point. I was in miserable pain with what is known as "back labor" (I would not wish this on my worst enemy) and they had just wheeled me back into the delivery room after a scare during which they took me to the Operating Room and got ready to do an emergency c-section. Well the c-section was not necessary (big relief), but when we got back to the delivery room they found out the high-tech million dollar hospital bed I was on was broken. So they wheeled in another fancy bed and told me to climb onto it.

Should be easy right? Well I was at a point where I could barely think straight, speaking was tough, and moving was excruciating. I was about 6 cm dilated and lying down in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask, an IV in my arm, a blood pressure cuff, and heart rate monitors strapped around my belly. I started to try to move and got tangled in cords and sheets. I felt like they were asking me to climb Mount Everest, and for some reason none of the nurses seemed inclined to help me get onto the other bed. Anyway, to make a long story short it felt like it took me 20 minutes to climb from one bed onto the other bed. It probably took me five minutes and all of my concentration. Seems really funny now, but at at the time I was not so thrilled. Fortunately after that things got better and in the end my son arrived healthy and adorable!

Why having a baby who is a bad sleeper early on might be good in the long run

So here is my newest theory*:

If you have a baby who is a really bad sleeper during the first months this may actually be good in the long run, because you will be forced to address and work through sleep issues early in your child's life.

Here is the sequence of events as they happened in my family:

1. my son did not regularly sleep for more than 2 hours at a time for the first four months of his life
2. by the time he was four months old we were all so sleep deprived and miserable that we felt we had to make a big change and we did some sleep training (Ferber style)
3. a week after we started the sleep training everyone was getting so much more sleep, including my son who was happier and better rested. He started taking long naps and only waking up 1x per night
4. at 15 months old he sleeps really well for naps and sleeps through the night from 7:30pm-6:00am (apart from the occasional night when he is sick or teething) 

Now I don't know what it's like to have a young baby who is a "good sleeper", but I do know a few people with older babies who still need to coax their children to sleep each night. A case in point is a friend of mine who was still rocking her baby to sleep when he was eleven months old. Or another mom who still had to breastfeed her baby to sleep every night when he was two years old. There is nothing wrong with doing these things as long as everyone is happy doing them, but this is not always the case.

This post is not intended to encourage people to try sleep training or to criticize certain methods of getting your baby to sleep. My motto is do whatever works for your family. But I am hoping if there are people out there with young babies who are eligible for the "worst sleeper ever" prize you will see that there might be a silver lining to your situation.

At least in my case I am sure that if my son was only waking up 1x or 2x a night at four months old I would have felt no need to do sleep training. But since he was waking up on average about 4x times a night we were desperate and when he was old enough we tried the sleep training.

* As always my theories are based on limited anecdotal evidence.