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Life as a Parent 2.4

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    It's been a while since I mentioned a kids show in here and after watching a recent TV movie on Cartoonito this one is back in my head:

    Thomas & Friends
    Slavery and Death. I think of all the kids shows it's Thomas the Tank Engine that most makes you reflect on these issues. Now deep into its twenty second series, the shows metaphorical analysis of these complex issues remains far from complete. Thomas and Friends live on Sodor as slaves for the Fat Controller, each day proving their usefulness for fear of execution should they fail to please their master. Over the years the Fat Controller has shipped more and more engines to work the land of his island. The most recent series is based on the most recent tv movie where Thomas was briefly free to explore the wider world off Sodor for the first time, the Fat Controller hot on his heels to locate the rogue engine and bring him back to his home.

    It's interesting that the show's set up so easily begs these questions but they pretty much go ignored. Christ know what the internal logic for the creation of living trains would be.

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      Friends of mine write that show so I could probably find out but, in all honesty, I can’t imagine there is much logic. Thomas is run by a toy company and it exists to sell toys, unfortunately. While I know the writers still try to do the best job with what they can, the show is driven by those sales.

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        I suppose a lot of it would come down to the original book writer, it's something that mostly doesn't come up in most episodes but the second it uses references to the scrappers yard where the engines are dismantled and melted down it pops in your head as it's such a dark rabbit hole.

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          Yeah, we had some of the early stories when my kids were little and they're pretty dark with some generally awful morals. Like a lot of old stories, the message is often: don't do something the rest of the people won't like or you'll be punished hard. Lynch mob morals basically.

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            Yep, I think every 80's child has the memory of Gordon being semi-buried alive in that tunnel burnt into their minds

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              Yeah but here's the thing nobody ever tells you but is really clear in the book - the other end of that tunnel isn't bricked up. He could have reversed out any time he wanted to.

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                There's an element of that, maybe, but a lot of the time they all want to be "really useful engines" of their own volition.

                Thomas began as a wooden toy made by Reverend Wilbert Awdry for his son and started writing the stories afterwards to go with the toy.

                The whole franchise has been sold a couple of times and the agenda might have changed, but I actually don't mind my kids watching Thomas and it portrays a relatively positive message.

                I've got season passes to Thomas Land this year at Drayton Manor and can't wait to go with the kids!

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                  I've had the boy for 6 weeks now. He mostly eats, poos, cries and sleeps, but he's so damn cute

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                    That's a very cute squishy baby boy!

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                      Two weekends on the trot I’ve tried to get ONE hour on a game. Two weekends I’ve failed miserably.

                      Literally can’t get out of the house without screaming hysterics.

                      After a week at work I need one hour of downtime. One hour for me. I’m not getting it, and I’m getting massively frustrated and resentful. Nights and weekends are a blur of doing jobs and taking over holding the baby. Hours vanish with alarming speed. I had to look after the baby from 7 until 12 this morning. Then we spent 2 and a half hours trying to get him ready to go to the shops, but the feeding and winding and screaming and nappy changes meant we bailed and I went alone. I got back at 4 ready to make ‘lunch’ and take over holding him again.

                      I only got to see After Life due to epic feeding and winding and rocking sessions at the same time. I can’t do that gaming. Feel like I’m going stir crazy doing this dogsbody stuff.

                      People keep saying it’ll get better. It’s getting worse.

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                        How old is the baby now? Sorry to hear it’s not getting any better. And yeah, you do need that downtime and that’s really important. Can you and your other half not alternate some baby shifts to give each other a break? I can’t remember exactly how we worked it but one thing I do remember is that, on the weekends, I would take baby duty for one morning and she would take baby duty for the other morning.

                        Totally depends on your child and you I guess but I know for us I was better with the baby on my own sometimes. For some reason putting both of us in the mix at once was more stressful, like maybe we were both feeling the other wasn’t quite doing it right on some level and so tasks ended up even harder with two than doing it solo. Of course that depends on the situation. Sometimes our first would cry so much it really wound me up and I had to hand the baby over just to retain any sense of sanity. But yeah, depending on the day and the situation or whatever you might need to see if you can split the baby (not literally - authorities will get involved) so that you’re each getting at least some shifts off but also not stressing each other out when you’re trying to manage together.

