The Switch At Three

You know, some periods of your life move slowly and others move very quickly. The last several months have been both very slow and very fast. On the one hand, my parental leave time felt like it went on for a long time, due to how much work I was doing with the kids during it. On the other hand, it felt like both kids were changing in so many ways that I could hardly keep up. If there's one word to sum up the feeling overall, it's... tired. [Note: I started writing this in January, so some of this is stale, but boy, I really need to just get this post wrapped up.]

At this point, baby R is over 6 months old and little G is over 3 years old. Both of these pieces of information are important context for what will follow, because, totally unsurprisingly, kids' abilities and behaviors are governed in a large way by their age. Let's give the little one priority today, shall we?

That little guy is doing great! He is a relatively simple baby on most days. The sleep scheduling has been going awesome. At the time of the last post, we were still doing one middle-of-the-night feeding at 2:30 AM and rejoicing at getting a 3-hour block of consecutive sleep. Between then and now his night-time feedings have wonderfully eroded to the point that he now gets about 10 hours of sleep a night, which is what I wish I could be getting.

I try not to be too obnoxious about it around my friends, but sleep training has worked so well for both our kids that it's hard for me to shut up sometimes.

On the topic of sleep, at the time I wrote the last post we were still swaddling him, but over time found that he was incredibly willful about working his arms out of the swaddler. Both mommy and I eventually just gave up and started wrapping the swaddler around him more like a blanket or just an extra layer. Eventually that just gave way to sleep sacks. He just seemed ready for it, you know? Now he usually sleeps on his side, which is weird because babies typically learn how to roll from tummy to back first.

When he's awake, little baby R has gotten super cute. He was a fairly cute newborn, but all newborns are a bit weird looking and don't open their eyes enough. At a few weeks old he started following us around more with his eyes. A few more weeks and he started smiling at us, and I think that's the point where the good stuff really starts. He smiles so frequently and so easily. All you have to do is smile at him and he readily reciprocates. Now he laughs if you laugh with him, which is just super infectious.

After that he started getting chattier, like he was trying to talk with us. He started doing this hilarious bellowing thing where he just makes "ohhhhh OHHHH aahhhhh oaahhhh" sounds for several minutes on end. Eventually he started throwing some consonants in there. Seems like he's having a good time.

Bottle-feeding a breastfed baby

As I mentioned last time, little R was successfully breastfeeding, and that's still going great. One extra thing we have to do is make sure he'll also feed from a bottle, just in case someone has to feed him when mommy's not available.

For a while it was different enough from how he usually eats that we had to practice it. Eventually he would take a bottle... grudgingly, and by now he accepts it easily. It was a journey to get here, though. He did not prefer it and made it known with "YUCK" faces and gagging on the milk, even though it's the same milk he normally gets, dude, just a different delivery mechanism.

With a bunch of practice, he and I came up with routine to get him to eat. First thing after waking him up is I would take off his clothes except diaper, because he was about to dribble milk all over them anyway. I offer the bottle. He rejects it and either gets mad or just starts smiling and chatting. I say fine, have it your way, and set him down until he's ready. Not ideal, but I can't force him to eat. Eventually he gets fussy, and this is when I strike! I pop that bottle in and he slips into this weird trance where he's fully engaged with eating. It's not unlike how he seems when he's breastfeeding, so that's good. Now that he's more used to it he doesn't make as much of a mess, so I no longer strip him down, and he usually accepts the bottle right away.

While he eats, I have to micromanage him like I'm playing a fiddly video game. I carefully watch how many sucks on the bottle he takes before swallowing (I can hear it when he swallows). Two or three sucks? No problem. Five or six? Uh oh, he can't swallow all of that in one mouthful! I pull out the bottle for a second and wait until he swallows again. If I don't? He'll just keep sucking and every subsequent swallow will displace some quantity of milk out of his already-full mouth. Apparently he just goes on autopilot, and, since he obviously doesn't care about how much milk he's wasting or how sticky he's making himself, he just goes for it.

Like I said, it took a lot of practice. Now I can often feed him a full feeding with, say, 1% wastage, which is pretty good. It started off taking 1.5x to 2x as long to feed him a bottle as a breastfeeding session, but he's gotten much faster over time. He's also just started on solids (more on that in a different post), so his bottle feeding will continue to be infrequent.

