u/vintagegirlgame

Why are they all microfiber?! Cannot seem to find yoga mat sized towels that are made of cotton. When you’re hot and your pores are all open the last thing you want is to rub your body on is microfiber plastics… My husband is going to hot yoga 5-6x a week and I just want to find him a bulk pack of grippy cotton towels that fit over his yoga mat (folding a normal sized towel doesn’t really work).

So crazy how much of the yoga industry is plastics like expensive Lululemon yoga pants. Have been trying to convert all my athletic wear to wool (even tho washable wool still has some kind of processing/treatment…)

While this isn’t a co-sleeping question, I’m asking in this community because we don’t believe in/practice Cry It Out and are overall into attachment/responsive parenting. However I’m sure we’ve all dealt with a crying newborn in the car (after the phase where they are constantly sleepy, but before the phase where the car is soothing). Letting them cry while driving feels like a form of CIO as baby just wants comfort and closeness. Car seats are the roughest part of having a new baby for me (I’m on my second).

Just had a rough day with my 8 week old in the car seat. Pulled over 4 times before I could finally get her to fall asleep for good (and this was just for a 30 min drive).

Wondering how long do other co-sleeping parents let their baby cry in the car seat before pulling over to comfort them? How do you calculate when it’s going to be worth it or whether you should push through to your destination? So far I can’t tolerate more than 5 mins. But then I know she might just start crying again after being taken out and settled/changed/nursed. It’s so stressful driving when they are screaming (which is adds risk to driving) and you know they can’t just fall asleep on their own yet. At what age did yours start to handle the car seat better? At 8 weeks she’s looking around more and is sometime able to tolerate 15 mins awake, but then when she’s over it she’s shrieking and I don’t want to push her to the point where she passes out while crying bc that feels like CIO. If we’re 5 mins away I’ll try to push through but otherwise I feel like I have to stop. And I live on a very small island where most drives are only 15 mins…30 mins max.

Any other tips/tricks for getting through this phase?

Edit: Reddit won’t let me reply to comments for some reason, so just going to add some here…

Forgot to mention this is my second baby, so I remember that it got better eventually when she got more into toys and snacks, especially when her big brother (my stepson) was in the back to entertain her. When daddy was with us I would sit in the back and comfort her in the car seat (and even nursing her while he was driving bc it was worth everyone’s peace of mind and we just have country roads here, not highways). Now we have 3 kids in the back so there’s no room for me to sit next to new baby 🥲 I may have to try the trick with printing out a photo of my face.

And yes the Happy Song was a game changer with my first too. Doesn’t seem to have an effect on the newborn yet, but hopefully soon. My first also liked a set of Koshi chimes over her car seat. When she started eating I used dried mangoe bc it gave her something to gnaw on that wasn’t too messy, and with a large piece it wasn’t a choking hazard. At 2.5 years old she still gets a mango bribe for letting me do her buckle

And I do believe letting a baby cry in the car seat results in the same stress response as CIO. To me “sleep training” where you’re there comforting baby but not picking them up is still CIO and very distressing for baby. Car seats are another unnatural container that our ancestors didn’t have to deal with, but that has become a necessity in ours. I would seriously prefer going out in a horse and buggy where I could hold my baby, over putting baby in a car seat (we actually had carriage horses growing up so I know what this entails).

How do I find out who is hosting her website so we can cancel the services?

I’m an artist (not a coder) and I’ve done web design via Wix for friends and family (actually won an international award for best music website for the band I was in). My mom is a doctor and wants me to take over her website. She’s been paying some company $300/month and she has just a simple website with no services or e-commerce so this is way overpriced. She is a boomer and is not computer literate and has no idea how or where it was set up. She has no idea who she is paying, just knows that it keeps being charged to her card. All I know is it says 2023 on the bottom of the site. And we think that the registration is with godaddy but we’re having a hard time getting access to her account.

Has anyone else here had a baby that was born pre-term but was a normal or larger than average size? I recently gave birth to my second baby at 35 weeks + 5 days, so almost 4 weeks early, but my baby weighed almost 8 lbs!

At first I thought I must have had my calculations off on the due date, but I went back to my fertility calendar (we were trying so I was tracking diligently) and everything was correct.

She was born quite red which is a premie symptom bc their skin is more thin and translucent. She also has really skinny legs (even for a newborn). But otherwise she was perfect and healthy!

Baby was born at home. We had been planning a homebirth all along and didn’t plan to have a midwife this time, just a doula (My mom is also a doctor and was planning on flying out to us to be there for a month around baby’s due date). But baby came unexpectedly and so fast in only 1.5 hours of labor! However I wasn’t worried and the birth was very smooth (lots of oxytocin so I was laughing with contractions, same as my first birth). My husband’s first baby was born 6 weeks early (mom had an adverse reaction to the TDAP vaccine) but he was just a tiny 5 lb but perfectly healthy baby and he didn’t end up needing anything from the NICU. So when I realized I was in labor early and fast I kept calm by remembering this.

My firstborn girl was 9 lbs 5 oz so it seems possible that a premature baby could still come out at a normal weight.

When it comes to kitchen scraps, which ones should I set aside for chicken treats and which ones are best just adding to the bug bin?

