The worst teething case now thus far

Kaia has not been happy. She has some side front teeth coming out, and surprise surprise: the pain seems to be the worst, even worse than her molars. With her molars, I was actually quite surprised that four popped out in her mouth with very little fussing or noticeable pain from her. With these two side front teeth, she’s so upset that she’s barely eaten anything over the last day, even her usual favorites. Even bread hurts her; she took a few bites and screamed.

Chris didn’t think it would be fun or productive to go out and about with her today, so we decided to stay home and let her rest. We walked around the building and in the common areas. I made some apple sauce, banana, and chia seed (ABC) cookies for her, which she ate four of in one go, so at least that was a hit. But we ended up not really leaving the building at all today, which is strange for us on a Saturday. Hopefully, she will be better tomorrow to go out.

Baby comes home in a diaper two sizes too small

Earlier this week when we brought Kaia home from daycare, she was wearing a diaper we did not recognize — with an Elmo design on it. I didn’t think much of it; I figured the teachers got the diapers mixed up once, and I let it go. But then today, she came home with a Target brand diaper (which we buy), but it was a size 3; that’s two sizes smaller than the diaper she typically wears. Plus, it was super tight on her. After changing, I realized she had a bit of a rash on her butt, and I started applying some diaper rash cream. All rashes are inevitably going to be uncomfortable, but a diaper rash is worse because given the fact that this area is always covered with a diaper other than during diaper changes and baths, it has no time or “air” to breathe and be free, which makes it even more susceptible to getting worse over time.

I was willing to let it go with the first diaper, but with the second diaper, I was definitely annoyed… not just because it was someone else’s diaper, but because the diaper was just too small. And who knows – maybe that small diaper is what ultimately caused Kaia’s rash? It would be hard to prove, but she has never before had any type of diaper rash, not even a small one. Also, this would mean that Kaia’s diapers are likely being used on someone else! So I sent a note to the teachers to address the problem. Whatever their response will be, I know for sure it will not just simply be a scowl or death stare that assumes zero accountability the way I used to get for even the most benign feedback from our ex-nanny.

Eating dinner out: how it’s different with a baby/toddler

My friend suggested going out to eat next Friday night, but I told her that I wouldn’t be able to go out (or, at least, not that far) because Chris already had tentative plans to go out to eat with his friends, and so I’d need to be with Pookster. She responded that she could still come over, and suggested we could still eat out and just take Kaia with us.

While that sounds like an easy solution… it’s not as easy as a non-parent would think. Kaia really shouldn’t stay out too late given her age, and to keep her on schedule (and away from crankiness), we need to keep her bedtime at around 7-7:30. So that means we would need to eat early, closer to 5-5:30pm when she typically eats, and ease her into her sleepy time before then. A lot of people think parents are just being inflexible with schedules, but schedules are what babies and toddlers need to thrive. They need a schedule and a level of predictability in a world of chaos. It keeps them grounded, and it prevents things like tantrums, hunger, and over-tiredness, which then results in baby mood swings.

What’s likely going to happen is that we’ll probably get takeout somewhere. I’ll pick Kaia up a bit early from daycare, and we’ll eat at home and hang out until she has to go to bed. It’s much easier to hang out with friends with baby in tow during the day as opposed to dinner time for this reason. It’s a temporary adjustment given the stage of life we’re currently in now. But as with all stages, it has its time and is temporary, so I’m happy with it because I know it will pass.

Kaia’s development: connecting words to objects, and saying her own name

Out of nowhere this week, Kaia has started yelling out her own name. She will just say “Kaia! Kaia!” over and over again, and so it’s clear she’s fully recognizing that this is her name. She would always look up for the most part if I called out her proper name, Kaia, or even Pookie or Pookster. I wonder if we are confusing her by calling her so many endless nicknames…?

The other cute thing she’s doing is that she’s recognizing animals and sounds, and words to objects. In different books we read, she recognizes the dog named Pal; when I ask her what this is when pointing at the dog, she responds, “woof woof!” and when I point at the cat, she responds, “Meow!” She also knows who Arthur is (one of her favorite books), Bluey, and she even has started pointing at pictures where there’s the beach and shouting out “watty! (her word for “water”). Sometimes, she will speed ahead to her favorite parts of books. It’s been really sweet and endearing to see this level of development.

