September 2014 - Toddlers & Tantrums!

[lilone1234]

Babies are now toddlers at 18 months +, growing and learning new things all the time!

Oh my DD can't do any of them yet either! It's a checklist out nursery does when they start nursery. That'll be a January 2018 for September babies or Easter 2017 for August norms. Loads will change between now and then!

No, it'll be September 2017 for August borns to start preschool, not Easter.

Hi all.

Having taken baby KitKat for her first jabs today reminded me that I always meant to get DD1 to have the meningitis B vaccine, as our babies just missed out on it by a few months, and I remember us discussing this a few months ago. So I got on it and boked her in to have it done on Wednesday. I didn't realise you can get it done at Boots, and they are a lot cheaper than some other clinics. Each jab there is £110 and she needs 2 jabs, two months apart. This is a lot cheaper than £180 a jab I was quoted by another clinic! I thought I'd pass on the info as I remember others of you ladies had been thinking about getting it done. Not looking forward to it though. At least baby KitKat today forgot about it after 2 minutes, whereas I suspect toddler DD isn't going to forget that quickly. I think I'll take chocolate to distract her with afterwards.

How the do you get a 2 year old who refuses to go to bed, to go to bed? Seems terrified of his own bedroom, and now even our room. Sat on the couch, falls asleep, pick him up to go to bed and he wakes up without fail. I need sleep!

Oh Cumbria, how exhausting - I wish I had an answer :( I will write my experience

Why is he terrified ? I feel like this is one that need gradual work, creating a positive experience of sleeping, with perhaps a musical cot mobile, a low sleeping light, some story telling or singing, some hand holding, etc ? I know you want this to end now though ...

We do all those things and that etc for us still is a dummy, he still looks forward to have his dummy in bed, he can only have it in bed
Even though we do things to make going to bed like a little nice experience recently he prefers to be awake and refuses to get ready for bed, but he also get it that he has no other choice , he knows we will put him in bed anyhow, so by the time he is brushing his teeth he knows the battle is lost and takes it easy afterwards
But we still spend lots of time with him before bed, far too much for a tired parent after work, I think he is not ready for us to cut that time though
One of us stays with him next to his bed until he is asleep, most nights he also asks to hold hands, many nights he has his own little individual request for a story or a song , he tells us specifically what he wants ; he still has his little cot mobile which we take with us to any trip, and this cot mobile has a very low light too ; the music of the cot mobile means it is sleepy time now

Next thing I need to do is to add gro clock because some nights he wakes in the middle of the night and has to b told it is middle of the night and he has to go back to sleep and he is not Very pleased about that then

Thanks for the advice nazly. He's always been a great sleeper (with the odd blip), but since the weekend it's been bad. I think he had a nightmare/night terror Sat night, he woke up screaming and crying (I honestly thought he'd from out of bed our something, the scream was very piercing) and he wouldn't go in his room Sunday night. The last two nights he's gone down at 7.30 ok-ish, but woke in the early hours screaming again and won't go back in his room.
Will try to get him in his room playing/reading before bed. We do have a low night light, but that didn't work last night.
I will keep persevering. To be fair its only been 4 nights, I'm just so unused to it

Cumbrian, that sounds really difficult. It sounds like night terrors to me, so it might be worth looking into advice on that? How is he verbally? Are you able to ask him about his dreams? DD has awful nightmares, but over the past couple of weeks she has been able to tell me what is scaring her, and that makes it far easier to reassure and calm her. The other night it was a crocodile chasing her!!!

KitKat, DD has bad both the MenB jabs. It was done at our local chemist, and I think it was £110 per jab too. Some places charged a fortune when it was in short supply.

Oh bless her Team. Unfortunately verbally he isn't great. He tried to speak but I don't always understand him, so he can't tell me about the dreams. He points and babbles and I thought I made out Saur (dinosaur) last night but he is so upset he can't get it out. And in the morning he is fine, so I am a bit wary of asking him and bringing it all back. This morning he was laughing and running around, as if nothing happened last night.

