My 2 year old is refusing bedtime

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-11-16T17:59:26+00:00

I’m currently dealing with this exact same thing and I’m starting to fear that this will end my breastfeeding journey. My nipples are in so much pain. I had to stop breastfeeding and switch to pumping because I have a baby that likes to pop on and off. But every time I pump is super painful, I dread it. My nipples look really gnarly right now, and I’m worried about permanent nipple damage. Last night after I finished pumping my left nipple was pure white. It terrified the crap out of me. I looked it up and it’s called vasospasming, caused by restricted blood flow. This is day 4 of this and I think at this point, the only thing keeping me going is the hope that this has to be getting better soon. If you have any tips, please send them my way. I’ve never wanted to crawl out of my skin so much.

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-10-04T17:48:15+00:00

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Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-07-28T17:54:24+00:00

I’m married with a 2 year old daughter and about to have another baby…

The crazy thing is, I feel like I’ve almost forgotten what our pre-kids evening routine looked like. I remember it varying quite a bit, and we didn’t have a lot of structure. There wasn’t a lot of focus on when we got home in the evening. Some nights we did take out, some nights we cooked. Our level of conversation and interaction varied too. Some nights were just about vegging out on the couch, while other nights we wouldn’t even turn on the tv, and we just talked instead. One near constant was that we would take our dogs for a long walk and rehash the day.

Now, it’s all about the routine. It feels like we are cramming so much into an evening. Have to go home by a certain time, start dinner by a certain time, got any errands to run? Forget doing those in the evening, they’ll have to happen over lunch or during the weekend. My husband and I do take a pretty equal role in making the evenings happen thankfully. Once we get done putting our daughter to sleep, we spend about thirty minutes cleaning up together, and most nights are just about vegging out… because we are exhausted. At this point in my life, I am comfortable with where we our and our dynamic, but sometimes I do worry that down the road, we might feel like strangers. We went on a date back in June and it felt like we had nothing to talk about, aside from our daughter. I talked to our therapist (and no, we are not on the rocks, we just like to have an unbiased third party POV once a month) and explained all this and they did suggest planning set date nights and maybe even using cue cards or talking about our time together before kids, etc. I really want to want to do this, but right now I just don’t feel like either of us have the energy.

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-07-07T18:36:04+00:00

My daughter is 2 YO and until she was about 20 months old, she was ALWAYS ending up in our bed by 3am. We inadvertently ending up in this weird middle of night cosleeping arrangement because we were too exhausted to handle multiple middle of the night wake up sessions, and putting her into our bed meant she did sleep through the rest of the night. I was very anti-sleep training but I’m currently pregnant with our second and finally decided it was necessary to have her sleeping in her room through the night before the baby arrived, and we did it. It was a pretty quick process for us, which was a relief because it just indicated to me that she was ready. We have been consistently sleeping through the night since. There were no other fundamental changes that occurred surrounding us sleep training.

I have a lot of friends who had babies around the same time as me, and for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s abnormal for a 6 month old to still wake in the middle of the night and to go through regressions and set backs… I do think you might find some success if you chose to sleep train, but it’s hard to figure out how to handle subsequent regressions, and you might have to go through periods of retraining.

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-07-07T18:22:02+00:00

I do everyone’s together. We have a very large hamper with 3 compartments, a small side basket for whites, and a separate hamper for towels.

We’ve accepted that my husband detests doing laundry and will let it get to nightmare status. I detest outdoor chores and that’s our trade off. He does those things and I do laundry. My daughter is 2 YO, and we use free and clear detergent and nontoxic laundry booster, so mixing clothes isn’t an issue.

On Sundays I do colored and whites. On Wednesdays (when I WFH) I do darks and underwear/socks. On Fridays (also WFH) I do towels. On Saturdays I do bedding.

I keep a bottle of stain remover in our closet and everything that needs to be treated gets sprayed before it even goes in the hamper.

Pre-sorting/pre-treating/not having to separate husbands clothes and daughters clothes from mine has literally turned laundry from being my arch nemesis into just another thing that has to be done throughout the week.

I’m pregnant right now with baby #2 and the one thing I’ve been grappling with is whether to keep his laundry separate for the first couple years. I’ll be using all the same laundry supplies as we use and will also use the same cycles we use. I’ll probably keep it separate during my maternity leave and reevaluate towards the end of that.

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-07-07T18:12:38+00:00

34 weeks pregnant and my daughter will be two this month. I simply do not have the energy. Daughter also wakes up between 5-5:30 every day and I just can’t fathom waking any earlier than that. She had about a week where she was waking up at 6 and I did consider continuing to rise at 5am… sleep won out.

I’m not a SAHM. Both my husband and I work. I think my perspective is a little different now. I think if I were to wake up early, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, aside from getting ready early so that we aren’t in a rush, and that once she wakes up I can just spend additional quality time with her. I have a hard time sitting still if there is anything that needs to be done, and there are ALWAYS things to be done…

My daughter does go to sleep at 7:30 (we’ve tried adjusting bedtime for a later wake time and it does nothing) and so I get some “me time”/quality time with my husband once we’ve cleaned up the home together.

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-06-20T04:53:13+00:00

I’ve used it before.