                        Two other pieces of probably really bad advice. One is this: not everything has to be right. If your house is turning into a dump, let it. You literally can’t do everything so don’t even try. Do what you can to reduce what needs to be done in the house just by not doing it. Obviously that will need to be a conversation! But something has to give until this baby settles and gets a bit more self-sufficient. The other is following on from how you got to watch After Life - until that baby gets mobile, you get to put it where you want. Finding ways of playing games may yet still be possible. Try literally anything to get that baby calm on your shifts so that you CAN play some games, if even in little bits. I have vague recollections of playing Fallout 3 while mine was on a sling so I was bobbing up and down while playing. But I didn’t do that for long. Floor time plus mobiles and twinkly music sometimes bought me a bit of time too.

                        Babies suck that time up. And it’s really difficult to juggle everything. And their cries and drive you bananas and then make you feel guilty for going bananas and that then makes it even worse. You’re not going to get much time. Not yet. But yeah, it feels like you need a bit more. And there are two of you in this, right? So unless you have already talked this through to death and it hasn’t worked for whatever reason, see if you can find ways of tag teaming and splitting the baby time rather than having you both on when you’re in the house.

                        Edit: one last thing for now. That baby is going nowhere. If for the sake of your sanity (which is required to be a parent), you need to put that baby in a cot, close the door and let it cry on its own for a short while with you at the furthest point in the house away from it, do it. Might make me sound like a monster parent but sometimes you need to take a moment away from the baby to regroup.
                        Last edited by Dogg Thang; 17-03-2019, 19:53.

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                          Cheers for that reply, Dogg. Sometimes, even just a single sentence can make you feel a bit better about feeling totally pissed off.

                          The problem we have at the moment is that he rarely sleeps. He didn’t sleep yesterday. He slept a little during the night, but not today at all. If he falls asleep on the breast, getting him to the cot without him snapping awake and kicking off is like handling a bomb rigged to explode with the slightest movement.

                          He seems to be in a lot of pain with colic and digestion. Powdered feeds result in screaming, agonising cramps, with chods containing clumps of powder that must be crippling to pass. That’s after hours of screaming. We’ve tried various feeds, powders and things to alleviate this, to no avail. Seeing him straining in agony is occasionally hilarious, mostly annoying and frustrating, and always heartbreaking. Which is emotionally draining. Yes slightly better on ready made feeds, but they’re expensive and far from perfect.

                          He’s most regular and comfortable on breast milk. This ties my partner to the couch for hours and hours. Some days I get back and she’s had no dinner or shower. I’ve told her to leave him in the cot but she says she can’t. We had quite the barney over it, and apparently agreed that she was right, because she’s his mother and has ‘that bond’.

                          Shes suffering. He feeds for hours off the belt. He’s goes on the breast for comfort and pain relief. He’s teething so goes on the breast to alleviate that. He can hurt her quite badly. The pain he’s in means he’s awake most of the day and night, and therefore so is she. She knows I have to work so tries to give me six hours of sleep.

                          This means, though, that all the washing and dishes and emptying of bins (how does a bin get so full of ****bags so quickly???) and drying and bathing and cooking is my job when I get back at half 6. She’s tied to him. When she’s truly in despair I have to take him for walks and drives, or resort to a bottle feed - which we know spells disaster.

                          On a weekend, she’s so tired that she’s really quite down and things are very fraught. So I get up Saturday morning and try and keep him for five hours so she can get some sleep. That means more bottles, which means more agony, which means the rest of the day is a cycle of changing nappies, breast feeding, screaming, whimpering, rocking, and the usual. The same applies to Sunday. We couldn’t even get to the shop for an hour today because of it.

