All Done Mommy Milk

Tags

breastfeeding, nursing, toddler, weaning

Owl is now officially weaned, and I’m not sure he likes it.

We’d been slowly cutting down on the nursing for a while. When he was around 18 months old we stopped nursing on demand. He could nurse in the morning and in the evening and before naps if I was home, but he couldn’t just yank my shirt down.

By the time he was two, nap time nurse sessions had been cut even if I was home.

Then, a couple of months ago, he stopped asking for milk before bed. PH had put him to bed a couple of times in a row because I was out training dogs, and Owl didn’t ask and I didn’t suggest it, and that was pretty much that.

The morning nursing sessions continued.

Part of it was simply that we were unmotivated to try and wean him first thing in the morning. We were tired and if latching him on would get us another fifteen minutes of rest, we would take it.

But I wasn’t enjoying it any more. My breasts were producing milk but were never full, and Owl’s nursing just felt annoying.

But he wanted it, every morning, and I was reluctant to cut that last string.

Then my mother came for a visit, and that fixed it.

Mum would go to Owl when he woke up in the morning and he would spend an hour or more happily on her lap reading stories or watching videos on her tablet. In fact, if I tried to come into the room he’d shoo me away. “No, that MY Nana!”

And so a week went by wherein he didn’t nurse in the morning. When Mum left, PH took over distracting him in the mornings, so he didn’t go back to his old ways.

And that was that – he was weaned.

But I’m not sure he’s happy about it. He has asked for Mommy Milk a number of times, and even cried for it when he was feeling sick.

He will also just whine for Mommy, even when I am holding him.

“I’m right here, Owl, what do you want?”

“Me want YOU, Mommy.”

“But I’m RIGHT HERE! You have me!”

It’s heart breaking and frustrating. In fact, it’s a lot like when he was a colicky newborn. I’m giving you what you want – why aren’t you happy?

He also started chewing his nails a couple months ago – right around the time he gave up the nighttime weaning. He bites them right down to stubble, and no matter how much Daycare Lady hounds him about germs or how many times PH and I remind him that he’s giving himself “owies” by doing it, the fingers go back in his mouth.

Lately, he has started sucking on his fingers as well.

I don’t really know what to do about this. When I see it, I feel guilty for taking away his comfort, but after all, I nursed him for 28 months… that’s more than most kids get!

But yesterday, he pulled at my shirt and said “Me baby now,” he said cuddling up. “Me drink Mommy Milk.”

“Mommy Milk’s all gone, Owl,” I reminded him.

“Me pretend have Mommy Milk” he insisted and nipped at the shirt for a moment. Then he patted my breast and said, “Me finished the Mommy Milk. Me eated ALL the Mommy Milk.”

“That’s right, it’s all done,” I told him.

And I hope he doesn’t suck his skin right off his fingers as a replacement activity.

Potty Training Your Puppy, I Mean, Toddler

Tags

2 year old, baby, conditioning, house breaking, motherhood, parenting, positive reinforcement, potty, potty training, puppy, toddler

So, when potty training Owl, I’ve been working off of the basic tenets of puppy potty training. I’ve received tons of advice for potty training Owl and have incorporated some of it into my program, but it’s always easier to work off of what you already know.

And so, for anyone else who finds dogs easier than kids, I present:

Potty Training Your Puppy Toddler

substitute dog with child and grass with potty

Step 1: Allow your  puppy toddler to roam around the house, while you watch carefully.

Step 2: Take your puppy toddler to the appropriate location on a regular basis, most notably whenever he/she wakes up, has played for 10-15 minutes, or has eaten.

Step 3: If your puppy toddler urinates or has a bowel movement in the correct place, make a big deal out of it. Have special, very high value treats that you dispense only when your puppy toddler has voided in the correct location.

Step 4: If your puppy toddler begins to urinate or have a bowel movement inside while playing, interrupt the behavior (by picking him/her up or simply saying “oops!” or clapping your hands to distract him/her) and immediately direct him/her to the correct location. Hopefully he/she will finish urinating or defecating there.

Do not punish mistakes; simply try to interrupt them. Potty training is about conditioning correct behaviors.

Step 5: If your puppy toddler manages to urinate or defecate in the correct place once redirected, throw a big party and dispense the usual treats, even though this started with a mistake. What your puppy toddler will remember is that urinating/defecating on the floor resulted in interruption, while urinating/defecating in the correct place was highly rewarded.