During play, she’s also started stacking multiple blocks on top of each other, and she seems to understand more nuances of other toys I’ve been picking up for her through our Buy Nothing group. It really is like what Chris said: literally since our nanny quit, her development has truly exploded. I wonder if that’s a sign of something?

Walking progress one month later

It really is amazing to watch a tiny baby develop into an opinionated, assertive little toddler. In just the last month, Kaia has started walking. While she was initially quite robotic and would leave her arms in front of her like a little robot, she’s been getting the hang of balance and has been walking more with her arms at her side now. It’s especially gotten more conspicuous that she’s more at ease walking now during this trip: wandering around the hotel grounds and pool, you can tell that she’s more confident as a tiny human walking around. She’s even proactively tried to walk up the pool stairs several times. Initially, she seemed quite resistant and refused, insisting to crawl and climb up instead. But after some initial coaxing, she finally started walking up, one step at a time, as long as I held her hand. By the end of the trip, while she still needed to hold my hand going up, she was more than willing to do it.

My sweet baby is growing into a cheeky, assertive toddler. It’s still hard to believe that just one year ago, she was just starting to roll over and had these super chubby cheeks and just a little bit of hair on top. Every day, I look at her and think, even though she can be stubborn and difficult and not listen to what I say, she’s still my little miracle baby.

Swim diapers and their purpose

When you have a baby and you’d like to get her in the pool and ocean, you likely are debating what kind of swim diaper to have for her. There are two main types of swim diapers: single use, disposable, and reusable cloth ones that you just wash after each use. Contrary to what some may assume, swim diapers do NOT soak up or hold urine; if a baby pees while in a pool, the urine basically just gets into the water. A swim diaper’s main purpose is to hold poop. But, if you do recognize that your baby has pooped while in a swim diaper in the pool, it would be best practice for you to take your baby out IMMEDIATELY and get her cleaned up and changed. No one wants to know they are swimming in a pool with baby poop somewhere. Be nice to your fellow swimmers/pool attendees.

We’ve been getting Kaia acquainted with the pool and ocean water for about the last year. She’s mainly been in our building’s pool, but we’ve also had her go to the beach with us and pools at hotels where we’ve stayed during our trips. We thought we had been clear this whole time, never experiencing her pooping in a pool before… until I got her ready for her bath tonight after some pool time at the resort pool, and when I pulled down her diaper to put her into the bath, a big ball of brown poop plopped out.

Welp, I guess our streak of no poop in the pool has officially ended!

Toddler tantrums – our new reality

The last few mornings of getting Pookster ready for school have been a little bit less than fun. She usually wakes up crying, drinks her milk, and then picks at her (first) breakfast and cries for her pacifier. She’s definitely teething, as I can see when I brush her teeth that there are even more teeth coming, but it’s been pretty miserable. She’s usually a great eater, but the last three mornings, her eating has been pretty terrible. She will eat a couple spoonfuls of Weetbix, a couple bites of greens, beets, or mushrooms, maybe 6 spoonfuls of yogurt and almond butter, and then whine and whinge to get out of her high chair. She’ll demand to walk and get out of the chair, but once out, she refuses to walk and wants to sit. Or, even worse, she will splay her entire body all over the play mat, face down, and cry.

At the end of the day (or, well, morning), I just need to get her ready to get out the door. So I try to coax her to eat between getting her snacks and lunch box packed, then clean her up, do her hair, dress her, clean up her high chair and splat mat, and do all the dishes. Once she’s finally in the stroller seat, she seems to calm down, but it’s definitely a struggle to get to that point. When is this supposed to get easier?

Buy Nothing group snags and acts of service as love

I recently have scored quite a number of useful things via my local Buy Nothing group: a “vintage” set of Pyrex glass mixing bowls; a lot of fun board books to entertain Kaia’s passion for reading; eight massive bulbs of fresh garlic. With the garlic, it was more an aside from the person I picked up about eight board books from. She kind of threw it in as an after thought, and I passively said “why not?” I mean, I could always use garlic. But when I collected it, I realized, WOW. This is a LOT. Plus, the cloves were WAY fatter than the ones I get from Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. And I don’t know how old this garlic was or if it was on the brink of going bad. So when I bought some bok choy, I thought I could make it the way the Sambal Lady makes her bok choy, which is to blanch it, season it, then sprinkle the top with homemade garlic chips. And with half of these garlic bulbs, plus another bulb of my own, I decided I’d make garlic chips. But I didn’t really want to peel and slice all 70-80 cloves of garlic by myself.

