Your most batshit parenting moments?

[Hassled]

For some reason today I remembered the MNer years ago who confessed to squirting no-tears shampoo directly into her eye to make sure it really was no-tears before using it on her baby.

I think my equivalent is probably banning DH ( who seriously loves The Cure) from ever playing Boys Don't Cry in case the DSs grew up thinking boys don't cry. The ban was in place for a solid 15 years.

Anyone else looking back and wincing at themselves?

[LauraPalmersBodybag]

My pfb was born via c-section and her ears were a bit blocked up with mucus when they did the newborn hearing test. Was reassured by all that this was normal for babies not pushed through the birth canal, no one was concerned!

We brought her home from the hospital, went out for coffee a few days later and I watched in horror as she slept through the cafes fire alarm sporadically going off.

So I did what any sane parent would do...waited until she was fast asleep and did a huge CLAP directly over her. Was relieved when she startled and cried!

[slipperywhensparticus]

I used to poke my daughters eyes when she was sleeping because she slept with her eyes open and I thought it would damage her eyes

[RoxytheRexy]

We slept with a lamp on a night for about 3 months so I could see the baby at all times. Not a night light, an actual lamp. My DD is 4 now and really hates the dark. I think it’s probably this.

My DS was in darkness to start with,

[Gingerninja01]

Going to make me sound mental but just remembered arranging to meet a fellow new mum who I’d met at a baby group at a cafe in a park. Ahead of meeting, I started having
a panic that I didn’t know anything about this woman and she could be part of a human trafficking gang who were ready to attack and steal DD. I insisted on giving OH her name, phone number and screen shotted her WhatsApp profile picture in case he needed to alert the authorities of anything.
In the same vein, DD has quite an unusual name and if we were ever stopped by a stranger commenting on how cute she was etc at the shops, if they asked her name I would give tell them it was “Olivia” as I thought we would be harder to track down with such a common name as an alias, should they also be part of some sort of baby stealing gang.
As you may have guessed, I was later diagnosed with severe PND.

[Sunnysidegold]

@Hoppinggreen so glad you posted, I've remembered your layering story from years ago! I always thought it was a great example of how much you loved your child, that you'd give up your coat! It is the sweetest story! How old is DC now?

I found a diary I used to use when sending Ds to mum and mil for childcare. I used to properly rage if someone forgot to write something down, even though I was really scarry and never wrote anything down. Held everyone else to very high standards.

[LisaSimpsonsbff]

Called 111 and was sent to A&E because I'd bumped 5 week old DS's head off a cupboard door while he was in the sling. I was crying so hard I could barely tell the 111 operator what was wrong, I think she was imagining a horrific accident. The doctor at A&E was kind and sympathetic but did lose their patience with me slightly when I revealed that DS had actually been asleep throughout the incident: 'What we'd generally say,' he said, struggling to keep a warm tone, 'is that if a child gets the sort of head injury we'd need to see at A&E, then it would probably wake them up'

[Hassled]

These are all truly batshit but also really lovely - yes, we were all barking mad at one point but it came from such a good place and our motives were so spot on - that instinct to protect is so strong. Parenting does weird things to a person.

[DartmoorDoughnut]

I remember with DS1, it was either our first or second day home and he was too hot so I phoned the hospital in an utter panic and they suggested that I took a layer off him and retook his temperature in 5/10minutes they were so lovely to me but I felt like an utter muppet!

[Restlessinthenorth]

We lived in very central London when my DD arrived, in a very hot summer. The room thermometer was off the scale and I was really quite certain she would combust in the night. My poor husband was forced to walk around the parliament area with me and DD in the pram one night until 1am when the thermometer had dropped down into the "Amber" zone again. The next morning at 6am I back a bag, headed straight to kings cross and got the train to my parents in Leeds because the 3 degrees drop in temperature was the only thing that would keep DD safe 😄

Absolutely unhinged

[firstimemamma]

This doesn't really count because we never actually went ahead with it but when we were deciding on which baby monitor to buy, my fiancé really wanted to buy a posh one that had 2 cameras "so you could see the baby from more than 1 different angle at any given time". I stopped him and we got one with one camera!!