So I griped a bit about bottle feeding, but really, that tiny fellow is at an easy stage of his life. Easy in that it's a fair amount of work, but it's straightforward work. His needs are very simple: I don't want to be too hot or cold. I don't want to be hungry. I don't want to stew in my gross diaper filth. I don't want to be kept up when I'm sleepy. I don't want to be overstimulated. I want to see people and see what they're doing and talk at them and have them smile at me. My imminent teeth bother me, so I want to chew on stuff. OK? Good, I'm happy. Our eldest, on the other hand... has many complicated needs, and complicated things need more words to describe them--that's what this post is mostly about.

Now I'm three

Let's do a little compare and contrast. My wonderful eldest son, little G, went through an astounding and sudden transformation (like in the span of about a week) at around two and three quarters years old: he burst forth with, let's say "independence". Although most of his personality traits stayed the same, we had to bid farewell to the compliant and pliable two-year-old we knew and welcome the highly emotional and stubborn three year old he became.

At ages one and two, a lot of his life was spent pushing boundaries, exploring how far he could go before we stopped him. Finding out when he could get away with bringing a snack out of the room, or how messy he could get during meals. He still does some of that, but nowadays, it feels less like he's experimenting with us and more that he just sees something he wants to do and just does it. He wants to be his own boss and he wants to do his own thing, and argh, mommy and daddy are in the way again!

Suddenly, getting him to do almost anything turned into an ordeal, with him yelling in our face and flopping his body around like it was made of jelly. Getting out of bed, going to the car, getting dressed, diaper changes, mealtime, you name it. We were thoroughly caught off guard by the rapid transformation.

So we did what we always do at times like this: read a book. No, not that book. A topically relevant book. Specifically, How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen. It's not an understatement to say this book saved us. Ever since I became a parent I've found that the right way of taking care of (or "handling", if you want) your child is understanding what they're thinking and going through. The book had a lot of that child's perpective on things framed in terms of many specific examples that addressed all of the areas I mentioned before and more.

We took a lot of the book's advice, tweaked it for what works well for us, and it made a lot of things a lot easier. Not easy, of course, but acceptable. Here are a few specific things we did.

I really believe that the words we use to talk to people make a big difference. It's never "just words", and kids are people, so we adjusted the way we talk to him. The book told us about the way kids can get defensive when we tell them to do something. It had the suggestion to talk in a more impersonal way, and we do this sometimes. Instead of "you dropped your snack on the floor, so now you can't eat it," we might say, "I can't let my kids eat dirty food that fell on the floor." Or instead of "take off your shoes before you come in", we might say, "shoes have to stay in the front hall by the door."

The other day we were playing a computer game together, and I said it's time to go. Boy, he didn't like that at all. He wanted to keep playing! Using a suggestion from the book, I got out a post-it and, with him watching, drew a picture of the main character from the game for him to carry around. He took it happily, and the sharp disappointment turned into something he could manage internally.

Another of the book's suggestions really rankled me at first, but has worked so shockingly well that I have fully accepted it: playfully imbuing any object, no matter what, with a voice. Our house is now fully populated with a million little things that have their own personality and talk to G: Mr. Toothbrush, Mr. Potty, every item of food he eats, his stuffed animals, the blocks that are lonely and want to go home (be put away), the box that wants to swallow up the cars that came out of it (again, for putting away)... the list goes on. For some ridiculous reason, he will accept commands from a piece of cereal on his plate sooner than from me or mommy.

Doing some of these things (especially the talking as inanimate obects) really bugged me at first and was hard for me to get past. In a way it felt like compromising on the direct, straightforward way for conveying something and instead dressing it up in a goofy way to get what I want (compliance). Eventually what I came around to is that at this age kids just aren't rational and reasonable in the way I wish. They will be eventually, but they aren't there yet, and for everyone to get what they want, I need to adjust my expectations and meet them where they are, developmentally. For this period of their life, I have resigned myself to just making sure the boundaries are enforced and have abandoned much of my own parental stubbornness.

