Unprofessional Parenting

Here is another interesting news video story. A group of teenagers start a random acts of kindness club that is apparently misunderstood by many people in their community. This is kind of funny in a sad way. A bunch of kids are trying to cheer people up and help out in their neighborhood and are met with suspicion and mistrust.

I have been posting a lot of videos lately but this one is too funny to pass up. I remember a similar story of someone trying to give out $300 worth of a tax refund to make other people have a good day. The person stood outside a store and tried to hand out $1 bills and it took something like three hours to offload the money because everyone walking by thought it was some kind of scam.

What a world!

Baby sign language has been making news for a while now. Here is an interesting video link to a news broadcast about a pre-school that is teaching baby sign language as a part of their curriculum. Proponents suggest that teaching babies sign language leads to earlier communication with parents as well as increased language skills overall. Critics say that it might delay the ability to actually learn to speak since the kids will rely on signing and won’t be pressured to learn to vocalize wants and needs.

It’s an interesting topic either way. I wasn’t opposed to teaching my son some signs but he started speaking very early so it didn’t seem necessary for communication at that point. I have friends who have had varying degrees of success with it though so it is still intriguing to me as a possibility with young children. If you child is going to be in daycare anyway it might be worth while to pick one with a curriculum that teaches signing. Check out the video and see whether or not you agree.

This one caught my attention since car seat recalls are always important. The model is the Britax Frontier Harness-2-Booster car seat and there is apparently potential for a problem with the safety harnesses on the unit. Basically there is a potential for the straps to come loose and not properly secure the child.

The impacted model numbers are E9L54E7, E9L54H6, E9L54H7, E9L54M6 and E9L5490.

The good news is that this is a relatively easy fix. Be sure to check the bracket behind the seat that holds the straps in place. If the straps are secure then you are still in good shape and can still use the seat. Britax will also send you some rubber fittings that slide over the bracket to keep the straps from coming loose anytime in the future.

For more information you can call Britax at (800) 683-2045 or visit the website at www.frontierrecall.com.

This story is from a little over a week ago but I was shocked to see the video recently. Apparently, one response to difficult economic times who those who use baby formula is to dilute the formula with additional water so that one can will last longer. The trouble with this is that infants very quickly succumb to “water poisoning” because their blood dilutes and sodium and potassium levels drop dramatically.

I can relate to the sticker shock of formula but it never occurred to me to dilute it with additional water. I breast fed my son for eight months and then figured I would switch to formula for the last few months until he turned one year old and could start drinking regular milk. Had I known how much he would drink and what the cost would be I probably would have just continued to breast feed until he was a year old.

That said, too much water for an infant is apparently a matter of life or death.  It’s scary to think about but when my son was little I remember arguments with well intentioned relatives who thought it was cute to let me son drink out of water bottles. It usually wasn’t much but once I discovered he had “sipped” an entire bottle of water when I left him with a relative for a couple of hours. I was angry and was never able to explain to the person why water could be bad for an infant (I didn’t know exactly why at the time - just that it wasn’t a good idea). Well, here is why:

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So far my son has had three trips to see Santa over the course of his lifetime. The first was pretty disastrous. My son was only a couple of months old and our local grocery store advertised for pictures with Santa so we decided to try it out and see if we could get a cute picture without venturing too far from home. “Santa” turned out to be about 6-feet tall and all of maybe 160 lbs. He wore a very old and stained suit and his beard looked like a dead animal he picked up of the side of the rural highway he used to get to the store. The pictures were takes with what looked like an original Polaroid camera - the big huge prototype version. I won’t even get into describing the backdrop but I’ve seen more professional looking decorations crafted in kindergarten classrooms (I don’t think there was macaroni stuck to it but I could be wrong).

In any case we learned our lesson quickly. For the past two years we have driven the 45-minutes to the mall in town where we are greeted with an adorable and very friendly Santa who clearly loves his job.  This year my son hesitated a little at first but when Santa asked if he liked tractors he lit up and we ended up with another great picture.

Unfortunately not everyone is so lucky. American Baby is running a scary Santa picture contest and I recently visited the online gallery.  It is very funny and worth a look if you have got a few extra minutes. If you have a picture you can also upload it to enter the “Spooked by Santa” contest. Good luck!

Hi Everyone,

Thanks so much for all who inquired after my recent bout with food poisoning. I am finally feeling much better. I couldn’t believe how long it took my system to get back to some kind of normal processing (or at least whatever normal is for a 7.5 month pregnant lady).

After I regained my digestive operations I found myself way behind on my work so it has taken a while to get caught up and back to my usual routine. Luckily, I still have time to get going on my holiday baking - my favorite hobby of the year.

In pregnancy news I went to the doctor today who was a little surprised that over the last four weeks I had only gained a pound. I thought that was pretty good, all things considered, and after I explained about being sick he agreed that since I did not actually lose any weight the baby and I must have handled it pretty well overall.  I’ll get back to posting on a more regular basis. I’m so very much looking forward to the holidays. Thanks again for well wishes!