When ds was a few months old I had a timetable for his routine up in the kitchen. 'No nappy time' was a scheduled activity, set days and all...

[firstimemamma]

@JenniferM1989

"Using the thermometer to check the bath temperature and needlessly adding hot and cold water for ages to get it to the very exact temperature, not even 0.1 of a degree out because he would burn or freeze if I didn't do it correctly in my mind"

Daddy still does this one in our house and ds is 16 months!

Your car seat one cracked me up!

[CigarsofthePharoahs]

My mum offered to look after ds1 when I returned to work. She asked me to write down his routine. I gave her a multicoloured spreadsheet to follow. Which, bless her, she did!
DH was very fussy about food. Leftovers from yesterday that had been refrigerated straight away? Not "safe for bubs". Meanwhile ds has crawled to the cat bowl and eaten a kibble.
I was much more paranoid about ds2. He was a month early and we both had nasty infections. I was terrified of anyone getting near him. Didn't help he didn't sleep and couldn't be put down. I was on my knees with exhaustion but didn't feel able to ask for help.
I was obsessed with bathing him and using lavender baby massage oil. It has to be done in a very exact way starting with his feet. I bought the sucky tube thing from a chemist as ds1 gave him a cold. It was utterly gross and probably didn't help at all.
Nowadays - he's five and I struggle to remember how often he has a bath. Probably not often enough. Colds? There are the tissues.

[SimonJT]

My son is adopted, he was just shy of two when he moved in.

All young children benefit from skin to skin contact to form good bonds, feel safe etc, not just new born babies.

For about 3/4 weeks I wouldn’t let anyone touch him unless it was directly on his clothes. One friend still takes the piss out of this, he (rightfully ignored me) and if we were swimming etc he would hug, carry him the pool etc so ignoring my clothing only rule. I still sometimes try to defend my batty rule as my son had lots of skin to skin with him and their bond is as secure/strong as my bond with my son.

[Greeper]

OMG, I think I probably did most of these.
Also rinsed all the pans and utensils I used to make the first batches of initial organic food mush in boiling water to "sterilise", despite the fact we have a dishwasher. And one inexplicable and shameful sunny afternoon, decided it was better to let PFB scream with thirst for 20 mins than give water from a plastic bottle that might have pthalates or microplastic contamination.

[Greeper]

These are lovely, but re-reading the all, I do feel slightly sorry for those of us in the new generation of parenting. As slightly more serious perspective (sorry), do these sorts of behaviours suggest that we as a society have lost our minds about what should actually be a very natural and normal transition with lots of family and community support. Various well recognised factor have disrupted all these "natural" support systems and we are now very isolated, and we have over complicated it to the point where the anxiety is ridiculous and the pressure to do the "right" thing is insane. I wonder if people were fretting about these PFB sorts of things or anything equivalent in 1819 or 1919?

[moobar]

Just catching up this morning and some of these have me in tears. The love is something else.

I have health anxiety and PNA since Dd was born. I still freak at temperatures water and her. I tend to be seen scanning her head a couple of times a day and her bath is exact. I have. Groegg in most rooms.

I am getting better but it sort of offers me some reassurance to have control of those external things when I can.

I also wrote a feed and sleep diary till she was about ten months old.

[firstimemamma]

I've just thought of 2 more!

PFB was exclusively breastfed and for the first 6 weeks of his life I meticulously logged every single detail of his feeding, right down to the minute, on my phone. For example: "right side 3:09am-3:17am."Every. Single. Feed.

