The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Congrats! You may have read some parenting-related threads previously that I've interacted in so apologies for repeating myself if so. (You aren't Dave Grohl.... are you?)
Sorry, it's a lot, just the tip of the iceberg. I'm basically a meatsack wrapped around opinions, so there's always more if you ask.
I think we've got a new TheMotte motto!
I thought it was the first few months, before they stopped waking up needing feedings in the middle of the night, myself. My kids were never unhappy while being carried when they were pre-walking, and the "I'm getting a ton of exercise" stage was a welcome change from the previous "I hope I don't fall asleep while driving to work" stage.
(things then get awesome, with the "oh my God the little alien is trying to communicate, this is like First Contact" stage)
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Can you expand on this? When do you move them into the crib? And why do you let them cry it out?
Edited for clarity. But what I mean is when they graduate from being in your room/bassinet into their own room and crib.
Many parents fail at this step by checking on the baby far too often. A baby crying at night can just be sad and has to tough it out. The statistics say it's 100% the way to go but it's hard. Families I know ship their kids to a sibling or parent for multiple days because mothers "can't take it".
My advice about the checklist is for when you're not acclimating them to sleeping alone.
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If I can add a tip, teaching your baby some very basic signs is really, really helpful. At 4-6 months you can begin to teach simple signs for Hungry, Drink, Done, Play, Sleep etc, for my youngest two it helped in finding out what is wrong, and anecdotally they seemed to be more content once they were able to communicate even very basic information. Very useful in the time before verbal communication is possible. And the babies I have seen (my own kids and others) seem to pick it up reasonably quickly.
When teething, my youngest was able to sign "Tooth Medicine" when teething which was a godsend when he woke up screaming.
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