NZ Baby Blog

The upside of the economic downturn is that my builders are free to begin the next phase of our renovation project. The downside of course is that if we need to borrow money it’ll be that much more expensive.

However we’re pushing ahead anyway, working our way through our building consent and we’re up to the last phase of that. We’re making a bigger bedroom for the boy out of the old study & old bathroom, tarting up our bedroom, making an upstairs deck, putting big doors on to the downstairs deck from the kitchen, and reworking the old downstairs bathroom & kitchen into a scullery & kitchen combo.

In the meantime the contents of 3 rooms (including the boy) are all in the front room (bye bye trampoline room you were fun for the winter), and the contents of the kitchen are variously in the lounge, and in the office (bye bye Dean).

Kitchen pack up isn’t quite done, it’s just got to the annoying stage. It’s a little unclear how long we won’t have any kitchen facilities for, maybe only a week or two, maybe a month or two, depends on the plumber among other things.  So we’re accepting invitations to dinner, we’re even happy to cook it

I was going through my trunk of “stuff”, doing a cull, and found again my giant Barbie doll. I didn’t know much about her except that my Great Aunt Patty gave her to me when we visited her in Florida in the 80’s, and she’d said that I should take care of her. She made and collected dolls, so I figured she might be collectable.

So tonight i spent some time on the interwebchatthingy, trying to find out more about my Barbie.

Turns out she is an 18 inch supersize Barbie Bride, with 1976 Mattel printed on her, but probably made in about 1977. She is missing her shoes (Of course! What Barbie ever kept her shoes?) and her bouquet. But she still has her original dress and veil. She’s never been really played with but there is a bit of a rip in her dress at the back (or maybe just stitching coming undone).

I found 2 listings for the same sort of Barbie on different e-Bay’s, one for $84sish, and one for $34ish - mine doesn’t have her box (but does look just like the one on the picture, so I think shes all original).

She’s heading back to her trunk now, but it was a fun outing, maybe I’ll check the auctions again in another 10 years.

What to do when your dog is toilet trained most of the time, but sometimes they’re not.

The dog in question is a sweet young male beagle called Finn. His owners say he’s mostly toilet trained, but that when he comes back from kennels he pees on furniture and the bed. He then might ask to go out as well. So what’s going on and how do you fix it?

What’s going on?

He’s likely marking because the house doesn’t smell enough (like him) for his liking, and so he’s reclaiming the furniture and the bed by peeing on them.

He could be having a bit of anxiety & exhaustion mixing in too if he’s wetting his own bed as well.

What to do about it

I’d take a two pronged approach. If he’s not rock solid on toilet training generally then you need to try and get him that way.

Train a “Go Toilet”  Command
It’s useful if you can give your dog a command (or at least a suggestion) and they understand that they should try to go to the toilet. This is good for putting them out at night, making them go to the toilet at a good place on a walk, making them go when on a long car trip, and before going somewhere scary like the vets.
The command I use is “toilet time” and this is how I train it.

1. Accompany your dog outside when they need to go to the toilet, taking clicker & treats.
2. Wait patiently.
3. When they go to the toilet click and treat them.
4. Repeat
5. Next time, say the word that you want to be your cue word - eg “toilet time” when they are doing it, click and treat.
6. Repeat for a few weeks as often as you can.

Part 2

When the dog next comes home from the kennels you want to empty their bladder before they come in the house, praise them for going toilet outside, and discourage them from going inside.

1. Take dog from car to lawn/backyard. Get him to go use the facilities and let him wander about doing the territory thing outside if he wants to
2. Put dog on lead and take inside
3. Take dog around all his favorite “haunts” in the house, let him sniff and reacquaint himself
4. If he sniffs and looks away then I’d click and treat
5. If he sniffs and moves away then big treat
6. If he tries to pee, grab him and take him outside
7. If he has a pee outside, or after a couple of minutes so your heart stops racing, come back in with dog on the lead and try again.
8. If you use a crate, consider putting him in the crate for that first evening, or only having him out if he’s on a lead.

When you’ve had a few successful goes at this, you can then try doing the same thing off the lead.

We’ve just had a month away with our 2 year old and it went really well. In part it went well because we tried to be as prepared as we could be to fight off the twin event killers - hunger and boredom.

