Does anyone else's 18 month old still wake several times a night to feed or be comforted?

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-07T03:28:33+00:00

Thanks, I have and there's a lot that I think is good about it. In my case, though, I'm a single parent so don't routinely have someone else available to comfort the kiddo at night. I also am on the covid-cautious end of the spectrum and want to keep nursing my kid until they can get the vaccine and gain some protection that way. I don't want to take the risk that night-weaning might demolish my already-dwindling supply. But I really do appreciate the resource and think it could be very useful to other folks on the thread. Once the kid is jabbed I may see if one of my close friends, who has been around a lot for this kid's life, would be available to night-nanny for a week and see how it goes.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-07T02:31:25+00:00

At least some of the science on legumes suggests they keep all that yummy nitrogen to themselves until they die & decompose, so to use them for rotation instead of interplanting. There's still a lot we don't know about the way plants interact, though, and most of the research is targeted to agribusiness instead of backyard gardeners. Could be worth a try.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-07T01:37:59+00:00

In our case it was clinging pretty tenaciously to the sides of the containers. I've seen the same with non-homogenized cows' milk, too, that I have to shake the bejesus out of it to get the fat off the sides (which I was reluctant to do with breastmilk). Maybe I just have special milk for a human? I dunno, I just know a gentle swirl wasn't doing it for mine. Daycare did start heating the storage bottles when it was time to get the last of it into the drinking bottle. They started calling those particular feeds "fat bombs" and the kid always had an extra good nap after one of those.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-07T01:28:51+00:00

I'd only worry about it if they're falling off their growth curve (this is an age where weight gain really slows down) or if you don't think they are getting enough variety of nutritious foods over the course of a week. Some days my toddler subsists on air and two leaves of oregano.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-07T01:14:17+00:00

Yup. OP put the abstract in a comment, and indeed the high triglycerides are there.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T22:52:14+00:00

A baby carrier might be a thing that would help you both. Give her the closeness to you that she craves, and give you the freedom to use your hands and get stuff done. At that age a back carry can work well, at least part of the time, so then you don't have little T rex arms like a front carry. It might work to approach it like your husband did, but the relationship she has with each adult will be different so I wouldn't blame yourself if you try that approach and it doesn't work.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T22:11:33+00:00

Do you know how to tell the difference between a weasel and a stoat?

Weasels are weasely identified, while stoats are stoatally different.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T21:47:23+00:00

Yw! I like the crowd over there and have had some great discussions. Be aware that the mod recently introduced flair so that OPs could indicate if they're OK with "all advice" (your anecdotes, speculations, great-grandma's home remedies) or if they want "evidence-based only", in which case all top-level comments need to link to a reliable source.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T21:38:55+00:00

We are still breastfeeding, and there are still some nights the kid is going for nursing every few hours. Other nights we get a five or six hour first-sleep, a quick nurse, and a two or three hour second sleep. This latter pattern is becoming a little more common, thank goodness. In some ways I would have preferred to night wean a while ago to see if that improved my sleep (little one seems to like the existing sleep pattern fine...) However, I'm concerned about the unknowns around long-term covid effects. With the kid in daycare my breast-milk antibodies are something I want to keep flowing until either there's a vaccine for the littles or we get enough data to really understand the long-term effects of repeated covid infections. I'm concerned night weaning would demolish my already dwindling supply. And they keep dangling the promise of a vaccine in just a few more weeks, so I chug some more espresso and white-knuckle through it.

I've had moments of despair, especially when the kid nursed at ten PM, then two AM, then starts a marathon at four AM and I realize I won't get to go back to sleep before my alarm is due to go off. Other parents with older kids have been sympathetic and reassuring, which helps. Agreed that I would never have believed I'd manage to function (such as I do) on such messed up sleep!

