Oh geez this. My parents never let me try out new things if they would be messy or might fail. I wanted a veggie garden, nope. Baking, too messy. Tons of craft things were vetoed for a very long time too. Thankfully as an adult I’ve rekindled these desires, and i have a garden I cultivate and a sourdough starter going (as examples). But I do mourn the learning I could have done as a kid.

I’m determined to let my kid do messy things. Right now the messiest thing she can do is spit up, but when she’s older she can have so much play doh and dirt time and baking time.

(Play doh only if she’s not eating it)

I appreciate the sentiment (it hasn’t gotten better per se yet, but we’ve gotten more used to the… nature of the screams) and also I wanted to apologise for being rather combative in explaining the context— which, yeah, was definitely missing in the original post. Gonna edit that now to make this post less rant, more informative.

Yep this. I’ve been given the advice to step away from my baby when she’s crying if I’m overwhelmed and she’s in a safe place. That’s advice from basically every medical professional I’ve encountered during pregnancy and post partum. Because it is so, so important to not let your nerves get fried in an attempt to be a perfect parent, because letting your nerves get fried will lead to shit you’ll regret down the line. Be that shouting or checking out mentally or way worse stuff.

Ear plugs =/= can’t hear. Loops specifically are designed to allow you to hear but not have hearing damage.

My baby is colicky AF and will scream while we’re in the process of making her a bottle. Or while we’re burping her. Or when we have to pull the bottle away to wipe spit up. Or while we’re in the process of soothing her but not soothed yet.

I’m pretty patient (with children, not judgy parents though) but I’m not perfect. I can parent better and be more present while not massively overwhelmed by a noise designed by evolution to be horrible and intolerable.

I’m so sorry. I almost wanted to downvote this because I want to downvote the circumstance.

But heeeeeey that would sort childcare… woohoo…

The swaddle. My child has learned being awake is fun. Including at night. By the power invested in me by this swaddle blanket, she will learn the beauty of SLEEP.

I grew up such a people pleaser that this would have worked SO well on me. Stop leads to “why?” But my parent being upset, or god forbid dosappointed… those are some words of great power.

I swear my nearly 3 week old is starting to turn her head towards me, and occasionally even try to focus her eyes on me, when I speak to her up close.

She wasn’t even meant to be born for another 12 days! At least going by due dates. But honestly as much as I’ve researched adjusted age for preterm babies, I’m becoming convinced I can ignore all that. I can see her speeding towards the 2 month milestones (the first checkpoint, essentially). She’s not hit them yet, that would be crazy, but I’m seeing early signs like the above.

Also she read Watership Down.

Okay it was an abridged version for kids and I did the reading. But she liked the pictures.

Okay not strictly words, like at all, but the other day I had my baby in my lap and she randomly arched backwards, pursed her lips in an O, and after a dramatic pause let out a long “oooooooooooh”

I knew then I was sleep deprived because I lost my shit laughing.

Tl:dr; “ooooooooh”

If your freshly born newborn doesn’t poop because she’s constipated, well they work surprisingly like toothpaste tubes if you hold their knees to their chest.

I’m sorry for the image. I’ve earned my “grit your teeth and do what you gotta” merit badge at just a week and a half postpartum, so I’m… happy?

We’re not talking about hair colour though, this is obviously reducing a pic of some friends to “haha big booba small booba”. That’s kind of textbook objectification.

It’s not super obscure or anything, but I want Vocaloid to get more love. Especially non-Miku voices.

I’ve got a few projects in the works, one of which was graciously donated by universal entropy over the weekend! The normal projects are fixing up a very overgrown back garden and redoing basically every surface of our soon-to-be main bedroom. The “spontaneous” project gifted by reality is redoing the inner mechanism of our toilet, along with fixing one of the seals.

More details on the garden: I’ve just been pruning stuff WAY back for months whenever I can. Despite the slow progress, it’s definitely a huge improvement. My goal is to have the back garden (or back yard as my American heritage calls it) ready for planting a proper food oasis in Spring. So far, I’ve got the flat space for garden beds cleared, as there was a truly massive hedge covering most of the garden. I’ve also pulled up some paving tiles and started removing gravel from the main walkway. More space to plant without these silly rocks. I hate gravel.

On the bedroom: My wood floors have been “acclimatising” for like, months, which concerns me a bit… hopefully no warping! I pulled the old baseboards/skirting boards off the wall ages ago (and then spent forever filling the holes and gaps underneath with plaster) in preparation for painting the walls a lovely azure colour, and it’s just been fighting to get the time to actually paint the dang walls. We haven’t even done the base coat yet, but maybe this weekend. I just started a new 4 day work week job, so hopefully that extra day becomes a DIY day properly.

The dreaded toilet: On Friday we woke up to no water because a main pipe burst in town. And then when we got water back, the toilet’s fill valve decided to compensate for lost time by never stopping filling. Doesn’t matter how high the float goes, it just doesn’t stop. We’ve also had issues before with the toilet seal leaking, so we’re killing two birds with one stone by fixing the seal as we replace the fill valve. Fingers crossed. Right now the two birds are killing us instead.