You gotta check everything!

Last week we came home to a flood in the house. Not an act of nature, but rather an act of a 4 year old. Yes, my child was playing with water post morning teeth brushing before we went out for the day and left the water running with a facecloth in the drain hole. Now that we are a week past it, I feel I can write about it a bit. As I was speaking with the insurance agent last week, she was quick to assure me that I'm not the only one this has happened too, in fact I'd be surprised how many people she speaks to who have had the exact same thing happen to them. So this is a friendly letting you know that yes keep checking the stove, the coffee pot and the windows before you go out, but also check the taps because you never know!

Dressing for Winter and Car Seat Safety

I was reflecting today how autumn seemed to slip away from me.  I can't avoid it any longer, after all Christmas is next week and we've already has a few dumps of snow in our neighbourhood.  Winter (or at least winter weather) is officially here.  It's cold.  We're into our mittens and warm hats.
Being Canadian, I take knowledge of how to dress for the weather for granted.  It gets cold, you add a layer, no big deal.  I have a friend who has recently moved here from Pakistan and the weather is quite a shock for her.  She finds the 10 degree (celcius) days of autumn cold.  She finds the -3 (plus a windchill to make it feel like -10) unbearable.  She was over the other morning for tea after we had dropped our sons off at school.  We both have daughters about the same age (1 year).  I undressed my little girl from her hat, mittens, lined fleece suit and boots and let her play.  My friend took a lot longer.  She removed a snowsuit, not one but two fleece suits, a scarf, mittens, and boots before her daughter was free to play.  "Is that too much?"  she asked.  "A little."  I said.  Her daughter may be warm, but also may be too warm and overheat.  So what's appropriate dress for cold weather like this.
Here's what my little one usually wears: a onesie with a sweater or a long sleeved shirt over top, a pair of babylegs (baby leg warmers), a pair of pants, and then either her snowsuit or a fleece bunting suit overtop.  A warm hat (that she can't get off herself) and mittens, socks and boots complete the outfit.  That's really all that is needed.   I'm a little wary of the safety of scarves (they can be tied too tight too easily, or, the end can get caught in a stroller wheel and pull to choke).  If you are out and about with a stroller you can always add a layer by adding a blanket too.
A lot of moms don't realize how big and bulky their little one becomes when dressing them for winter.  This affects the safety of strollers and car seats.  Fortunately, there is a lot more awareness around this issue.  Here's some ideas and tips to help you out.
First believe me when I say that adding snowsuits and layers affects the safety of the car seat.  You can check it out yourself.  Bring your car seat inside your home.  Dress your little one in full snow gear.  Now put them in their car seat.  Buckle them up.  Now take them out of the car seat.  Remove the snow gear.  Put your little one back in the car seat and buckle them up.  Take a look at how much excess seat belt has been pulled out to allow for the snow suit.  Quite a lot!  You may wonder what the big deal is.  Unfortunately there are instances of families being a car crash.  Due to the force of the crash the baby was fully ejected from the car seat because of the amount of room let out to allow for the snowsuit.  So what can you do?  You want your little one to be both warm and safe.
1.  Dress your baby in a lined fleece suit.  It's thin enough to be safe, but warm enough to be warm.  You can always add a blanket on top.  (I've found this to be the best with littler ones)
2.  Have your little one in their snowsuit until you get to the car.  Take the snow suit off and belt them in the car seat.  Then, put their jacket on backwards over their arms. (I do this with my older boy who is three.  He doesn't wear snow pants in the car.  He brings them if we are going somewhere that he needs them, but most of the time he leaves them at home.
3. Little babies in infant seats can use a car seat cover.  You want to get the kind that fits over top of the whole car seat as opposed to the kind that you belt in.  Nothing should be behind your little one in the car seat.  I don't know why they continue to make these things, but they aren't safe!
Winter can be a pain for lots of reasons.  The multi-layer dressing is just one of them.  Give yourself time to do it right.  Lets keep our kids warm and safe this winter!