We'd also read somewhere that it helps with newborns digestion if they are held upright / not laid down for 15 mins after a feed. So every single time we'd sit and hold newborn PFB for exactly 15 mins after a feed. We used the stop watch on my phone. Even when it got to 13 mins we'd sit there some more until it got to 15 exactly.

Cringing writing these! Will never do any of this stuff with future children!

[LisaSimpsonsbff]

I wonder if people were fretting about these PFB sorts of things or anything equivalent in 1819 or 1919?

I think people absolutely worried about their newborns to this extent in the past, it was just that it was a much more 'justified' worry as the chances of losing them were so much higher. I wonder if part of the issue here is that we have such a strong natural drive to protect a small baby but we're in such a relatively safe world now that it's hard to know where to 'put' that and so the anxiety gets attached to objectively silly things.

There are some theories that that's one reason why anxiety is so high in modern life - it's not that we have too much stress it's that we're built to deal with struggling to survive and freed of that worry we attach it all onto other things and so feel overwhelmed by things that aren't objectively very important.

[Hoppinggreen]

sunnyside Dd is 15 next month!!
I’ve also got an almost 11 year old, who managed to escape the batshittery!

[Thebestdays]

I love this thread: It makes me feel
more human and happy that I am not the only mum who has irrational thoughts about wobbly pathways but it also demonstrates clearly how much love we have for our children.

I also remember taking the same child as "wobbly path-gate" to A&E when his umbilical cord fell off and when I came home with "medical talc" (that you can buy off the shelf from Tesco's) I looked deep into the eyes of my MIL with a hard stare and said "See I told you it was an emergency" ...

Have a great weekend all!!

[MartyrGuacamole]

I don't think I was too bad with my first, I'm generally quite laid back and had great support from dh and my mum. Ds, however, was a nightmare as he had sleep apnoea and so used to stop breathing at night, several times a night and every night. Incredibly stressful and took until he was a year old to convince the doctors (they just kept repeating 'babies don't get sleep apnoea' 😡 The extreme sleep deprivation caused issues. At one point I ended up taking him for a drive at 4am because it was the only thing that stopped him crying. I ended up sobbing on the forecourt at the petrol station while he screamed in the car 😵. A very kind policeman stopped to talk to me and bought me a coffee.

I used to walk miles as he would only sleep in the sling and if we were moving. I would drop dd at preschool and then walk for 3 hours covering about 8 miles every morning because 'sleep breeds sleep' and how would he ever learn to sleep if he was so tired? I was constantly exhausted 😂

[Mercedes519]

I think once you know that these things are a potential danger you can’t ignore them when you are responsible for another human being. There is so much , a lot of it ‘official’ that is really hard to get perspective. Most of these are valid fears but just done really really thoroughly!

However, proper batshit is rememberBig when DS was about 4 months and I read a story as he had his bedtime milk as part of his routine. I was reading The wind in the willows and skipped the scary bit in the woods because I didn’t want to give him nightmares

[ColleysMill]

Dc1 - on going back to work after mat leave with dc2 i dropped him off at breakfast club for a trial run and then drove and hid in my car down a side street to check he was ok walking to school with the club.

Dc2 - i remember being hysterical one night when he was a few weeks old as his ears were different sizes and shapes. I even text my dsis and friend photos of his ears for comparison. He actually still has 1 ear smaller than another although it really really isnt noticeable - and i have since discovered that my ears arent identical either .....

[LisaSimpsonsbff]

I do think it helps to have extra perspective, though. The most chilled out new mother in my post-natal group by a really long way was the social worker, who pointed out that she'd seen what actual neglect looks like and it isn't letting a baby cry for eight minutes while you have a shower or a cup of tea.

[Sparklingbrook]

I was very particular about the steriliser. With PFB if I dropped a teat onto the perfectly clean counter top I would have to pick it up WITH THE TONGS and put it straight back in the steriliser to be done again.

DC2, the tongs were long gone and that teat would be straight on the bottle. I think the bottles were in the dishwasher ocassionally by that point too.