Mealtimes and taking ownership of a task

Mealtimes started getting much harder, too. Suddenly his three-year-old obstinacy started kicking in and he rejected a lot more food. He also would make more messes, leave food half-eaten, say he wanted to eat something and then not eat it or eat just a little bit. The book had excellent advice about how to help at mealtime, and it's advice that carries over to other activities. It has to do with getting the kid more involved and taking more ownership of the task.

Instead of fighting G on every piece of food and how he should eat it, the book suggested giving a number of items that I approve of and letting the kid pick what they want to eat. I think they called it the "empty plate" method. So now I set out a "spread" of food, usually 4 items, and they are all items that I would be okay with him eating in any order. I include a main thing--usually a sandwich, some "kids' food", or a portion of something I myself am eating for the meal--one or more veggies or fruits, and maybe something slightly snackish, something I know is totally uncontroversial for him and he'll eat, just so he has some substance in him in case he doesn't feel like eating anything else.

He starts with an empty plate and gets to pick what he wants, often literally serving it onto his plate by himself. He can take one serving of a thing at a time and has to finish the serving before taking another serving. I am a bit squishy on that rule when it comes to food that's new or unusual and I suspect he might not like. Mealtime this way has gotten much better. He gets to own his choices and that makes him more invested and consequently compliant.

Potty training

Kids thankfully don't wear diapers forever, but the journey to get there is not always straightforward. We finally started feeling like G was ready for it when he started keeping his diapers dry for longer stretches automatically. We experimented with having him pee on the toilet and found that he had the dexterity to sit there and willingness to pee on demand.

The method we used followed the advice his cousin used a while before. It's an intensive 3-5 day method where you jump in completely and try to abandon diapers fully. We started while I was still on parental leave and on a long weekend when he didn't have preschool so we could focus on it without interruptions. It was a rough 5 days and a decently long tail of incremental improvements that have led us to being in a good position now.

The idea was to basically let your kid run around naked for several days straight, no diaper. We kept him mostly in the kitchen so accidents were easy to clean up. We fed him copious amounts of drinks to help him practice getting that feeling of needing to pee. These drinks were usually water mixed with some kind of juice--a treat, since he usually only drinks milk or water. We put on a lot of TV to help him with the boredom of being trapped in the kitchen. And we took him to pee every 10 minutes or so. That's right, I set timers for as frequently as every 10 minutes for five days straight and forced him to go try to pee. By about day 3 the timer was relaxed to about every 15 minutes. Eventually we got to every 20 minutes. He could hold his pee much longer than that, but the idea is to have a large number of successes and few failures (accidents).

Needless to say, that was a grueling exercise. We were all at our wits' end at many points during it. It probably wasn't helped by having a newborn baby in the house at this time and also by turning three years old and suddenly sprouting all kinds of new feelings of aggressive independence.

When we did have to send him back to preschool, he started going in pull-ups. We still do that, but they're often dry. At naps and other times, he wears underwear, and at nighttime he still wears a diaper. He has the capacity to hold it for hours, but we try to make him go about every 2 hours. He hasn't yet mastered telling us when he needs to pee, but sometimes he does. His diapers are usually dry after naptime, and occasionally they've even been dry overnight, which is pretty cool.

One thing that wasn't clear to me when we started is that the short-term goal here isn't to get your kid telling you when they have to go, exactly, but for them to be able to hold it for "long enough" and release on demand. How long is "long enough"? Long enough to make a car trip. Long enough to run an errand. Long enough to last through naptime. You get to pick. Something you can work with. If your kid is unconsciously peeing every ten minutes, that definitely doesn't work, but if they can hold it for half of a grocery store trip and you can take them to the bathroom there, then maybe you can work with that. As they get older they'll be fully autonomous on their own. For now they merely need to be convenient.

Pooping was a whole deal in and of itself that I didn't really expect. It seems the sensation of pooping into a toilet rather than a diaper is strange and unsettling for kids. They also have trouble grasping that something is coming out of their body. It's apparently not uncommon for kids to feel weird about it. G was good about recognizing when he needed to go but often had trouble when he got up there and sat down. We had episodes when he'd need to go, run to the bathroom and sit, then not actually poop. We'd get off the toilet a few minutes later and he'd run off to play. He'd repeat this cycle maybe ten times within an hour or so, finally managing to get it out at the end. Eventually one of the things that helped was offering a reward (a little piece of candy) after a poop. That plus practice led him to be the competent pooper he is today.

