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Should I or shouldn't I? I couldn't decide if I should get a jumperoo to add to our menagerie of baby entertainment devices. I ended up buying a 2-yr old jumperoo on Craigslist for $20. The first day, Cari didn't seem too interested and didn't really bounce it. But Arden, surprise surprise, loved it right away. She likes jumping up and down, but mostly I think she loves to be standing. I'm not sure if it eases her reflux or what, but there it is. Now both girls are diggin' the jumperoo.
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Thoughts on (Over) Parenting
I read an article in The New York Times predicting the end of helicoptering parenting along with its many variants of attachment parenting and so forth. I doubt it. In my early days as a new parent, I was confronted with the attachment parenting paradigm and met many diehards in the "movement" promoted by Dr. Sears. I guess I would have gotten sucked in too except that I broke the number 1 & 2 rules...breastfeed and sleep with your child till he or she is in college. Alana never took to nursing (a horrible understatement if there ever was one) and Chris and I found we couldn't sleep with a baby only a foot from our heads. I remember clearly bolting upright with a pounding chest each time she groaned or stirred. I had to move her to the nursery next door in order to get any sleep at all. I did "wear" her all the time but it was more for our salvation than anything else, since she was a very fussy baby.
Her little sisters are not fussy babies. Far from it. However, nursing was a challenge with two and didn't last long. Sleeping with two was also not ever going to happen. And this time I don't wear them...I mean, for gosh sakes, how do you wear two babies?! So once again we are the anti-attachment parents. Clearly, our kids are going to grow up to either be slackers, smoking weed behind the gym, or sociopaths, regularly parting hapless suckers from their cash. And of course they'll be fat and dumb because of all the formula. NOT! I've come to view attachment parenting, or child-centered parenting, as over parenting. I don't think it's bad per se except as an extreme dogma. Children probably shouldn't be at the center of a family for the obvious reasons. I think it's too easy to let them rule the roost and create little monsters.
As they say, I was the best mom ever. And then I had kids. The other thing I've come to realize over the last 2.5 years of actual parenting (rather than parenting dogs) is that a lot of the so-called rules: babies must sleep on their backs (to prevent SIDS), no peanut butter before age 2 (to prevent allergies), no honey before age 1 (to prevent botulism poisoning) are not rules at all. They are opinions. And more than that, they are RECENT opinions. For many years prior to the back to sleep movement, moms were told to babies to sleep on their bellies so they wouldn't aspirate their spit-up. Experts are now saying to introduce peanut butter early to prevent allergies. And let's just say that my babysitter has been feeding her son honey since he was 6 mos old. (She never read that babies can't have honey.) I think sometimes you have to use your gut in the face of all this "expert" opinion, not easy to do when you're a new parent under a lot of sleep-deprived stress. I will say that my twins have been tummy sleepers since 5 mos. I decided that the BTS program was really a BS program designed to torture babies and their parents. SIDS is sad, but it is very rare and it does not occur because a baby smothers itself. I mean, really?
Anyway, these are my 2 cents. Maybe I'll change my mind over time or maybe not.
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