Further adjustments: Since puppies are naturally naked, it is easy to spot urination and bowel movements as they happen. For this to work with toddlers, they must be similarly unencumbered. A collar shirt is optional.

Further adjustments part the second: Toddlers seem to respond better to smarties and similar small sweets than they do to freeze dried liver or cut up hot dog, but this may vary from toddler to toddler.

Congratulations!

You have begun the process of potty training your puppy toddler! While you should see dramatic improvements within a few days, the process may take several weeks to months to complete. Consistency is key!

 

Potty Training: NO MORE EXCUSES

Tags

anxiety, biting the bullet, excuses, house breaking, parenting, potty training, puppies, toddler, trying new things

Since this is the long weekend, we have decided to take advantage of three days off to bite the bullet and try potty training.

I’ve spent the last few months reading The No Cry Potty Training Solution, and asking every single parent I know for advice.

My mother has no advice, since I was potty trained by my aunt. I asked her for advice before she died and she said she had just made a big fuss over me – apparently for weeks afterwards whenever I used the potty I would ask “Auntie Helen happy??”

Not Mary Poppins over at Daycare Daze lays out her Smartie method, which she has been using with great success for decades.

Hannah from Hodgepodge And Strawberries has also blogged about potty training, and vehemently expressed her distaste of pull-ups to me over Twitter.

@IfByYesTweets no worries. i have OPINIONS about potty training. i've trained, lemme see, five kids now. PullUps are bollocks.

— Hannah (@hpstrawberries) November 9, 2012

And we’ve spent the last couple of months getting Owl accustomed to sitting on the potty (both a small potty and a potty seat on our toilet) while reading stories.

Once, while running around with no diaper on, he started to pee so we sent him to the potty where he deliberately finished the pee to great acclaim, and he was so encouraged that he did it again a few minutes later.

Our excuses for not potty training him properly were wearing thin.

Ultimately, I was afraid of failure, and afraid of change. I have anxiety issues. Change scares me. Doing something I’ve never done before scares me.

Then I had an epiphany.

I was called to a man’s house to help him deal with his new puppy. He was red-eyed with sleeplessness, and shack-wacky for spending three consecutive days holding his puppy. Every time he put his puppy down the puppy would pee or poop, and he was so anxious over messing up his dog’s house training that he was driving himself insane.

Even though this is the best kind of owner – 100% dedicated to starting his puppy out right – he was thinking of returning the puppy for the sake of his own sanity.

So I stepped in and made him put the puppy down, and as I talked him through the process of interrupting the behavior, moving the puppy to the correct spot, and then rewarding things when done correctly I realized…

…I have TOO potty trained before.

And Beloved Dog was challenging to potty train.

If I could train Beloved Dog, if I knew the steps well enough to walk someone through it and be paid for doing so (he kept the puppy, who is doing much better, and signed on for six more sessions), then I could potty train a toddler.

So I went out and bought stickers and smarties, bristol board for a (very crude)  reward chart, and training pants.

Let’s DO THIS THING.

Well, F*** Me, Owl Survived A Daycare Centre

Tags

bad words, child care, children, daycare, toddler

Owl’s Daycare Lady is on vacation and I’ve been patching together care for him piece by piece. Thursday and Friday of this week were courtesy of PH’s corporate daycare downtown. As part of his benefits he gets 2 free days a year.

I was reluctant to send him to one of these massive centres because studies have shown that kids in these environments have high cortisol (the stress hormone) levels. No matter how well trained and caring the staff, it’s just not the safety of home. That’s why I wanted a small home daycare instead.

But we’re low on options (next week The Farm Fairy is taking him one day and the other three days I have hired the newest helper at Owl’s Daycare, who I slightly distrust because she wears impractical shoes and spells “sure” “shore”). So on Thursday and Friday PH took Owl downtown and I biked to work.

I was worried that the change of routine, and being dumped all day at a big centre filled with complete strangers might stress Owl out.

PH was like “have you met our child?” and he was right – we know because they have a parents’ webcam.

PH sent me running commentaries on all of Owl’s doings:

Food time! They’re sitting at the tables and red smocks are being put on them all. It’s really cutely ridiculous. Owl’s seat is mostly out of shot so it’s hard to see how he’s doing. However we may safely assume the standard OMNOMNOM.

These children are good eaters. Not one of them has stood up yet. Owl is in tough competition.

And just as I say that, the first one falls. Tension mounts.

Another two fall, and the gustatory battle truly begins.

The last standing warriors have been grouped together at one table for the final eat off. 