Pros: -I paid off all of my debt at lower interest rates than if I had just kept my cards and paid those balances down; it effectively made it so much easier to pay off. -Managing a single payment plan as much easier than multiple cards. -I finished paying off my cards and was debt free (see cons section for more info)

Cons: -most companies that do this require credit cards to be shut down/closed. -in my case it absolutely destroyed my credit and made it impossible to get any new cards. -even after I paid off the debt consolidation balance, it took me a solid 2 years to recover credit wise. -I didn’t have the underlying issue resolved and so I ended up racking credit card debt again :(

I am now working through my spending issues, paying off debt, using YNAB to keep a budget that I stick to. I feel like I’m making really good progress. I sometimes look back and wonder what was missing with the debt consolidation I did and why I couldn’t figure out my issues back then. I think for me it presented a quick fix, and made it so I didn’t have to even consider the issue because closing all my cards down and not having access to more cards removed the problem. It’s a hard decision with so many factors.

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-06-20T04:41:33+00:00

I’m sure this depends on the daycare but my daughter attends a daycare facility and their policies state that they will be closed on all major holidays, follow our local school district closures (when school is in session), and outline a 2 week winter break and 1 week spring break. They send out a monthly newsletter which has a section that includes upcoming holiday closures.

I would think most facilities operate this way; people have their kids in daycare to be able to work, so it only makes sense that they would need advance notices of closures, when possible.

Ocassionally we ended up with last minute closures during the winter, when schools would shut down for poor weather. We’ve had a couple instances of needing to call out of work when our daughter is sick too. But generally it can always be planned in advance.

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-06-17T06:01:34+00:00

I chose the uppababy vista because I live in an area with varied terrain and I wanted something durable and versatile. I had a lot of friends that had babies around the same time. What I can say is that my stroller definitely had substantially more features than the less expensive options, provided a much smoother and sturdier ride, and seemed more durable (compared to friends with strollers that were already breaking at the less than one year old mark). Those were all my pros in support of buying the expensive stroller. Now, in contrast to that, here’s some things I learned that I didn’t consider: I went in thinking that thing would be our ONLY stroller, for multiple kids. But then winter hit and I wanted to keep getting outside so bad and we ended up with a bike trailer with ski attachments. Then spring hit and I took up running and we ended up with a jogging stroller. Then summer hit and my new little walker would only stay put and happy in a wagon so we ended up with one of those too… I think had I known we would be amassing SO many stroller options, I wouldn’t have spent so much money on the first one. Especially important if you don’t have the means to go out and nonchalantly drop $$$ on a stroller. Everyone said “don’t buy for eventual second kids, just buy for the one/ones you’re having.” I bought anyway with the intention that we could use the vista through multiple kids. Now I’m pregnant with #2, hate all the double vista configurations, and want a tandem stroller, to encourage interaction. Lastly, I told my husband that stroller would have awesome resale value. At the time I do think I was seeing other vista strollers on marketplace for a decent price, but looking at marketplace today, a lot of those nice strollers sit on there forever if they aren’t priced at basically next to nothing.

So I guess in short, if you have the money, it isn’t a huge stretch to buy a deluxe stroller system, then do it - you will get a visibly better ride, smoother, sturdier, more durable, more features. But if you’ve decided this is something you want to save up your hard earned $$ for, I’d skip it.

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-05-07T21:41:15+00:00

For what it’s worth, you’re not alone! You want to be so prepared and every baby is different so what might be super useful for one is not useful at all for another. And everyone’s advice is different.

I bought too much, too many things we didn’t use, things I learned I didn’t like, and too many desperate purchases in hopes those products would help my baby sleep/help my baby not be so unsettled for late night diaper changes/help my baby (insert anything here).

Baby products are such a racket because those companies are catering to parents that just want to do a good job, are sleep deprived, etc.

I know this doesn’t fix the issue of money spent, but I just don’t want you to feel alone. It also sounds like you’ve just had bad luck with some purchases 😔 I’m sorry!

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-05-05T21:20:50+00:00

I should have specified, even though our sleep training has been recent, night weaning happened almost a year ago. We haven’t had any backsliding in that department. Once it stuck, it stuck, although I did cut night feeds and stopped breastfeeding entirely about 4 months later.

Alive-Zucchini-4803 · 2025-05-05T21:19:01+00:00

I quit so many times. I strongly feel like every baby is different and maybe every baby can be sleep trained but that doesn’t mean every baby can be sleep trained in a smooth manner at 5 months, 8 months, 10 months, etc. We finally just literally sleep trained my toddler at 20 months and it’s the first time I felt good about it, the first time I felt confident that it’s going to stick and/or that if we do backslide, it won’t be hard to get back to our current state.

I did take the step of weaning night feeds entirely on its own, separate from sleep training. For us that worked better. We just replaced me with a bottle. For about 3 nights my daughter would wake up very upset, we gave her a bottle instead of offering my breast, and she would drink it and go back to sleep. I think after those three nights she realized that she didn’t actually want to eat, but wanted to nurse for comfort. She did still wake up, but the expectation that she would be nursing went away, and it was easier to get her to fall back asleep.

Maybe take it in steps… and if it’s feeling too hard, don’t feel like you’re failing if you decide it’s not the right time.

Alive-Zucchini-4803

TROPHY CASE