One of our outings was to a very “grown up” pot luck lunch with about 20 ish people including 4 or so other kids ranging in age from 10mths to 8 years. Our man had some food, a bit of a play and then fell asleep on dads lap - nice - we were the envy of everyone.

One of the mums of the older children though was complaining about how her child constantly interrupts her while she’s talking at these “do’s” and so we talked about some a techniqueto teach them for for getting attention quietly - “Quiet Hands”.

You teach your child to come up and gently touch your hand when they want your attention rather than shouting at you or dragging at you. Attention is the “reward” so you need to withold the reward for behaviour you don’t want. You might start by giving attention for shout and touch, but then go only for touch. Her child was 8 so she could explain it to him.

However it got me thinking about going out with a child to essentially an adults “do” and how she really had set herself up to fail. It was a house without kids, or any outdoors, so no toys and no running space. We took our travelling suitcase with toys in it (as we had on our whole trip), and the other children fell on them with great gusto.

So I think if going out with a small, or even not so small child, to a non child friendly place where you’d like to be able to ignore them, or keep them amused with minimal intervention take…

Toys and lots of them, some suggestions are
Toys that they and other adults will want to play with like lego, trainset, cars, mechano
Toys they like to play by themselves like crayons, colouring book
Books either to be read to them or they can read themselves
For older kids then computers, games, cards, anything that some other adult will take an interest in is a good idea (so not the new fangled game boy style things unless they will just play that themselves).

How many toys to take? Well that depends on how long you want to stay with them being quiet, but I figure one toy per 20 mins or so is about right. So if you’re wanting to stay for 2 hours, you’ll need about 6 things.

For our toddler we have a suitcase called a trunky that is both a good carry case and a ride on toy which is pretty well perfect for outings.

And I guess for anyone in their 30’s-40’s who is hosting this sort of event and would like to help thier guests with kids out, stockpiling a few books and toys would be most gratefully recieved.

It all starts to pay off about now! My boy will go the whole day if we’re at home taking himself to the potty, only needing a nappy to sleep, and often we make it to the potty post sleep as well.

He can’t do his clothes himself yet, and he’s not keen to ask for help so we have to be nappy free at home, but hey, some longer shirts and the heating turned up and it’s all good.

Long time no posts, I’ll get caught up sooner (or more probably later) but right now I’m back trying to click my boy to sleep (now nearly 18 months so more of a toddler than a baby).

The problem: Not going back to sleep quickly in the night without being patted/holding your hand.

My goal is for my boy to go to sleep by himself in his cot, without having him cry himself to sleep. He was doing it quite well, but has drifted off again due to a mixture of teathing problems and sickness etc. At the moment it’s taking up to 1.5hrs for him to get back to sleep, which is pretty hard on the parents at 3am.

Yesterday we got started.

The behaviour I want to reinforce

is quietly lieing in his cot - not standing up at his cot, and not crying, even when I leave the room.

The reward

is what he likes, which is being patted or cuddling my hand.

The method I’ve employed is similar to teaching a dog to stay

• Get him lieing in cot not crying first by usual method of cuddling/patting etc.

• When he’s been calm for a minute or so, withdraw the hand for 5 seconds, if he’s still & happy, then pat as a reward for about 10 times (so more patting than not patting initially).
• Then withdraw hand for 10 seconds, then pat for 10 times
• Then withdraw hand for 20 seconds - then reward
• Repeat building up to 1 minute
• Then 2 minutes

When I got to 2 minutes with me by the cot, I decided to go for distance as well.

As any dog trainer knows, if you change one variable, you need to compensate with the others.

• So it was 10 seconds with me 1 foot away, then back to patting
• 30 seconds with me 1 foot away then reward
• 1 minute 1 foot away then reward

Then

• 10 seconds with me over by the door
• 30 seconds by the door
• 1 minute by the door

10 seconds out of sight completely in the hallway - that was tricky, he got back up again so I went back to by the door for a longer time, then tried just a literal walk out the door and back in, got it.

Out of sight for 20 seconds but quiet (ie just out side the door)

Then the next biggie, me walking down the hallway (Squeaky floorboards don’t help my cause)

YAY managed that too (which is about 30 seconds), but he stayed horizontal.