                          She’s feeling like a prisoner trapped in the house. Three times she tried to take him out last week. Every time she had to return within half an hour because he was screaming so much that his temperature was skyrocketing. On a weekend all I want to do is flake out. She wants to ‘go out and do stuff’ because she’s been trapped in the house. That leads to arguments.

                          We are trapped in a cycle of trying to shoulder the burden for the other, while being exhausted, while I have to work too, and while the baby screams and howls his way in agony through days and nights. I can’t see an end.
                          Last edited by prinnysquad; 17-03-2019, 20:42.

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                            That’s REALLY rough. My first had colic and it was pretty awful (although thankfully I don’t think it lasted all that long) but it sounds like you have it way worse. Babies don’t do well not sleeping so, yeah, that’s going to be really bad. When he feeds on the boob though, it generally shouldn’t take so long that your partner can’t even get a shower. I wonder if the supply is slow? Has she tried expressing it so it can be used to bottle feed him? It means he might be able get it into himself quicker. That’s what we did so we could split the feeds but we always topped up with bought formula. Like yours, ours did not do well on any of the powdered stuff so we had to go for the premade mix and also, as much as possible, we tried to use it as top up so that feeds were mixed. Which now that I think about it is the opposite advice that we’d give someone for alcoholic drinks and nobody ever told us to do that so it’s possible that mixing it isn’t a good thing. But it seemed to have better results than full formala feeds.

                            My memory is sketchy but I have a feeling we ended up using some special (expensive) formula for a while to try to ease the colic. No idea if it actually worked - she still had the colic but I guess it’s possible it would have been worse without it. Have you talked to a doctor or someone to see if they have any advice for the colic and indigestion? If it was just the colic you might be able to ride it out but the fact that he isn’t sleeping is going to make things so much worse. Colic totally messed up my girl’s sleep and I remember pacing the floor in the middle of the night with a screaming baby but eventually she did sleep and I can’t imagine how bad it must be to not eventually get that relief. Yeah, maybe see if you can get some professional advice on that one.

                            My heart goes out to you, buddy. That’s really hard. It was already hard but now with colic and lack of sleep you are really getting hammered. One thing to remember (engage monster parent mode again) is that your little guy will remember none of this. The pain and discomfort he is in will pass and he will never remember it. You will remember this. So I stand by my last edit - if you need to leave him for a bit and let him cry, as long as he’s not going to do himself any harm, do it. Just for a bit so you can catch your breath. But really the best scenario is for you to get him to sleep somehow. Seeing if you can get enough food into him so that, by the time his initial indigestion passes, he’s still well fed.

                            The colic will pass but it reads like you need to see if there is anything else you can do now rather than just continuing on until it does.

                            Also, as much as possible both of you need to get what you want. I can understand your partner feeling totally trapped in the house so needs to get out and I can also understand your need to flake out. I can’t see how you can both get these if the dude isn’t sleeping but if you can at least get some amount of his sleep back on track, those two things need to become a priority but separately. So if you need to get a shop done, for example, maybe she can go and do it and also meet a friend for a quick coffee while you take the baby rather than having you both go, doubling over on the task and both dealing with all the worst of it all the time. You might get lucky and might get the guy to sleep or you might not in which case you try to swap and she takes the baby while you get some housework done and then get to take a half hour for yourself afterwards. Like I say, that seems really hard in the current situation so I feel you might need to talk to someone who knows babies better to see if there is a way of getting the colic a little more under control or, especially, get the sleep back on track.

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                              Thanks Dogg. My partner has tried expressing - to very limited effect. The thing is, sometimes he’s full and still wants breast. I’m convinced it’s a comfort/ pain relief thing. The teething is upsetting him. He’s on that gel stuff and Calpol, but that doesn’t make him sleepy or anything. He’ll doze while treating her nipple like a dummy, then wake up the second he’s moved.

                              I’ll mention some of the other ideas to her. See if we can break this cycle of grimness.

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                                Does he have a dummy? When ours had colic we actually tried to get ours on one and she didn’t go for it but worth trying if he doesn’t have one.

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