So, I decided I’d use the Mother’s Day excuse and ask Chris to do this task. It’s not a task for ME; it’s a task for the family to enable tasty meals. When he woke up this morning, I declared this to him, and he immediately groaned. Then, he saw exactly how many cloves there were on the kitchen counter, and he tried to negotiate with me and said he’d do half. I said, no, he had to do all of them. In the end, maybe he left about 15 undone, but it was still a pretty good job. He spent about an hour just peeling them, then did the slicing a few hours later. While Kaia napped in the early afternoon, I fried the garlic. Unfortunately, I probably fried them a minute too long, but it was still edible.

While many mothers out there want expensive gifts and flowers for Mother’s Day, I really do not want any *thing*, per se. I’d really just like acts of service as love. I will make sure to ask Chris to peel and slice garlic cloves for future garlic chips, especially now that I didn’t master frying them to the optimal level during my first try.

Rough mornings with daycare Pookster

This morning, Kaia barely ate any breakfast. She got mad any time I tried to take her pacifier from her. She had about three spoonfuls of yogurt, a couple bites of muffin and oatmeal strips, three bites of beet. She completely ignored her carrots and even her mushrooms. When she refused her beets and mushrooms, that is when I knew for sure that she was teething. I ended up dumping all her food she didn’t touch into a container and saved it for dinner in the fridge. When I gave her her toothbrush with a little toothpaste smeared on it, and she threw the brush onto the floor, smearing toothpaste everywhere, that’s when I knew I had to get a little aggressive with her. I changed her into her clothes for the day, then pinned her arms under my legs and brushed her teeth. She screamed and cried endlessly, but I really was not having it this morning. She already barely ate anything and kept getting mad when the pacifier got removed, and now she was refusing to brush. Sometimes, things just need to get done! So I explained to her that I didn’t want to upset her, but she had to get her teeth brushed and get to school.

This was a quick preview into my very-near-future life as a mother of a growing toddler. There will likely be many mornings far worse than this one, but at least I am tough enough to just power through it.

The pros and cons of nanny vs. daycare/school

At least a few times a month across all the mom/parent groups I am in, some flustered, frantic mom or dad will post that they are quickly approaching the end of their family leave with their company and will need to return to work soon, and they haven’t yet decided on whether they will choose to hire a nanny or put their child in daycare. And every single time a post like this comes up, the same answers in different tones and levels of exasperation or insistence will respond. Some are level headed and say there are pros and cons to both, then briefly highlight those pros and cons; others will be determined to convince you that only one path is the right path. And very, very occasionally, someone will try to shame you for even wanting to go back to work and say that “they’re only this little once,” and insist that the REAL best path is for you to simply quit your job and be a full-time, stay-at-home parent (never mind that 95% of these posts are in New York City, and specifically Manhattan, where the cost of living is extremely, extremely high, and most people with a child will need a dual income household just to pay the bills and ensure some level of savings is still happening. And to further complicate that last point: here in the U.S., employment is not just your source of income; it’s also in more cases than not your source of fully or partially subsidized healthcare, any perks you get, as well as, well, part of your identity. We do live in a country where people “live to work” as a culture.

After a week and a half of having Kaia at daycare/school, having started at about 16.5 months of age, this is generally what I’ve come up with for pros and cons:

Nanny pros:

Childcare comes to you; super convenient

Nanny acts as your backup care for nights/days out for dinner, theater, etc.

More personalized childcare (the nanny contract explicitly states that the nanny follows your instructions for everything from feeding, like baby-led weaning, to what activities the child will do, etc.). Granted, as discussed in previous posts about our ex-nanny, that was not always the case with insolent nannies, but at least “personalized care” is in THEORY what is supposed to happen.

If you work from home, you will still get to see your child come in and out throughout the day and not miss them as much

Nanny will take care of child-related tasks to relieve you from doing them, such as baby laundry, cleaning of playmat, cleaning the child’s bedroom/play areas, changing station, baby bath tub, toys, etc.