We just bought a ProtoPod from a friend who set us up w a bucket of larvae to get it started. We live on a large 28 acre organic farm in Hawaii have access to ground scores of tropical fruit so will be able to fill the big bin with overripe mangos, jackfruit, avocados and soursop which grow nearby. Should we just give our family’s fruit/veggie scraps to the chickens to give them some variety? (The farm owners have asked that we contain them from free ranging bc they are getting into the garden.) Or just turn everything into larvae? Or have 2 compost buckets to separate?

Overall my 2.5 yo loves her 1 month old baby sister and is very sweet to her. But when she sees her being babyworn she has a meltdown or won’t stop whining about “my turn!” and “up!” This has been happening especially in the mornings, as I think she’s still a little cranky and also hungry. I’ve tried giving her the first turn in the morning but things were just as dramatic when I had to put her down.

I wear baby in a Sakura bloom scout or in a ring sling. I can put toddler in the ring sling or Sakura Bloom Onbuhimo (tho she prefers to “see mama!”). But she’s so heavy I can’t wear her for very long (and any time I have the newborn out of the carrier is my chance to get the tasks done that are hard while babywearing.

Any tips? I love babywearing and it’s the best naps my newborn gets. With my firstborn I didn’t get into it until a few months in, so spent most of the days nap trapped. But that’s not as much of an option now with a toddler to care for.

We just had 2 dead chickens and noticed red mites crawling all over a broody one. We live in Hawaii so bug infestations are particularly stubborn here but I didn’t realize they could kill otherwise healthy adults! We think the infestation started when one of our chickens brooded on a wild nest and then brought back 16 chicks (most of them died and we thought it was rats but maybe it was the mites).

We’re considering a strategy where we just block off the main coop for the 7-10 day life cycle of the mites so any mites in there will die off if they don’t have any food sources. Our chickens have a large fenced area that they hop out of to free range and they like to roost in the mango trees over our coop, not inside. We just acquired a separate mini coop w nest boxes where they’ve already started laying some eggs, and we could make a few more cozy nooks for temporary nests. There’s no natural predators to worry about for the adults in Hawaii (other than the mites), so the fancy coop my husband built is really just glorified nesting boxes. We would have to kick out our broody hen and give up on the clutch of eggs she was trying to hatch, but she’s got a lot of mites on her and we wouldn’t want chicks hatching into an infestation.

We’d also have to treat any infected chickens directly. So far we have DE, dust baths, garlic water (spray and in their drinking water). Any other recommended direct treatments?

Could this strategy work? Don’t really want to invest a ton of energy in bombing the coop considering the mites could easily come back bc our birds free range and there are wild chickens everywhere. At least a quarantine of the coop wouldn’t require too much effort.

We could also powerwash, re-paint and caulk the inside of the coop so there’s less cracks for them to hide in the future. And for prevention regularly add some DE, garlic spray and herbs?

Any other ideas?

Wondering if there are any other stepparents here who are actively homeschooling their stepchildren? What has your experience been like and what kind of expectations do the parents have of you? How does it affect your relationship with your stepchild?

I have a 6 yo stepson, a 2.5 yo and am 8 months pregnant. I was homeschooled partially myself as a child, and I want to homeschool my children so it’s something I’m pretty passionate about.

He did public K to start but by Christmas they took him out bc the mom moved far away and we started doing 1 month on/off schedule. She said she was down to homeschool. I did the first month and we had great progress compared to public K where the teacher said (in front of him!) that he had trouble focusing and was getting behind. We did a reading (TYCTR in 100 easy lessons) and math (Saxon) lesson almost every day and built good momentum. Sometimes we even did 4 back to back lessons bc he liked the idea of “getting ahead.” We also do jiujitsu 3x a week, a weekly homeschool coop group and volunteer weekly on a farm together.

When his mom’s month came she did about half the amount of lessons and it sounds like it was a struggle for her. She’s moving back this month and it sounds like she wants to drop him off for me do the lessons on her days. Btw she and I don’t communicate anymore due to her being verbally abusive… esp after she found out about our 2nd pregnancy, so I just let dad handle things now.

His dad works very hard and long hours in construction to support me being a SAHM, and he doesn’t have the same patience for homeschool lessons like I do. Theoretically I don’t mind taking on all lessons bc we can build momentum, but I’m worried about burnout and resenting the mom for not stepping up. She already relies on a lot of screens with him and doesn’t even use educational content, just lets him watch YouTube and other junk (we do no screens at our house). And I’m not sure how it’s going to work out with the schedule moving forward. Plus the new baby is coming soon.

Also I think one of the main issues I’m having is that me being the main teacher often puts me in the “bad guy” role compared to the parents. The reality is that his parents still baby him a little and I’m the main one pushing him past his comfort zone. He gets triggered by things like me having him carry his jiujitsu bag to/from class (“you never help me with my things!”) Or when I ask him to sound out words (that I know he can do) in his story books he says “My mom and dad read to me but you always make me read!”

The stepmom role is already so challenging as they’ll never love you like a parent. I don’t expect him to either. He says I love you a lot and is very affectionate with me, but he still says harsh truths like “I miss my mom so much, but I won’t miss you” or “you’re not my family” and it still stings that he can’t understand how devoted I am to his growth and happiness. He enjoys his lessons with me bc he likes the one-on-one attention. But he also knows at his mom’s house he doesn’t have to work as hard and he gets lots of screentime. I worry that in the long term it’s going to make him resentful of me.