Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Quandries

At present, there are a few quandries running around in my head, so yall out there reading this (the 5 of you), suggestions welcome.  My brain is very heavily into school and school alone at this point (and yes, I can tell you the starting replacement dose for almost any electrolyte you'd like to have, thanks very much), which makes this burning desire to nest really challenging.

1. First to second floor communication with sleeping baby/kid: We have this lovely 2 story house that's pushing a century old.  Much of it gets awful cell phone reception, and we only have one anyway, meaning we could call from the cell upstairs to the land line downstairs, but the land line resides far from the living room/future baby territory.  Do we get another phone so the land line is upstairs as well and could be called from gchat in case of emergency or do we try walkie talkies?  Or does the sleeping parent get the couch and the infant care parent get another room on the same floor?  Previously with the kid, we took 3 hour shifts for rocking/diapering/whatever while the other person slept, and in case of actual kid sleep, we could call in early to get help moving the babe without waking.  I imagine some of this is in our future, so I'm hoping to develop a plan.

2. Split level baby accommodations: the spouse thinks one Little Monster bed is adequate, I think that perhaps we should have a downstairs bed as well.  We have one fancy changing pad and it will be upstairs in the kid room, and we'll have somewhere downstairs to change Little Monster too, but then there's the consideration of where the primary dirty diaper storage will happen (or if two small storage receptacles are better).  We've never had two real floors before (plus a basement) so no idea how this might work.  Help?

3. How long do you do "rooming in" anyway?  The kid slept in our room until she was 6 months, and the first 3 or so was on purpose with the next 3 happening because we had one room.

4. Cat troubles: Currently the adult bedroom has a door (read: is cat-free at night because zie is a bed hog) and the child bedroom does not, so the cat sleeps on the recliner in the kid's room (likes people I guess).  In the mornings, if nobody is awake at Cat Feeding O'Clock (time varies, but is usually about 5:45am), the knocking of all the things onto the floor commences, and then the meowing at our door if nobody is awoken by the ruckus.  Do we need to prevent the cat from terrorizing Little Monster as a way to wake everyone, or do we wait to see if Fluffinella realizes this is an option first, and should we be keeping the cat out of the crib even before it's occupied regularly (aside from the pirate octopus festive bedding, that is)?

5. Is there an app that does all the things that the Itzbeen timer times, and can I make it sync across iDevices and/or the internet itself (a web interface too)?

6. The life raft maternity pillow: should it come to the hospital too or do I beg for adequate alternative hospital-issued pillows? It is a bit big and hard to wash, but sooooo comfy...

3 comments:

  1. We have a two story house. Are you using cloth or disposable diapers? We used disposable for the first 2 months and had two diapering stations, one upstairs and one downstairs. We've never had any special type of diaper receptacle, just a plastic bag that was thrown out every other day. When we switched to cloth, we only had a diaper changing place upstairs with a bag for wet-only diapers next to it and a bag for dirty diapers in the bathroom in the next room after rinsing it. It was really not that much of a hassle to have to go upstairs for every diaper.

    We've never felt the strong need to communicate from upstairs to downstairs like you seem to be talking about, so I can't give advice there.

    The baby slept only in our room for the first 3 months (on the first floor). Then we moved him into his room on the second floor.

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  2. I can't answer a lot of these questions, but we have a two-story home as well and we found it useful to have two complete changing stations (one for each floor) and a place for the baby to sleep on each floor. Like Missy, we never really had a problem with communicating between floors. If necessary, we yelled. Or got up. The current official recommendations are for rooming in for the first six months. People do different things.

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  3. 1)We never worried about up/down communication, so no help here. I just yelled or got up.
    2)Stella slept in our room upstairs, and in a swing in the downstairs living room. We only changed diapers upstairs in the nursery (except the first few days when I was so sore). I found I liked the extra forced exercise. :)
    3)Stella slept in our room for just over 6 months. It ended up being about 75% in our bed, 25% in the co-sleeper. That only changed b/c Char insisted she move to her crib!
    4)Babies sleep through everything, and it might not be a bad idea to get her used to the mewing from a young age. Stella sleep through our damn dog barking all the time, for example.
    5)Not sure about Itzbeen comparable app. I just did a spreadsheet for the first couple of weeks to track diapers/nursing sides, and then I quit worrying about it once she seemed to be nursing/gaining weight appropriately. When I googled it ppl recommended "baby timer" for iPhone.
    6)I didn't bring a pillow to hospital. I was so tired after L&D that I slept hard no matter what, and with the belly gone, my back no longer hurt!

    Hope this helps. :)

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