parent hacks

Can’t Touch This

/ Shane / Leave a comment

 

Every once in awhile you come across a fantastic parent hack. A solution to a common problem that is so obvious, you just want to slap your forehead and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Very rarely do you find a parent hack that involves MC Hammer. Even more rare is a parent hack of both the the why-didn’t-I-think-of-that variety AND the MC Hammer variety. This is one of those hacks.

Problem: If only I had some way to easily, and consistently label the things that my kid shouldn’t touch. If only I had one icon (pun intended) that could easily signify to my child, “You Can’t Touch This”.

Please Hammer, don’t hurt ‘um.

Link via Sara

What’s on your butt?

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Sometimes, you are just bone tired. Any parent can relate to this. However, your energy-factory toddler just can’t imagine being anything but hopped up. So as soon as I saw the title of this article, I was hooked.

Fun Toddler Games That Let You Relax; How to entertain your child while lying down.

Now that’s my kind of article! Unfortunately for our children, Sara and I are sort of low-energy parents. So most of these games came as no surprise to us. For the most part, we have our own variations on these games. However, game #5 stuck out. That was certainly one that I had never thought of before:

Game #5: What’s on Your Butt?

Position: Lying down with your eyes closed.

What your child will love about it: Butts.

What you will love about it: The roar of laughter that accompanies anything having to do with butts.

I recommend playing this one in your child’s room or wherever she keeps her toys. The participating parent lies face down on the bed and closes his eyes while the child finds an interesting object to place on the parent’s butt. Keeping his eyes closed, the parent guesses what’s on his butt. Your child will enjoy giving you endless clues in between peals of laughter from seeing Elmo or Barbie or her toothbrush riding your backside. This activity may last for a very long time as children rarely tire of seeing their parents with stuff on their ass.

Source: “What’s on your butt?” was invented by my genius husband on one of those mornings when we were cheerfully awakened by our sleepless child at 5 a.m.

That is pure genius.

Any other parents have games like this that can contribute to my laziness? (Yes, we’ve already covered timing her as she runs up and down the hallway)

Now with less robots!

/ Shane / 4 Comments

Lately, Evie has been a little frightened at night time. Every time she mentions something like that, my heart really goes out to her. I wish she never had to be afraid of the dark. So lately her fear has been centered around robots.

See, all the doors in our house have like 6 panels in them. Evie decided a long time ago, that they kind of look like robots. The two smaller top panels kind of look like eyes. Evie has mentioned this for a long time, but only recently has she been afraid of them. And her room has not one but three of these doors, because the closet has two.

So this is where her brilliant daddy stepped in. I suggested we cover up those robots with old art projects. This killed two birds with one stone, because it used up some of these art projects. You kind of hate to throw them away, but what do you do with them? Well, you wallpaper your doors to hide the robots, obviously.

So the other day, I hung up around 30 pictures all over the doors. In addition to hiding the robots, it looks pretty good! (if I do say so myself) I hung them sort of randomly with all different mixtures of orientations, painting, markers, white paper vs. colored paper, etc. I almost wish I would have done it a long time ago, even without the robots. The room looks cheerier, and it is a good display place, over space that wouldn’t have been used by anything anyway. Plus, I don’t have a big stack of art projects sitting around anymore.

So, I guess if your kid has a problem with robots in their room, I would recommend hiding the robots with art. And if all else fails, there’s always robot insurance.

Potty Tickets

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Overnight and during naps, Evie got the brilliant idea to start taking her diaper off before falling asleep, which inevitably led to a wet bed. Washing her bed-clothes multiple times a day started to get pretty old. In an attempt to fix this problem, I told her if she needed to go potty, she could call me, and I would come help her. This was one of those instances where the cure was worse than the affliction. Pretty soon she was calling me down every few hours, all night long, even though she hardly ever really had to go. The frustration with this situation led me to utter a statement that I immediately recognized as a mistake:

“Evie, I’m not coming back down here again.”
“What if I have to go potty?”
“Well then, I guess you’ll just have to go on your own.”

Hoo boy.

After that, she was coming out of her room constantly, always taking off her clothes, always crying when she got her shirt stuck on her head or dropped her pajamas in the toilet. In other words, this was the worst, least manageable stage of all.

I should say that all of this was combined with (and/or responsible for) Evie starting to not take a nap anymore. She’s in sort of the awkward, in-between stage where she sometimes goes without a nap, but then has an extremely cranky, sleepy, rest of the day.

I have a theory on parenting. Lets call it the “sine wave of parenting difficulty”.