So I’m up to about a minute out of sight, and he’s asleep, so end of practice for today.

This took about an hour, total awake time including potty and feed 1.5 hrs, so the same as if I hadn’t done it, but at least I felt I’d made better use of the time, and we didn’t wake up the whole house.

Sleeping was going really well for a few months, we had done a bit of toughing it out in the middle of the night after he’d started waking up and staying awake at 2am for a few days - this was at about 9 or 10 months.

1st night - did nothing asleep after 1 1/2 hrs
2nd night - cuddles etc for 1 1/2 hour, crying for 1/2 hr, sleep after 2 hrs total
3rd night - small cuddles, crying for 1/2 hr, sleep after 1 hr
3rd night - no cuddles, crying for 15 mins or so, sleep after 1/2 hr
4th night - no wakeup!

At the same time I instituted: Farex & Formula cereal before bed, milk before a bath, and a later bedtime. He was going about 10 hours, but now more like 9.

And now at a year the dreaded hungry wakeup is upon us again. It’s got a bit hotter, and he’s eating a bit less well during the day, and doing a heep more, walking and running everywhere, and thus waking up after 6 hours or so hungry. At the moment I’m feeding him but I’m thinking of ways to increase his food during the day so that he’s not hungry at night. So far I’m not getting far with it and my brain is a weeny bit fried.

Actually the plan worked for getting him to go to sleep by himself. I spent a few weeks diligently putting him in his cot, taking him out before he got upset, gradually increasing the time int he cot until he could be there for 15-20 mins quite happily. Then one night I left him to it and went and brushed my teath, came back, and he was asleep, yay!

Then of course I didn’t keep it up for a bunch of not very good reasons, so we’re back feeding to sleep at the moment because it’s quick and easy and reliable.

I’ve been thinking though that I might make the effort again to get him to go to sleep in his bed a bit more. Interestingly now he’s in his own room, he gets more soothing to sleep than he did in the room with me, because I want to make sure he’s well and truly asleep so I don’t have to get up again.

Hah, who has time to write a blog when you’ve got a (not sleeping) baby and a business - not me that’s for sure!

My babe has been generally not a bad sleeper - not a fantastic sleeper, but not dreadful. That was until he turned 7 months, and into the sleeper from hell.

For starters I got a head cold, so wasn’t sleeping that well myself, and then he got the cold so wasn’t that chipper either. So we had a 2 week feeling rubbish lead in when the sleep deteriorated. Then for about a week, he was waking up every 2 ish hours and I was definitely hearing about it.

For the first time ever I was getting to 6am with a dry nappy, because he’d wake up screaming, and then I’d put him on the potty, he’d do a big pee, and after a cuddle go back to sleep. While having a dry nappy is nice it was seriously doing my head in being woken up every 3 hours again.

I even started reading various sleep related webpages, about how to do controlled crying etc to get them to go to sleep. What was really gutting was that he’d been quite good about putting himself back to sleep in the night and this was such a giant leap backwards.

He still has a bit of a snotty nose, so I decided to tough it out until that was better, and have been planning how to do the essence of controlled crying, preferably without the actual crying. I did notice that most of the crying technique things say you should get them better within 1-2 weeks.

Maybe reading the webpages was enough, because he’s a lot better now - back to sleeping 8 hours, waking for a quick feed, and then back to sleep for another 3-4 hours.

What did I do to achieve this? Pretty much nothing. I thought it was suspicious that various people I talked to said that their baby wasn’t sleeping so well at around the same age. So did think that perhaps it would just pass - sadly like sleeping 10 hrs straight a night just passed as well. I did put him into bed one night awake and do the controlled crying, without the crying - so more controlled grumbling while I did my teeth, and then comforted him & fed him when he cried.

I also started having cheese and crackers again for afternoon tea - I’ve noticed a definite correlation between my protein and fat intake and his sleeping over the months (more on that later).

So my lesson for next time I’m panicking about sleep is to first think about how long the changed behavior has been going for (a week isn’t a permanent change), to give it a bit longer before doing anything radical, and to make sure I’m eating enough at the right time of day so that the milk is good and sleep making!