Owl is down! He finishes outside of the medals in fourth place! What a stunning turn of events! 

So clearly Owl had a good time, and I was silly to worry.

But you never know what can happen when you leave your child with strangers. Look at this poor kid, who got his face scrubbed with a Magic Eraser or something.

But Owl did fine. His face is not burned by cleaning chemicals, and he does not appear to be in the least traumatized.

But he DID come home yesterday repeating something that sounded an awful lot like a swear word.

Tell me, what does it sound like he’s saying to YOU?

A Canadian Extrovert In Las Vegas

Tags

babies, Las Vegas, photos, toddler, travel

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In Which I Get Medical Advice From An Oompa Loompa, And Distrust It

Tags

baby, colds, common cold, coughing, daycare, doctor, pediatrician, sick, sleep, toddler, virus, winter

Owl coughs.

He’s been doing it for months and months. Ever since he got croup, really. It’s practically part of his personality, now. We hardly notice it. His nose runs, and it gives him post nasal drip, and then he coughs, mostly at night when he’s lying down and we’re trying to sleep.

(Incidentally, this is hilarious, especially when you’re really tired.) 

At first I took him back to the doctor for it. Each time the doctor told me it was “probably viral” and that colds are common in the first winter in daycare.

“He’ll basically have colds non-stop all winter,” said the pediatrician jovially (my pediatrician looks exactly like a human sized Oompa Loompa. Not the weird orange men from the Gene Wilder film but Oompa Loompas as described by Roald Dahl).

How I imagine my doctor’s family must look

Plus Owl tended to pick up worse colds from his visits to the doctor’s office. So I gave up.

But Daycare Lady didn’t.

“I’m sure he needs antibiotics or something,” she said. “He’s always coughing, and it sometimes sounds like there’s boiling water in his chest.”

Every now and then the coughing gets worse.

It happened again this weekend. His coughing was so bad that PH was up with him again and again in the night, and gave up entirely at 3 am  when he handed me Owl in bed (usually it’s between 4:30 and 5:30 am when Owl joins me in bed).

Even in the car he’d cough and cough. When he breathes his chest sounds like it’s percolating coffee.

After the third night of this PH said, “take him to the pediatrician.”

Daycare Lady wholeheartedly agreed.

“You have to PUSH them. My brother is a pediatrician and when my little girl was small he told me that from what I was saying over the phone, he was sure she had pneumonia. I took her to the ER and the ER doctor said she was fine! Viral! Go home! So I said “you PROVE to me it’s viral!” and I insisted on an xray and the xray showed pneumonia!”

So I went in determined this time.

When Jolly Doc came in I explained that he has been coughing for months. Sometimes it’s worse than others but always THERE.

“Does it get better and then worse again?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“It’s a cold.”

“An eight month long cold?”

“No, he just keeps getting colds one on top of the other. Happens all the time in daycare in winter.”

“But it’s June!”

“The cold season seems to be lasting longer than usual. We’ve had a cool spring.”

“But there’s only four other kids at his dayhome and none of them are sick!”

“You can’t tell me that the other kids never get colds.”

“No, they get colds occasionally, but they get sick, with stuffy noses and coughs and fevers and then a week later they’re over it. Owl’s symptoms are non-stop, and his nose rarely gets really clogged. It’s just constantly draining clear or yellow snot.”

“Because he keeps catching new colds before the old ones are done! I see this all the time. There’s no point in doing tests and no medicine will help you. His lungs don’t sound asthmatic, and I don’t think it’s allergies – you say it happened all through the winter, so it’s not likely seasonal.”

“Some units in our complex have had problems with mold, but we vacuumed and washed his bedding…”

“Yeah, and he hasn’t had a history of lung problems or breathing problems. This doesn’t look like allergies. It looks like a cold.”

“But he always looks like this!”

“Yes, well,” he laughed, “we call them “snot-nosed kids” for a reason!”

He DID say he would refer me to an eye doctor about Owl’s clogged tear duct. He said they usually resolve on their own but after a year he gets them dealt with “you’ve been surprisingly patient.”

Yes, well, considering my child is constantly coughing, a teary eye hasn’t really been high in my priorities.

I left feeling so frustrated.

How does he know that Owl hasn’t had the same persistant infection ever since October? Maybe he fights it off for a while and it keeps coming back. Why is he the only kid in his daycare who is constantly coughing up phlegm?

would you like some snot with that?