Basically, every 6 months your child goes from reasonably easy to parent, to reasonably difficult. Not necessarily naughty, though. It could be they change their sleeping habits, start teething, reach a stage where they are whining, or pushing boundaries, or potty training, whatever it is. The tricky part is to remember to appreciate the peaks, so you can get through the lows.

So anyway, a perfect storm of not sleeping, mischief, potty issues and a push for independence is sort of making this one of those parenting troughs. I wasn’t sure what to do. On the one hand, both Evie and I were losing sleep for no particular reason. On the other hand, I didn’t want to tell her NOT to go to the potty, because I would eventually like her to be able to go the night without a diaper. So how to break the habit while simultaneously not encouraging and not discouraging?

Finally, Sara came up with the answer – potty tickets! Evie gets two potty tickets per night (one for naps) which she can use to go to the potty. When she’s out of tickets, she has to go in her diaper.

Evie loves it. She is so excited to use the tickets. By the time I get down there, she’s dancing on the bed, waving her ticket around and saying, “Daddy, take my ticket!”

At first, the tickets were just little scraps of paper. Sara had a second stroke of inspiration when we were on the train the other day, and now the potty tickets are actually old Metra tickets

It’s still not ideal. She uses the first potty ticket within 5 seconds of being put to bed. After I put her into bed I close the door and wait, so I can go back in immediately. She rarely has to go that soon, so she’s still stalling there. Consequently, we have had to move her bedtime up to compensate for this.

Other than that, though, it works out pretty well. It’s a tolerable balance between what I would optimally like to have and where we were just a few days ago.

And that’s all you can really ask for, isn’t it?

A ghostly wakeup

/ Shane / 5 Comments

There is a new weapon in the war against Evie waking up too early. We have finally resorted to the supernatural.

Evie has always had trouble staying asleep, some of which has been documented here. Through various tricks and subterfuge, we have sometimes managed to make her sleep in later (by later, I mean 5:30 or 6), but just when we start to congratulate ourselves on our success, she will start a push to get up earlier and earlier. It was in the middle of one such push, that we decided something new had to be done.

The problem is that Evie (and all toddlers) love routines. Everything that happens to her, she tries to incorporate it into a routine. Sometimes this can be used to our advantage, like the routine we use to get ready for bed, and sometimes it hurts us. In this case, her preferred routine was to wake up at about 5, and then have me come in to tell her it was too early. Then we repeated this at 5:40, 5:50, etc. until Sara came in to get her up around 6. She loved to talk about how daddy came in and told her to go back to sleep. And as time went on, the wake ups became earlier, more frequent, and she became more reluctant to go back to sleep.

I started trying to explain to Evie about the clock, and how she can’t get up until the first number is 6. She seemed interested, but I think it was a little much. It was hard to know that the first number was the important one, and the other numbers didn’t matter in this case. Also, Sara pointed out that she wouldn’t be able to understand that 5 is too early, but if she woke up and it was 7, that was okay. So Sara had found some toddler alarm clocks online that you can set to display an icon, such as a sun, when it was okay to wake up, or a moon if it was too soon.

Rather than spending money and buying some specialized clock, we realized we could make do with what we had. We used an extra light timer we had lying around, and we hooked that up to a set of ghost lights that we had hung in her room as a Halloween decoration.

I can’t begin to tell you how fantastically this has worked. She has been sleeping in (or at least staying quiet in her crib, which amounts to the same thing as far as I’m concerned) until 6:30 every day for almost two weeks! And she’s so excited for the ghost lights to come on. The first day, by the time we got into her room, she was literally jumping up and down and pointing at the ghost lights in glee, yelling, “Mommy! Daddy! The ghost lights came on! They said boo and I woke up!”

And this is despite the fact that Sara and I continue to botch the job as much as humanly possible. On the first day, when success was the most important, we accidentally set the time wrong, so that the lights came on like 45 minutes later than they should have. This meant she was yelling for us to come in and we were cringing in our room, trying to decide if we should go in or wait. After that, it took a couple more days before we managed to get the timing right. The timer is not digital, and there is a lot of ambiguity about the time it is displaying.

All in all though, it has been amazing. It has probably been one of the single most effective tools we have used to keep her in bed until a reasonable time. And now that we have the system in place, we are able to adjust her schedule by subtly adjusting the timer over the course of a few days, without her noticing. This is how we moved her from 6 to 6:30, and also how we managed to control the time change without disrupting her sleeping schedule.

The downside is that we’re stuck with ghost lights in her room for the foreseeable future. But maybe someday we can find some other kind of fun light to switch off to.