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T21:24:06+00:00

I think I really started around two, when kiddo could reliably follow slightly more complex directions. No need to deliberately set it off, because I managed to let the rice/oatmeal/whatever boil over just often enough, and then get sidetracked & not clean the burner pan before the next time I cooked, so that there were enough naturally-occurring drills (not fire, just smoke from the burner). Now that kid is older I'm getting a little more sleep and not setting off the alarm so often, so I might need to set it off with a match or something to practice the new routine.

You might contact your local fire department's non-emergency number to see if they'll send folks out to help you assess fire safety & develop a plan. I don't know how universal it is, but I think a lot of departments do have that kind of community outreach. If you're in an area where wildfires are at all a concern, many departments will also work with you on fire-safing your house and developing defensible landscaping.

I'm so glad your extended family made it out OK!

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T20:58:55+00:00

I've continued bedsharing even though my kid had similar feeding habits at that age. We are s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y getting longer and longer sleep intervals, but kiddo is also three years old and I still haven't had a full night's sleep. As a working parent in a society that doesn't give parents much support, it sucks. Sleep training was not for us, but I get why many people choose it. I can get into why I haven't, but I also don't want to seem preachy/shame-y at those who have chosen it.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T17:41:47+00:00

I'm good with "clean your plate" once a person is of an age to serve their own food or to "say when" enough has been put on. If someone else does the plating? Absolutely up to the individual to eat as much as feels right to their body and leave the rest. And I agree no one should have to eat or not eat based on whether the people they are with are hungry. It's nice to share a meal when it's everyone's choice, but the idea of someone else feeling they have to eat because I'm hungry is downright gross.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T17:22:21+00:00

I was warned about "threenager". We only just embarked on this special year, and it looks like we're in for a fun ride. One thing that so far is helping a tiny bit: I just have such a hard time understanding them when they talk in whiny voice. "What was that, baby? I think I hear that you want something, but it's just really hard to understand your words when you use that voice. Do you think you could please try again in a more calm, polite voice so maybe I can understand what you're asking for? Oh! that's what you were asking for? Sure, I can get that for you." I'm sure I'm in for a lot of whining anyway, but I'm hoping maybe less.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T16:45:31+00:00

This comment links to a super-interesting article on the role of breastmilk in Mongolian culture. Doesn't give much insight into whether it's weird in your particular culture or social circle, but is a great look at some practices that are pretty different from the standard in western countries https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceBasedParenting/comments/v1v759/breastfeeding_into_childhood_any_studies_saying/iapbybc?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3 Fwiw, still nursing my 3yo and I think it's helped them get through a lot of the round of daycare illnesses without being hit as hard as they could have been.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T16:38:52+00:00

Mine still loves the fresh stuff, but informs me the pumped stuff doesn't taste good. Lipase, I'm guessing. Glad they were ok with the pumped stuff when they were an infant in daycare!

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T15:23:46+00:00

I like your explanation of it "waking up"!

Fwiw, as someone with firefighters in the family, I've preferred to teach my kid to immediately go to an outside door, and let the grownups decide if this is a mute-the-alarm or evacuate-the-house moment. I have no intention of leaving my kid alone so that it would be a problem for them to mute the alarm instead of evacuating, but sometimes awful things happen and if I were somehow incapacitated in a real fire that's what I'd want my kid to do. Actually, this reminds me that now the kid is big enough to open the outside door, I need to update our drill so that they go to an outside evacuation spot and wait for me there.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T15:17:00+00:00

Oh! That baby shaming. Yeah, with my kid we'll talk about how some day when they are a big kid they'll do xyz, and tie increasing levels of responsibility to increasing privileges. I try to not attach any stigma one way or the other and I did find that bit cringey.