But I’m really frigging tired and I don’t see why he is constantly suffering from colds that no one else seems to be giving to him, or catching from him.

Owl’s First Haiku

Tags

baby, haiku, hockey, poetry, toddler

Hockey hockey ball
hockey ball, hockey ball ball
hockey hockey, yeah.

I Keep Thinking He’s A Dog, But Owl Thinks He’s People

Tags

babies, child development, children, concepts, dog, experiments, generalization, learning, psychology, reading, symbols, toddler, words

Most of my experience with teaching and training beings whose brains are smaller than mine has been with animals. Furthermore, in most scenarios Owl acts and responds very much like a dog and so I treat him very similarly most of the time.

I use redirection, positive reinforcement, a high-pitched, encouraging tone when I deal with him, and it seems to work. He responds well to praise, touch, and food rewards. He likes to fetch.

He’s a puppy!

So I am amused and delighted when Owl displays human-like abilities that are beyond the grasp of the dogs I have worked with.

Like when he was 14 months old and I realized that he understood that he was looking at himself in the mirror.

Hi, me!

I pointed to his reflection and said “who’s that?” and he pointed to himself! To test his understanding, I secretly placed a banana sticker in his hair and showed him his reflection. Sure enough, his hand crept up to his hair while a perplexed look appeared on his face.

Dogs would NOT get that.

Also, I am constantly surprised by not only the extent to which he imitates us, but the extent to which he understands what he is imitating. Like at Hallowe’en, when he had just learned to walk, and he spotted a candy wrapper on the ground. He picked it up and toddled over to the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and proceeded to try and open it to throw away the wrapper.

A dog can learn to put something in the garbage if you teach him, but it would never occur to him to see something like a wrapper, identify it as garbage, and then try to throw it away himself. Hypothetically you could teach a dog to recognize certain things are garbage to be thrown away, but it would be a lot of work.

Your average dog does not watch you do something, intuit the intent behind your action, and then try to do it himself.

Owl does this every day.

I'll just slip these on...

Then there are other things that I almost don’t notice until I think about them.

For example, every morning I ask him to choose his footwear for the day. He can pick his wading boots, or his little doc-martin style boots. No matter which he chooses, he always brings me a matching pair. He has never brought me, say, one wader and one doc martin.

It’s the same thing when he brings me my own footwear (yes, I get my baby to fetch my shoes. I told you he is very like a dog…). He never brings me one sneaker and one boot. He brings me two sneakers, or two boots.

Again, a dog would have difficulty with that. He can fetch your shoes, but you’d have to formally train him to understand “fetch my sneakers” vs “fetch my boots”. It would take WORK.

But Owl does it as a matter of course. Humans are clever.

And the way he generalizes! I made the mistake of teaching my dog to chase my ex-boyfriend’s cat under the command “get the cat”. When I got my own cat, that command didn’t work, because he didn’t understand that “cat” meant any cat other than ex-boyfriend’s cat. We had to teach him our new cat’s name, instead.

But the baby understands categories easily. When he was 12 months old I could say “where’s Beloved Dog?” and he would point to Beloved Dog, meanwhile identifying him as “dog”. Ditto for the cat. He knew that we had A DOG and A CAT but that they each have their own unique identifiers as well.

We taught him what a hippo was, and from then on he could identify all sorts of hippos in all sorts of books, even drawn by different artists. No dog could do that!

"hippo" is one of his favourite signs

Then again, Owl’s capacity for self-control, maturity, patience, obedience, following basic instructions, and potty training are completely eclipsed by our dog, and certainly his capacity for destruction rivals any dog I have ever met.

So I am putting him to the ultimate test.

I am going to try to teach both dog and Owl to read.

Well, not READ.

At least, not as those who use the alphabet would consider to be reading (Owl is trying to teach himself the alphabet, but has difficulty after “D”…).

More… symbol recognition, like in Mandarin. I’m trying to teach Owl to recognize certain letter combinations as holding meaning.

I made Owl flash cards

some of his favourite things

I’m going to do the same with Beloved Dog. I borrowed flash cards from my friend and business partner who swear up and down that she has seen dogs learn to recognize words like “sit” and “down” and differentiate between them.

Just to be clear:

I am NOT pushing, pressuring, or otherwise making this un-fun for Owl. It’s just a game, something I am interested in to test his capacity for generalization and symbolic representation. I don’t believe that it will aid his development or help him school in the future.

I’m just pitting him against the dog.

For science.

(I’m so going to get trolled…)

Which one looks smarter to you?