If it's a really recent and sudden change CumbrianExile, could he just be shut off colour?

I've periodically had spells of sometimes week, sometimes several weeks, where I'm up loads with one of the children. We just muddle through best we can (blow up bed in child's room, cosleeping in our room or travel cot in our room). It always goes back to normal after a little while of extra reassurance. Even my 12yo comes into our bed every now and again - so will be a long time before these poor sleeping 'blips' end.

Nazly - I use the dummy in exactly the same way. Free use of dummy for first 6 months reducing to 12m when it's sleep time only. Now "shall we go find your dummy?" gets DD excitedly running upstairs to go to sleep.

It's my constant battle on the Sleep Board to try and make new mums understand the huge value in a dummy for sleep comfort. It's one of those things new mums (me included) nose scrunch at the idea of.

"could he just be shut a bit off colour?"

(Autocorrect doing odd things)

E is going through a bit of a funny faze with sleeping at the moment but he has been unwell with a high temp so I am hoping once he is better it will be better.

E had his men b done last year at boots, I agree £110 is a much better price :) E isn't a big talker so he only guilt trips me with tears no words!

Ha Cookie, that sounds like A, he has mastered the puppy dog eyes too!

Could be off colour, he has been grabbing at his teeth a lot, and his ears, but his temp is fine. I will keep my eye on him, and try a few of the things suggested above.

I wish I had done the same as you with the dummy Fate and Nazly - A has his all the time and I struggle to get it off him.

Thanks for all the advice ladies - I love that we have kept this thread going . Can't believe its been 3 years!

We had a week of screaming at bedtime etc and we thought maybe he was scared of the dark. He was unhappy in the car when we picked him too (only after work when it was dark) so we gave him a wind up torch and glow sticks to play with, supervised of course so only in the car and it seemed to pass. We had the gro clock and fairy lights in hia room so it wasn't as if we were leaving him in darkness. Maybe it's just a phase?

Fate I was one of those first time mums for whom dummy was a no no; I was so surprised when the doctor who was monitoring him in special care after his birth told me what good things dummies were!! She told me babies are different with dummy and yours take extra comfort from it, etc
I didn't listen and just dismissed it , even thought it was interfering !!

I only started giving him dummy after he was 2 months out of absolute desperation because of severe colic ; by the time I would do anything to calm him down a tiny bit and make him feel better, anything in the whole world !! I can't remember how I handled the timing but it was never completely free for mine even in the first six months ; he only had it if he was upset; he would normally sleep while breast feeding those early days ... also, when I finally stopped breast feeding at the age of 2 years 2 months () having the dummy made it so easier

If I ever have another child I won't hesitate a second ! I may even take one to hospital !!!!!!

Cumbrian, we are very relax about giving ours extra comfort when he needs it , he can ask to come to our bed if he is upset and we are OK with it ; he normally only does that early mornings some days ; randomly he may ask to come to us in the middle of the night , maybe once or twice a month ; it ruins our sleep but we'll allow it ... perhaps getting some comfort in the middle of night will reassure him nothing bad could happen ... ?

Did everyone here take their stairgates down ages ago?

DD has been quite safe going up and down for ages now. I widened her horizons at home a good 6 months ago and she could play upstairs without me whenever she asked to.

But because we also have a puppy, I needed to keep the stair gate to stop the dog chewing everything upstairs.

Well dog is 12 months now and much calmer, so I have now decided to trust both the dog and the toddler free roam to go upstairs and removed the stair gate perminantly after Christmas.

It's such a huge freedom, I forget. Things like carrying washing upstairs and all the stuff you nearly think about are so much more hassle when there's a stairgate up.

I am so pleased to have taken it down!

