Straight Dope Dad | A Father's View on Parenting

Summary: Sometimes your child’s behavior is so bizarre you simply don’t know what to do.

I’m taking care of the aquarium when my daughter comes out of the bathroom after brushing her teeth.

“I think it’s your turn to brush your teeth.”

“I will later.”

“I really think you should brush your teeth right now.”

“Oh no. What did you do?”

I walk into the bathroom and start looking around. It looks normal so I reach for the toothpaste. Just then my partner yells out from the living room.

“Don’t use the toothpaste! She put soap on it!”

“What, are you serious?” Continue reading

Summary: She chewed her dolls, the furniture and anything she could get her hands on. You can’t stop her from chewing but you can stop her from chewing the good stuff.

My daughter at 18 months. Number one rule in the house. It can't fit in her mouth.

How many water-filled toys have we tossed? All of them. Usually within a day or two of buying them. Balloons were popped by mouth long before they deflated naturally. Rocks were tossed back like they were pills. Anything that could be popped, punctured, gouged or crushed was soon destroyed by my daughter. While she was teething she chewed grooves into the bottom shelf of our entertainment center. Long after all her peers were playing with marbles, fake jewelery, and little toys, our daughter still had to be restricted to anything that couldn’t completely fit in her mouth. She was a 24/7 walking choking hazard. Continue reading

Summary: Unsatisfied with the teething rings on the market, I made my own with surgical tubing and exercise bands.

WARNING: Be very careful when making your own teethers and always supervise your baby when using a homemade teether. If they can fit something in their mouth, it’s too small. If they can break it apart it needs to be redesigned. Basically, don’t be stupid and negligent.

My daughter kicking it in the grass with her home made teething rings. The one on the right is smooth and the left one is ribbed (for her pleasure).

As I discussed in a previous post my daughter has an intense need to chew.  She’s six years old now, and though more selective on how she expresses her oral inclinations, she’s still a put-things-in-your-mouth type kid. But hey, both of her parents are very oral so it’s no surprise that she came out that way as well.

Like most parents we tried about every teether on the market. She use them all to varying degrees but was not totally satisfied with any of them. She didn’t care for the knobby plastic ones that you freeze. Many of the other rings and chains were just too hard for any extended use. Continue reading

Summary: My daughter loves blood, dead animals, scary movies and making homemade haunted houses. It’s in her blood, so to speak. So why not go with it?

Winnie the Pooh, with bug eye glasses crying blood onto his meal of skeleton parts, pieces of zombie, spiders and eyeballs. Yummy!

It’s no secret that raising my daughter has not been easy. Early on there were some tough challenges around potty training, social anxieties and violent tantrums. But some parts of her are so unbelievably cool, that it kind of makes up for the rest. One of those things is her love of the dead.

No, not the band, I mean dead things.

Human corpses, bloody body parts, dead fish in the supermarket or floating in an aquarium, roadkill, that type of thing. And of course, haunted houses and Halloween. Which, at our house, is pretty much everyday. Continue reading

Summary: Using baby sign is pretty awesome and can give you insight into what your pre-language child is thinking.

Baby sign for "what the fuck, dad"

My daughter was never one much for baths. Even as an infant she preferred a shower. However, that is not what this story is about, which is baby sign.

Back in 2003, after our daughter was born, we decided to use baby sign as a communication bridge until she could talk. You can start anytime from birth, but you really won’t see any results until they are developmentally ready. So for a while it just seems like your spinning your wheels. The bummer is, you kind of have to go through that phase were you sign endlessly and nothing happens for your child to actually be able to implement it when she’s ready. Continue reading