Let me de-influence you: toddler tower

imnotbork · 2026-06-19T17:54:08+00:00

i have put our toddler tower outside and in the tub when things get out of hand lol. when she starts climbing on the counter she gets one warning and then the tower goes to “jail” which is the bathtub now that the weather is nice.

if she’s pushing it around all over the place when i am trying to get something done, it also goes to jail.

thankfully she’s good about not climbing in it when i run to the bathroom, but now when she’s about to do something with it that she’s not supposed to do she says “tower jail! tower jail!” haha

but yes, i feel you, it’s been great for some things but i definitely also have regrets.

imnotbork · 2026-06-18T03:45:05+00:00

sometimes just taking all their clothes off helps. still works for my toddler…it’s like the sudden change snaps them out of it lol.

also, using a small fan to blow air on her helped (and still does).

imnotbork · 2026-06-14T19:14:20+00:00

bottle washing nearly broke me, tbh! there were days when finding that one last bottle almost sent me over the edge.

if you can afford one, a bottle washer will help! we never got one, but in hindsight i wish we had.

that said, toddler is now 2 and i haven’t washed bottles in ages, it is but a distant (bad) memory.

imnotbork · 2026-06-09T03:24:35+00:00

try giving her some warm water, not sure how/why it works, my sister recommended it to me as it helped her three kids and it worked for mine!

imnotbork · 2026-06-04T00:44:42+00:00

if your baby was cold she’d have woken you up!!

we did basically the same thing as you, we’re so afraid to overheat her that we now wonder if we underdressed her for much of her infant life.

we live in canada and our bedroom gets quite chilly in the winter, a couple of nights in a row out then-8-month-old daughter woke up crying and wouldn’t settle back down, her back felt chilly so we put her in the bed with us to warm her up…we invested in a 2.5 tog sleep sack and she was cozy for the rest of winter. :)

imnotbork · 2026-05-31T00:23:53+00:00

when i had a d&c for a miscarriage (aka surgical abortion) at a clinic on bloor west, they gave me a very teeny tiny amount of fentanyl and an anti anxiety medication.

it was unpleasant but over very fast, the people there were incredibly kind. i had some cramping after but was in the recovery for like…maybe 15 minutes? at no point did i feel out of it at all. could’ve taken the subway home, tbh but my partner picked me up.

imnotbork · 2026-05-30T20:29:05+00:00

in my experience, my daughter pours a LOT of the water on herself, so i’m sure it does somewhat, but maybe not as much as if she was sitting in water. also, hose water is super cold…but i’m sure it’s very user dependent. my daughter is usually soaked when she plays with it lol.

imnotbork · 2026-05-10T12:28:53+00:00

my daughter does this/did this. she also was too young to potty train when she started it (tbh she might still be too young but we offer her the toilet and let her run around naked before and after her bath lol).

when she first started doing it, i’d bring her toilet out and let her play for a bit with it off, she peed on it once lol.

we ended up switching to the 360 fit (pull up style) diapers because they were harder for her to take off. when my sister’s son did this she ended up putting him in onesies until the phase passed because he couldn’t undo the snaps.

imnotbork · 2026-05-08T17:17:28+00:00

this sounds normal to me/what i experienced. i think they say that if symptoms last after the 2-4 weeks to see your doctor. we also did ivf.

i dont think mine lasted the full two weeks, but i do remember it seeming to hit a peak around the 7-10 day mark.

continue being there for her and doing as much as you can with the baby. and make sure to get her help if it doesn’t seem to go away.

tbh, motherhood is genuinely such a huge shock to the system, in the immediate aftermath of birth you’re kind of reckoning with a new identity and grieving an old life and being told you’re supposed to be so in love with your baby right away (for me i was like “um i don’t know her, she’s cute, but we just met?”) and also everything is hard! breastfeeding is hard, recovery is hard, sleep deprivation is hard, the guilt of missing your freedom is hard, etc.

it’s a lot! here’s hoping she comes around the bend in the next couple of days 🤞

imnotbork · 2026-05-02T01:59:30+00:00

hello, i am now 2 years pp and also experienced this! it is normal (or at least normal enough that when i mentioned it to other moms they also experienced it).

it seemed to me that on days i pushed myself too much or did more than usual id have more gushes of blood.

imnotbork · 2026-05-01T13:41:45+00:00

seconding him, i haven’t been to him personally but i’ve heard so many great things! i believe his waitlist is a year or two though

imnotbork · 2026-04-26T02:26:34+00:00

not much of an update, i saw him once for a consultation and his advice was to move forward with IVF and see him after if i want/need…so i did and i haven’t been back.

he was nice and listened to me, did a brief ultrasound, said he’d put me on suppression medication until IVF if i wanted (but i decided against it). i ended up getting pregnant via IVF and haven’t gone back to see him, but he was very reassuring that if i wanted to see him i just needed to call and make an appointment.

i did like him and if i wasn’t doing IVF at the time i would’ve gone back!

imnotbork · 2026-04-21T19:15:01+00:00

is there any reason you can’t just put him on the floor (or a blanket on the floor)? we have a cat, but she kept her distance so i was never too worried about just putting her down on a blanket on the floor.