I had some real doubts about the monsters thing, too, but gave it a try and I do employ it a bit. My pet peeve right when I read the book was that the kid had just figured out how to open the fridge door and would, of course, stand there with the door open for a long time. I started talking about how the fridge monster will get big if it warms up, and then it'll eat all our food. I realized after the fact that I'd stumbled on a nice metaphor for food spoilage, so I'm running with it. From a dental hygienist I also got the idea for sugar monsters that will eat their teeth if we don't brush well, and expanded it to the toothbrush being hungry for sugar monsters. While this has not totally solved toothbrushing resistance, it has helped. I've settled on the monster thing being ok if I'm using it mostly as a more-easily understood metaphor for something real (obviously not the hungry toothbrush part, but I hope my gist is clear), and it's very much with a playful tenor.

Thanks for the conversation! It's one of those books I really wanted to book-club with someone but of course I never put in the effort to set up anything like that. This is a fun little snippet of that experience.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T14:44:54+00:00

Purely anecdotal, but my kid got a lot of bottles of pumped milk and it was awesome to discover that they were fine with drinking the milk cold from the fridge. Unfortunately, I figured out a month or two later that the fat in the milk was separating out and congealing, so kiddo was missing out on a lot of the important fats and getting some digestive upset from that. No apparent long-term issues now at 3, and obviously this doesn't apply to formula which will be homogenized/stabilized. So I don't believe that the temperature itself would cause any issues, but for folks who feed any pumped breastmilk it might be important to warm it and make sure those fats get to your kiddo.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T14:35:09+00:00

But how do you know there isn't a micro black hole orbiting inside the earth and gradually consuming the ground beneath us?

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T14:32:51+00:00

Fwiw, I spent a while thanking the smoke detector for keeping us safe and asking my kid to do so, too, every night at bedtime. That seemed to help. It also helped to make sure they knew what to do when they heard the alarm.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T13:42:05+00:00

By baby shaming, are you talking about her descriptions of her struggles with her own daughter? I agree that I found some of that difficult to read, though ultimately I read it less as baby-shaming and more as an indictment of her own errors as a parent and the problems with the child-rearing approaches she'd been acculturated to. I can see how it could also come across as baby-shaming though.

That's a valid criticism that she should have acknowledged the western gentle parenting pioneers & provided more references to them. Tbh, I don't have much familiarity with the existing gentle parenting resources and she could have been a nice gateway to that. I do think a strength of her work is showing vignettes of societies where that is (apparently) the norm rather than still being something of an aberration, as I think is the case in much of the US at least.

Thanks for the recommendation about Alfie Kohn!

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T05:04:11+00:00

This is genius

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T04:43:38+00:00

My daycare is great. The kids play outside for at least a couple hours in all but the worst weather. The school serves foods like chilli, tomato soup, etc. The kids get to paint, play with stamps, and so on. No way am I gonna throw out/donate clothes just because they have stains from tomato-based foods, or some "washable" paint that isn't quite cutting it, or ground-in grass stains. As a single, working parent, no way am I gonna spend a bunch of time hand-scrubbing clothes. If the stain doesn't come out in a simple run through the washing machine, so what? I think of it a little like what the pediatrician told me at our 1yr visit: they worry about the kids who don't have bruises and scuffs, because that means the kid is parked in front of a screen all day instead of being active and learning to use their body. I want my kid to come home from daycare covered in mud, with paint on their clothes and the food stains that show they've been practicing feeding themselves. I want them to start the day in clean clothes, but to fret about starting that kind of day in unstained clothes just seems silly to me.

And maybe I'm just the low bar that makes all the other parents look good. I'm ok with that, too.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T03:43:26+00:00

I also like to think of it as having my kid on belay. Just like it's safer for a rock climber to learn how to navigate a rock face with a trusted buddy belaying them, there are plenty of situations where it's safer for a toddler to learn to navigate the risky world with a trusted grown-up belaying them.

Double_Dragonfly9528 · 2022-06-06T03:39:37+00:00

I love your suggestion about paying restaurant bills & getting the takeout boxes up front. We haven't done indoor dining since the pandemic started. With the possibility of a vaccine on the horizon (again), I've been thinking about how to venture back into that world now that I'll be wrangling a toddler. Filing this one away for then!

Double_Dragonfly9528

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