We took down our downstairs ones relatively recently. The one at the top of the stairs is still there though as DD still isn't very reliable going downstairs. It isn't an automatic close one though, so we only shut it when we are upstairs and she is wandering around.

DD does have a dummy for sleeping only. She was quite addicted to it, but in the Spring we decided to stop it for anything other than sleeping. Then in September, for various reasons she ended back up on it, but before Christmas we went back to bed time only. Both times we just went cold turkey. It was about three days of asking and crying, but then she seemed to get the message!

I've been wondering about the stair gate. We have one at the top of the stairs but when he comes out of a cot I was thinking of switching it onto his door instead.

We still have our stair gates up. To be fair our steps are particularly steep although DD does walk up / down them with supervision. We also have one blocking off the kitchen, partly to keep DD safe whilst I'm cooking, and partly because she's such a pain in there with opening cupboards and pulling everything out, pushing all the buttons on the appliances etc! Given that I expect DD2 will be crawling in a few months, I can't imagine we will be rid of them for a while.

I've been thinking recently that one of the big differences between having a first baby and a second is that with DD1 I remember excitedly buying loads of baby things in Mothercare etc, whereas now I am desperate to get rid of this baby stuff and get some space back once DD2 no longer needs this stuff anymore! I've actually started the process of ebay-ing my maternity clothes. I think this is also part of a bit of a psychological process. I'm certain now that I don't want another baby, and I'm happy just with two. Partly I feel quite sad about this, but an even bigger part of me is looking forward to being free of the baby days. I find the baby stage hard. Give me a toddler any day!

We still have gates up but with DC2 on the way there is no point taking them down really! DD is quite good on stairs but I don't want her doing them without supervision yet and she does manage to sneak off. We also have gates up downstairs to keep her in the front room. She can get in the kitchen too now since she can open the door but we keep her out the dining room and away from the front door which she can also now open! I just need somewhere in the house that doesn't get continuously wrecked!!

On a side point, has anyone got any snow yet, and what are your LOs making of it? I don't think DD1 has ever really seen proper snow. We had some when she was a tiny baby but obviously she was too young to notice it, and didn't really have any last year (we're in the South and don't get that much). But it's looking likely that we may get some tonight / tomorrow so I'm curious to see what she makes of it!

At the moment it is just pissing it down with rain here! It is supposed to snow later, but with this much rain, I'm not sure it will settle. If it does, it will be an ice rink!!!

It has rained all day here today but it is much much colder this afternoon. I don't know if we will get a sprinkle but I'm dying for DS to see it. He has a book with a snow plough in and always says 'car stuck in the snow' when we get to that page!

So ladies, we have visited two nurseries near our new house and I feel I know the value of our nursery twice now !! I didn't like either of them. His current nursery in comparison is far better.

What I want is this:
-Home like feel to the nursery
-Carers who with the first look I feel like they are kind, they like their job and they actually care

• healthy freshly cooked meals
• reasonable facilities, I.e rooms and outdoor space, etc

We have all these now and more

What I got in the first nursery we visited :
Poor facility, rooms were all in conservatory; small not so nice garden ; food prepared off site, although prepared fresh ; the staff were good, but not as engaged as our current nursery

Second nursery: new facilities so room sizes were perfect but terrible smell of paint after one year and half of opening (this is bad for health, I know cause that's my area of work); small garden, food from catering although healthy and fresh, but worst part is that the manager and staff were all about discipline and learning and focusing

We still have stairgates, but like KitKat we have very steep stairs, and while A can manage them I don't like him doing it unsupervised. He is also in a cot bed with no sides now, and although I said at the weekend he didn't get out of bed, he has started getting out and running to the door!

We did manage to get him off the dummy through the day a while ago, then he was ill and got it back and we haven't tried since. I think once we get over the sleep issue we will move on to that. One thing at a time

Nazly I hope you manage to find a nursery soon. its hard finding the right one. I struggled the first time, so when you have somewhere you like it must be even harder.