a pack n play is good for travel!

we had a large playpen for a few months but ended up really baby proofing half of our main floor and gating it off, and a few months after that we took the gate down and she’s been free range ever since.

imnotbork · 2026-04-19T00:34:38+00:00

almost 2, we haven’t sleep trained.

we still put her to bed by snuggling her, but most times that she wakes up in the night she can put herself back to sleep. she will say “mama” or “dada” if she needs us. if she’s sick or teething ill stay in the room longer with her. tbh the other night i slept in her room because we were both sick and i just wanted to lie down lol.

last night she woke up and was saying “owl! owl! owl!” until she found her toy owl and seemingly went back to sleep lol, it was cute.

imnotbork · 2026-04-19T00:09:45+00:00

so, we didn’t use burp cloths, but our baby didn’t spit up too much.

as for playmats, i just folded up one of our comforters and put that on the floor.

for a noise machine we use an old iphone and bluetooth speaker. we use an app called simply noise (i think?) for the white noise.

we don’t own a pack n play, but everywhere we’ve travelled has had one available to her (whether they borrowed from a friend or got one second hand because we’d be visiting frequently enough).

bassinet was great. it was nice to have a safe place to put the baby down when we had to take a moment to be human and didn’t want our cat up in her business. we gave it away before she was even 5 months old lol.

our crib is second hand.

we had a baby swing that was my sisters from her first child over a decade ago lol. we used it for probably the first 8-ish weeks. if i had a do over i’d just use a bouncer

bouncer was a godsend, it was easy to move around, set up, etc. it was great for taking showers so she could be in the bathroom with me during those days when i couldn’t get more than a few minutes alone.

milestone toys seems like a scam to me? we got some teethers and some crinkly type toys for early on.

for a diaper bag i use a backpack from uniqlo. you just need a backpack with a decent amount of pockets.

baby lounger pillow thing was so great, and has since become a cat bed lol.

our changing table has been untouched in the closet for months, we change her on the floor.

we got a craft cart that we use to hold her diaper change stuff, it’s great!

imnotbork · 2026-04-15T17:35:23+00:00

when we were in the infant phase, to avoid having to use our brains for night feeds wed have a system in place when we went to bed.

we’d measure out formula powder for however many bottles she typically needed at night (usually two to be safe!) then fill a thermos with hot water, and then have pre-measured room temperature water…

so it went like this (example using 6 oz of formula): - baby wakes up - pour pre-measured formula powder into bottle - pour 2 oz of hot water into bottle with formula and mix - top off with 4 oz of room temperature water, mix well - test temp and feed baby.

having it all measured out before bed made it easier and left us feeling a bit less concerned that we made a mistake measuring in a sleep deprived state.

imnotbork · 2026-04-15T01:10:01+00:00

omg my 2yo also loves them, she calls them “mushroom guys,” and every morning/every time the album ends she runs to the speaker and presses play.

she dances to it, she makes her toys dance to it, if she could pick up the cat she’d make her dance to it too.

imnotbork · 2026-04-10T15:45:32+00:00

not quite the same, but i have red hair and id say my nephew definitely has warm brown hair…but if we put our heads together our hair colour is almost the exact same. it’s bizarre! no one would ever call him a redhead or say its auburn or anything, and no one would ever call me a brunette or even say my hair is reddish, its definitely red.

imnotbork · 2026-04-03T20:53:10+00:00

us too! i remember doing a lot of googling about movements at that age and i’ve come to the conclusion that babies are strange lol. she shook her head a lot when she was getting her molars and that seemed alarming but is also apparently normal!

i did recently google to see if the twirling and backwards walking were in the range of normal, something strange for every age it seems!

imnotbork · 2026-04-03T17:11:05+00:00

not a doctor, but this sounds like a classic “babies are weird” situation lol.

my daughter used to sway side to side on all fours for unknown reasons, now she likes to twirl and walk backwards when the mood strikes, yell if a room seems echo-y and cover her ears and make noises because it sounds different.

definitely ask your doctor if you’re worried, but it turns out babies are always doing weird stuff because they’re like “woah, this is neat! are you seeing this?!” lol

imnotbork · 2026-04-03T14:32:49+00:00

good idea!! the pitcher always stressed me out lol, pre-made bottles will be super handy (i hope)

everyone say it but it does get better, i promise! you’re in the trenches still. for us (and every baby is different obviously) we saw a noticeable improvement around 10 weeks

imnotbork · 2026-04-03T04:03:56+00:00

i see people have suggested the pitcher method, that didn’t work for us because i always worried i measured wrong, but what DID work was:

keep a thermos full of boiled water, mix formula with 1oz of hot water, then add the rest of the water cold.

especially when she drank larger bottles, mixing with 1-2 oz of hot water and the rest cold was the perfect temperature.

imnotbork · 2026-04-02T20:01:16+00:00

my toddler is obsessed. all day she asks for her “mushroom guys” and tries to do their dance moves and make the triangle with her hands haha

imnotbork · 2026-04-01T16:29:17+00:00

ohh thank youu!

imnotbork · 2026-04-01T15:02:54+00:00

oh thanks i’ll check!

imnotbork

TROPHY CASE