The Dangerous Side of Potty Training

Over the past week, my 3 year old has become potty trained (daytime only). Yay! I'm so excited about this because let's face it, having more than one in diapers at a time stinks (pardon the pun), especially when you know that the older one of the 2 is perfectly capable of using a toilet. And now that he's a week dry I feel I can celebrate it. I really don't have anything new to offer to the "how to train your child" mix. I think finding the right motivation helps. With this one, it was the Ikea playplace. Ikea won't let any kids in who aren't trained yet (no pull-ups either). He was very jealous of his older brother getting to go in and he couldn't. So sure, I made sure we made one more visit to Ikea to boost him along. And today is celebration day. After lunch we are headed to Ikea where I will drop the 2 of them off for 45 minutes of playtime and I will get to shop with just the baby in tow.
So what's the danger? Well, you see this particular child has a habit of crawling into bed with us in the middle of the night. He also talks in his sleep. So one night last week I woke up to the sound of, "but I'm a big boy now, I don't wear diapers" followed by the distinct sound of his night diaper tab being ripped off. Yikes! Needless to say that was the last night I put a diaper on him at night - he's been wearing night pull-ups ever since.

Eat Your Veggies!

I've written about my picky eater before. He's my second child. He's turning 3 this weekend. I thought he would be getting better with his eating. He's not. He's getting much worse.
I know there are some of you out there who will insist that any child can be a good eater. I really don't know what to say to you except, congratulate yourself on a job well done with your child who will eat everything, and please don't continue to make the rest of us feel bad by pointing out that you just put sushi in front of your little one and they ate it up no problem. Same with enchiladas, lasagna and any sort of vegetable. My little guy won't even eat corn. I forced him (and yes, I use the word forced) to eat one spoonful of peas last Thursday and you would have thought I was pulling his arm off for all the noise he made.
"I NO LIKE THIS!" he screamed as he spit it back out at me. The only way that I got the little bit of it into him that I did was that he knew I had made custard for desert. He wasn't getting any without eating that spoonful.
And yes, I've tried all the tricks. He doesn't eat what is served for lunch?, there isn't any more food served to him until the next meal. We are cutting out all liquids in between meals except for water so he can't fill up on them. He just wants to eat what he wants to eat and is really, really stubborn about the rest of it.
He loves breakfast foods (cereal, toast, muffins and yogurt). But you can see the pattern there, bread and dairy. He continues to only eat fruit if it is dried (raisins, fruit leathers, apricots) or purred (all varieties of applesauce) and will only eat veggies unknowingly because I've hidden them inside pancakes or muffins or something else I know he will eat. Yes, I serve him the same foods we are eating at every meal (I will always offer). He refuses most meats except for chicken (sometimes he will eat fish, thinking it is chicken). And I really don't know what to do about it anymore.
My first child is not like this. He had his picky stage and grew out of it. At 5, he's a really good eater, surprising me even today my eating avacado. He was quite logical about getting out of picky eating. When he was 3 he didn't want to eat his veggies and started getting constipated as a result. We told him that eating his veggies would help make his poo not hurt any more. He started eating his veggies. For a while even declaring at the dinner table, "I don't want my poo to hurt!" (So much fun when you are in a restaurant). This same kind of logic doesn't work on my 2nd boy. He doesn't care, if he doesn't like it, or like the look of it, he won't eat it. And it's surprising to me what he won't eat. He loves applesauce but won't touch an apple. He loves strawberry "fruit to go" fruit leathers, won't even lick a strawberry to taste that it really is delicious too. I don't know, I just don't know. Do you?

