Our friends told us to forgo the crib and just let the kid sleep with us. We ignored this advice, but they took it. Two years later the kid can't sleep away from that bed, he's getting too big. nap times are a nightmare, especially now that he's started day care. Well, how 'bout that ... first post and it's gonna kinda stray off topic: but I hate friends (single, dating or married) who say something like 'Well, we have a dog so we know what it's like to be have kids.' then they try to give advice. why bother? it's gonna be useless. no single statement bewildered me as much. you have no idea. it's a dog. not a human. geez. YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT'S LIKE! also, I give this thread two posts before it veers violently off topic to made-up crap. Personally, I can't wait.
I've had the opposite experience. Everyone told us that if our daughter wasn't on her own in the crib after 3 months we were doing something wrong. My wife, like her mother, is involved in the local Le Leche League chapter. They counsel mothers in breastfeeding, and with that comes keeping the child with the mother so we chose to keep the girls with us until they were old enough to sleep on their own. It felt natural, instead of forcing the child into the crib and letting them cry themselves to sleep. Right now our 4 yr. old daughter goes to bed by 7:30am, and usually crawls into our king size bed between 2-5am. We also have our infant daughter sleeping with us, so while it does get crowded, it's nice and quiet. I prefer a crowded bed to a screaming baby, and it also means that no-one is getting up in the middle of the night. Plug the child into the breast, tuck them under the sheets, and everyone is happy. BTW - no problem with naps, and we don't use daycare.
excellent! I'm glad to hear it's working out for you and every kid/family is certainly different. I wasn't trying to say it was bad advice in all cases ... it's that the people who gave us the advice and it blow up in their face.
I love all the advice I get from my husband's single aunts. It's always easy to give advice about things you know nothing about.
"If your wife wants to do natural childbirth talk her out of it or get somebody else to do it with her. I did it with my wife and there was so much blood I almost fainted. A nurse sat me down in a chair in the corner. There was...so much blood. Plus you don't want to have sex with her for a while after seeing that." --Some guy I was talking to at the gym. What a gimp.
Our midwife was terrible. Just horrible. She was--I'm not making this up--running back and forth between the hospital (where my wife was going through an extremely problematic delivery; turned up she has an inverted coccyx which was blocking our son's birth) and her house where she was packing to go on vacation. The nurses took a lot of pity on us for being stuck with her. They hooked my wife up with some morphine; later, when the staff realized that a doctor was going to have to cut my wife open a little in order for the birth to happen (it was too late for a C-section), they proceeded to begin the incision on the assumption that my wife was good and doped up. She screamed in agony--THE MIDWIFE HAD SECRETLY SHUT OFF THE MEDICINE WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE ON THE STAFF. God I wanted to kill that woman. It was our own damn fault for trusting her, I guess, but damn. She was, by far, the last person involved in the birth who realized that it wasn't going right. After, say, 12 straight hours of labor, pretty much everyone else knew that we needed something else. But she continued interfering with every attempt to switch gears and bail out on the natural approach. Even though, as it turned out, a successful, natural birth was all but impossible given her tailbone situation.
that was an UNBELIEVABLE story. did you report the midwife? surely there was a course of action you could take.
Oh, we reported her all right. I doubt we were the only ones, given what we experienced with her. And the staff at the hospitol, including all the nurses, were pretty appalled by her and were willing to be vocal about their feelings; any invesitgative follow-up would have had no problem finding witnesses willing to talk. So the story has a happy ending--she later showed up at the nursing home my wife and I worked at, working as an agency nurse passing pills; she'd apparantly lost her license to be a midwife. And, wouldn't you know, she made multiple mistakes with the medications that night. And guess which one of her former patients happened to be the House Supervisor on duty that shift? In her career as a nurse, I don't think my wife has EVER enjoyed reporting another nurse for med errors more than she did that night...
Not direct advice, but all the ads for furniture and crap you "need". Save your money. Also, buy as few clothes as possible in infant size because they grow out of them in 30 days.