Nanny takes care of weekday baby bathing

Since your baby will be around fewer people vs. in daycare, baby is less likely to get sick as often

Nanny cons:

It’s EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE, at least in HCOL areas like New York City. Nannies will charge anywhere from $20-35/hour. The majority will expect that you pay for their monthly Metrocard, snacks, and by law, you also have to pay them for federal holidays, five days sick leave, plus at minimum 10 PTO days. They also require guaranteed hours per week since they rely on you solely for their income; this means that even if you choose not to use them for a given day or week, you will still need to pay them for the minimum number of guaranteed hours on their contract. So in other words, even when you don’t “use” their services, you still have to pay them like you are.

If you pay on the books, expect to pay a lot more than you originally imagined for things like household employer insurance, employer-side taxes. You will also have a lot more research and paperwork to do for them to have this set up and be legal. If you pay off the books… well, good luck to you for not getting caught. Plus, it will be massive sums of cash out of an ATM every single week for you — eeek.

Nannies are like the rest of us: they have opinions and preferences for the way things should be done, and oftentimes, this is not going to jive with what you want. Because of this, there can be a LOT of emotional labor done on the family’s part to ensure that the nanny is actually following the way YOU want to raise your child and teach them.. and handling your belongings as you want them to be handled. It can be extremely taxing and emotionally exhausting.

Nannies, for the most part, are not actual “educators”: the majority do not have an early childhood education background, and so baby may not do all the activities that she could do if she were in a daycare that does do them. Nannies may not always do things to help your child develop every step of the way. Because of this, some nannies are better suited for young infants, vs. others that are suited for older toddlers. Not all nannies can truly “grow” with a family.

You are relying on a single person to care for your child. If nanny gets sick and takes a sick day, you have no plan B or substitute to rely on. If she quits with zero notice (that sounds familiar), it’s on you to figure out backup childcare and the move-forward plan. You are also relying on the idea that they will be honest and report back what really happened. Even if you have cameras all over your house, you still can’t see what they are doing when they take your child out of your house, so you have to trust what they say is true.

You’ll always have a stranger in your home. While you may get used to having them around and they may become like family… guess what? They aren’t family. They are your employee. You have to be comfortable with this. That means that they may snoop, eat the snacks you reserved for yourself, etc., and you just have to suck it up.

Daycare pros:

Exposure to lots of other children of a similar age, and adults who are trained in all ways possible (early childhood education, CPR, etc.). Child is likely to be more socialized this way. They can also be “peer pressured” into things they may not have naturally done on their own, like building blocks, walking, etc., earlier, simply because they see other kids doing this.

Your baby will have a guaranteed network of “friends,” and you could build a network of parent friends, as well.

Set curriculum for learning: you never have to worry about your child getting bored because most daycares will have a set curriculum that is age appropriate for learning new skills and experiences. Every day will be guaranteed exposure to a variety of things without you constantly checking in and being prescriptive, like music, reading/books, learning new sounds, gestures, yoga, exercise, arts and crafts, science, etc.

Reliability/predictability: If your teacher gets sick, a substitute teacher will take her place. If that substitute gets sick, another teacher will come in and take their place. There are many backups here, and your child will never not have teachers there!

Accountability: If a teacher does something that disappoints you or your child, you can speak up to them and their managers/administrators, and these challenges will get addressed.

In most cases, daycare will be CHEAPER than having a nanny, if not all cases. It’s still expensive in our area, but it’s still cheaper than having our ex nanny.

Daycare cons:

THE SICKNESSES. Your baby will get sick. It’s inevitable. You just have to suck it up and look at the bright side: baby’s immune system is getting stronger with each illness!

Set times/hours mean less flexibility for your own schedule

You will have to do drop-offs/pick-ups

If doing things unconventionally, like baby led weaning, many daycares will not do this for liability reasons. Daycares are also notorious for not handling breast milk in the way it would be handled at home.

All items that go into daycare need to be labeled with your child’s name – like literally, every. Single. One. Emotional labor, much?

Daycare will not do any of your child-related chores, so you will need to do laundry, all of baby’s cleaning, baths, etc.

I think this adequately sums up how I feel? In retrospect, I think we could have put Kaia in daycare at 13-14 months to help with her growth and development. I was never that keen on her being in daycare and having the daycare teachers mess with my breast milk, nor did I want them shoving purees down her throat.