Some well meaning relative gave my son a giant book of Curious George stickers for his birthday. Since I was very sick all weekend my son pretty much ran the house and I emerged from my fog this morning to find our coffee table cleverly decorated with troublesome monkey smiling back at me. Being my experimental self I decided to run a search and find out the easiest way to get rid of the stickers without wrecking my table. As always, test any of these solutions on an inconspicuous area of your furniture before going whole hog - just in case.

Here’s what I found:

Goo Gone:  Final Grade  A! This was the winner. I suspected this would be the case but sometimes this stuff isn’t handy so I tried a few other things as well.  This was by far the easiest though. I sprayed it on, left it for a minute or two and was able to pull up the stickers as well as the adhesive. A quick wipe afterward with a damp cloth and all was forgiven!

Skin So Soft: Final Grade C-. I thought this was an odd recommendation but gave it a shot anyway. I left it to soak a few minutes and came back to check. If all you are worried about is a small bit of adhesive from a tag then this does actually make it easier to pull off. I still had to do that thumb-nail scraping thing though and given the number of stickers on my table this would have still taken way too long.

Baby Oil: Final Grade C-. Like the lotion this would work well for a very small amount of adhesive. Trying to get the actual stickers off was still a challenge though and did still involve scraping.

WD 40: Okay, I didn’t have this one handy this time but it’s worth a mention. I know it works relatively well on adhesive but I can’t testify to how well it would remove an actual sticker. My guess is it would work better than the lotion or the oil though so it it probably worth a try.

Good luck. I’m so very glad to have that monkey off my table!

So, I appear to have contracted mild food poisoning from the salad bar at our local pizza joint last night. Luckily, it’s not the “projectile from both ends” extreme food poisoning but the look of food sends me into 7-month pregnant nauseous waves. My system seems to have cleaned itself out (I’ll leave out the details) but I’m terribly exhausted and annoyed that I can’t eat anything.

My husband keeps asking if I need to go to the hospital, which I think is a bit of an overreaction. I can keep down water if I only take small sips so I’m sure the hospital won’t do anything (except make me wait for hours to see anyone) at this point.

More than anything it is frustrating. Every time I try to take a nap I dream of being sick so I can’t escape! My son has been really nice to me today so I can’t complain on that front. I’m hoping to start eating again by tomorrow - we’ll see how it goes. 

This was too funny not to share. It seems like every parent’s nightmare. This woman and her husband are on the way to the hospital to have the baby and are pulled over and ticketed by a highway patrol officer.  Apparently they were driving in the breakdown lane to get around some of the traffic on the freeway.

One of the strangest parts of this (for me anyway) is that if you listen closely they mention that the couple was allowed to pass by two highway patrol officers but the third not only gave them a ticket but made them wait while he finished ticketing someone else. The making them wait part is just mean but what I want to know is why the heck were there three highway patrol officers on the road between them and the hospital? How far were they going and how overstaffed is the highway patrol in this area?

Anyway, enjoy!

My son had a mild case of diarrhea (gross) after Thanksgiving. I don’t know if it was the food or the traveling but at least it wasn’t too bad - until I tried to fix it. Tuesday morning he seemed fine and hadn’t done his business yet so I thought perhaps he was over the worst of it. To get us out of the house I packed up and headed to my office.

We went to lunch and he enjoyed chicken strips and french fries (mostly the fries which I thought wouldn’t be too hard on him) and a glass of milk. On the drive back to the office he exploded in his car seat. I’ll spare everyone the details (except for the few other people in the office who had to witness the cleanup) but it was ugly. Always prepared, I had brought another set of clothes so I cleaned him up, got him changed and he seemed happy again.

Until an hour later when the whole process repeated itself. I was out of clothes at this point so I had to clean up the car seat - from explosion #1, I didn’t realize this was necessary until I opened the car door and the smell hit me - wrap him in a blanket and head home. I did stop at Walgreens to pick up more Pedialyte and toted him along with only a shirt, tennis shoes, and a blanket around his legs.

When we got home he did it again and my husband valiantly offered to clean him up. He didn’t know what he was in for and after a lot of horrified exclamations from the other room he arrived back to say it was done but the smell was so bad, “he must have swallowed a book of matches or something!”

Our pediatrician has a handy online manual for such things so I pulled it up to see what might have gone wrong. It said stay away from fruit or fruit juice - check. Feed him things like potatoes, crackers, bread - check - did that too. Then I saw it and realized where I went horribly wrong. It said that dairy products will aggravate diarrhea so stay away from those too. I flashed back to the giant glass of milk at lunch. Oops. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

One day, several destroyed outfits, a set of washed sheets, and one washed car seat cover later my son seems to be doing much better. Lesson learned - the hard way.

*Note to childcare class instructors. PLEASE MENTION THIS! I most certainly would have remembered the “no dairy or your house will never smell the same” tip.