Not limited to your husband's single aunts. I've found quite a number of people are perfectly willing to critique my wife and my parenting skills or judge our son's development and tell us what we are doing wrong... As for before he was born, most of my family and hers couldn't be arsed to provide any support or advice....
I'm glad our daughter is already used to sleeping in her own crib in her own room. It's going to make the bedwetting years far more enjoyable for the Mrs. and Me.
I think jimmybastard is pretty unique up above. I haven't heard anyone regret getting the kids to sleep in their own room early. But my crowd tended to be urban professionals who got back to work quickly. Unless you know you always really wanted to do the whole everyone in bed thing, get those kids trained early. I know people who agonized over really expensive strollers. We brought cheapo brands and wore them down. We also put the kids on a back/front pack lots and lots of the time.
Those things are gold. I used to get so much done when I stayed home on paternity leave. She would sit there and watch me clean dishes, clean the house, we could walk the dogs, I'd wash clothes and wihtin an hour she was out. It was exhausting watching daddy do all that stuff. Course she is a bit big for them now, and oddly enough the cheapest stroller we ever purchased is the only one that has lasted and that she really likes.
We were in a Chinese restaurant we frequent with our first child and were friendly with the waitress. She asked how the girl was sleeping and we said "Oh, you know, not so good" but not in any dramatic way. And she says "Oh, they have shots for that. Just ask your doctor." My wife and I were just silent -- mostly out of simple disbelief. I think I finally managed an "oh... really...?" "Yes, it's very simple. Then they sleep all the time." "Oh. .... O.K." She is a really a great waitress, though.
....did you tell her that a heroin dealer isn't the same thing as a doctor? I must say though, I am an advocate for an on/off switch. WHAT!?!
Some of the worst advice I got was from my own mother. She was on hand for the birth of my twins. The boy had to stay in the hospital for jaundice treatment, but the girl was sent home with me. She had a difficult time with nursing and spent a lot of time flailing about and would often fall asleep before ever eating. She got to where she slept hours on end and she was a newborn! My mom kept saying how great it was she was sleeping. I was worried that it was excessive for an infant of her age, but my mom insisted it was great and I should let her sleep and get my rest. Well, as soon as my mom left for home, I was on the phone to my doctor expressing my concerns. He was not so worried, but said to take her along for her twin brother's follow up jaundice test (he'd been released by then) and he would order a test for her. A couple of hours after that test, I got a call from the doctor, saying I needed to bring her in to the office AT ONCE. Her bilirubin count was so high, he actually wanted to admit her to the hospital without seeing her, but since we lived a couple of miles away, he figured he'd take a look at her first. He decided she looked better than he expected and ordered her to be put on a bottle and placed in the sunshine whenever possible. We then had two babies to haul up to the hospital for blood tests for the next few days. She got out of it fine, but remember, no matter what your mother or aunt or neighbor says, if a newborn is sleeping hours without eating or waking up, that's bad. My doctor said we were lucky with her and I'm glad my mom doesn't like to be away from home for long, even when there are new grandchildren around. Considering all four of my children ended up jaundiced, I'd guess it must be something in the mother's milk. Only the youngest avoided having any action taken to rid him of it.
Those people can ******** right off. I alway say to them, "Yeah, having a dog is just like having a kid. When I feel like going out at night, I put my kid in the garage, let them shit on some newspaper and feed themselves out of an old plastic margarine tub...or when I go on vacation, I get someone over to let my kid out once a day to piss in the grass. Yeah, having a dog is EXACTLY like having a human child."
Amen. The "changing table" is the most worthless piece of furniture ever invented...what the hell else are you going to use the top of your dresser for? Trust us...in a few years, your house is going to be crowded and you're going to be getting rid of all the baby stuff anyway.
Actually, because we have the tall dressers, we have two changing tables, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. Of course, we bought both of them for $10 combined at a thrift store, coz that's how we roll. Sachin