Reading update

One of the cool new capabilities G has acquired is reading numbers, or should I say, reading digits. It started with reading digital clocks. All of a sudden he really wanted to read the time a lot. So whenever he saw a digital clock we'd slowly go through the numbers and say them. Now he spots numbers all over the place and just rattles them off. He can do 0-9 accurately, and he knows how to count past ten, but is still working on making the leap that 10 is more than just "one zero".

He has also started trying to read individual letters in words. When we read bedtime stories, we move our finger under the words as we read to help him see what we're looking at. He can readily recognize his own name, but goes very slowly with most letters. He also reads some letters as numbers (like "l" is 1 and "S" is 5) because his number recognition is stronger right now. I can't wait until he starts reading. He's going to have such a great time.

So how is he taking the baby now?

In the last post people were asking how G is handling little R. It was too soon to tell then, honestly. But now he's shown himself to be a pretty sweet big brother. Of course they're going to have all kinds of complications in their relationship as they both grow, but for now it's pretty great. G likes R well enough, but is not obsessed with him. He likes to know where he is and comments on what he's doing or what sounds he's making. Sometimes I leave the little one in his room alone while he plays (and watch on the monitor). G will talk to him and show him stuff and generally likes to have him there. So far he doesn't show a lot of jealousy and usually likes to have the baby around rather than put him away. That's a good sign for now.

He also gets a little bothered when the baby is crying or upset. If R is in his crib and crying, G will ask us to go check on him and remind us that he's crying. We tell him we'll get him in a few minutes if he doesn't stop crying (same as we've done for him for his whole life). It's sweet to hear him thinking of his baby brother. Speaking of putting him to sleep, G likes to come in while I diaper and change R and get him ready for naps. He'll turn on the sound machine and mobile and turn off the lights, and do some of the same stuff we do when we tuck him, like singing a song, saying silly stuff, and saying "see you later, I love you, buh-bye". I think it's really sweet tht he's passing on some of the same things he likes us doing to him, to his little brother.

R, for his part, is obsessed with his big brother. If he's around he watches him closely to see whatever he's doing. I have a feeling he's going to worship him for a while. I'm also hoping having a big brother as an example will help him develop a bunch of skills and abilities.

Back to work

I started writing this blog like three months ago. At that point, I had been back at work since parental leave for less than a month, and I was just getting into the new rhythm of things. Mommy had a much bigger adjustment, being alone with both kids all day every day. I was able to alleviate this a little bit by working from home more often. That helped me a bunch too because then I can see the kids more, drop off and pick up G from preschool, and start cooking dinner earlier.

A typical morning goes something like this: I wake up and have a shower, then make lunches for everyone and do a little cleanup in the kitchen. By then it's time to wake G up to start getting ready for preschool. I get him to the point where he's dressed and sitting at the table eating breakfast, then in a little while I head out to work.

How I do dinners is probably the biggest change overall for me. I used to often make food after coming home from work, but I get home basically at G's dinner time, so that's not going to work. My commute is to blame, for sure. I've taken to making huge batches of food on the weekend to last the whole week and just reheat for dinners all week. And then when I work from home I have a chance to make something different to break up the monotony. Even with this setup, evenings still feel rushed, because we try to get G in bed by around 8 so he has the full night's sleep before school the next day.

Wrap-up

I feel like my relationship with little R is different than it was with G when he was a baby. It must do with things being more familiar and with my time and attention being divided between both kids. Back then, my one son was the focal point of my life, and so I paid close attention to every little thing. This time around, the little one is going through many of the same transformations I've seen before. Sometimes I find myself an interested observer more so than heavily invested in every tiny thing he does on a day-to-day basis. The other fact is that I simply don't have as much time with him, because G has much more complicated demands.

I still do his last nighttime routine every night, changing his diaper and clothes and talking to him before putting him down in his crib to sleep. He sure does love chatting then. I still can't wait until he grows a little bit older and can do more activities and be more mobile. We'll see what he's doing by the next time I write one of these.