It's Potty Time

Want to start a good old mama debate real fast? Ask how potty training is going. Here's a list of possible topics that can come out of this:
-when to start?
-are they ready?
-pullups?
-just underwear?
-potty?
-right to the toilet?
-what about at daycare?
-what about leaving the house?
-night training?
And the list goes on and on and on. I don't claim in any way to be an expert at potty training. I have ideas. I have experience with one child and I'm starting to get experience with my second. To our great surprise and wonder, our second has decided to start training on his own. I really don't know how this happened and I have no idea how to make your child decide to do this. Our boy is 2 and a half. We struggled training his older brother until he was 3 and a half. We tried everything. We read potty books. We filled him with liquid and sat him on the potty every hour. We tried reward charts and treats. We paid out so much money in pull-ups that I should have taken stock in the company and nothing worked. He simply wasn't ready. Do you want to know what finally did it for him? Hockey underwear. He loves hockey and decided that he didn't want to get the hockey players dirty. That was it. That was his big motivator and it worked.
I think our second is being motivated simply because he wants to be a big boy like his brother. We've had the potty out for a while now and let him sit on it when he wanted with no expectation for anything yet. The hope has been that we would work on potty training at some point before he's three and the new baby comes along (I really don't like having 2 in diapers). Last weekend, he shouted to me from the bathroom, "Mommy, I peed!" and I had this little naked boy running excitedly around the house. Sure enough, on his own initiative, he had ripped off his diaper and peed in the potty. I was shocked. And very excited. The next day I went searching for training pants. The thick white cotton kind. He told me he wanted to wear underwear - so that's what we did. He wears the training pants first with pair of little underwear over top. He's extremely proud of this. At this point we are only doing this while we are at home. He hasn't yet gone potty at daycare and we're not pushing it. He's still wearing a diaper when we go out because I don't think he's ready for that next step yet. Once he's a little more consistent with using underwear and making it successfully to the potty then we'll venture out diaperless.
How has it gone since that first time last Saturday? Pretty good. He's gone potty at least once or twice each day when we've been home. The times where he hasn't quite made it there, he's almost made it and told me he has to pee or has run into the bathroom and just didn't quite give himself enough time. We're taking the stance of being relaxed and encouraging about it. It's a learning process. We know he's starting to pick up his own body cues which is great, and now it's just a matter of putting it all together. Sure there's extra laundry to do, but it's to be expected at any stage of potty training (just wait until it's sheets for night training, then the extra pants won't seem like much). At this point we're not buying him pull-ups, but that's not to say we won't at some later point. I like that he feels wet immediately with the training pants, but they soak up enough that it doesn't leave a mess behind. Training pants can be harder to find these days (not like when we were kids and that's all the option our parents had), I believe I found ours at Zellers. They are basically a thick underwear, made out of a similar material to long johns.
As with anything potty training is something that you need to find what works best for you and your child. I don't think there is a perfect way to do it. Just take a deep breath and relax, everyone gets it eventually.

Clever Thoughts: Brush Your Child's Teeth Thoroughly

I know, I know, not very profound today.

But then, I spent my second hour long session holding my 5 year old's arms down and saying, "Wiggle your toes, don't move your head. Hold your head still so the dentist can work quick so we don't have to come back. Breathe through your nose. Its okay. Hold still. They're almost done with the drill."

Before we got into our first appointment with the dentist (a pediatric one we had to wait to see and drive two hours to get to), my son was having trouble chewing meat and uncooked vegetables because his teeth were sore. He was choking down bigger pieces of meat and having stomach problems because he wasn't chewing properly. He stopped eating salad, carrot sticks, crusts on bread, seeds and nuts, and numerous other crunchy foods he had previously loved last winter. I can imagine it will take us a few months to get to the place where he is comfortable eating those foods again.

We have brushed our older child's teeth every night. But he is very sensitive and intense and has a killer choking reflex. So for about a year, to really get in there you had to hold him down with your leg, hold his mouth open with one hand and brush with the other to get those back teeth clean. Needless to say, we didn't always brush the back teeth as thoroughly as we should have.

And we gave him milk in bed after his teeth were brushed. Soy milk, since he's allergic to cow's milk. About 2 months ago (after the first session with the dentist) it occurred to me that soy milk has a lot more sugar than cow's milk. So now he gets water. As does my 2 year old. I certainly don't want to have to go through this with a second child, if I can help it.

So that is my very practical clever thought this week. Take care of your child's teeth, even if they make a big fuss about it every night for a year or two (or three . . . ). Later on you will both be glad that you did.

Night Training

Potty training and night training are two completely different things. My oldest son has been potty trained since he was 3 and a half, we've been working on night training ever since. I really didn't know where to turn for advice on night training. Jill was no good, her kids just do it naturally and she has no idea how that happened. Another mother I know told me not to worry about it her son is 8 and still wears pull-ups at night. Oh great, I really did not want to be buying pull ups for that long!
We'd been working at training in pull-ups with ups and downs and it all came to a head a few months back. Our son was getting ready for bed at a friends house. The other kids his age happened to see that he was wearing a pull up under his jammies. That did it. Peer pressure. He did not want to be seen as wearing a 'diaper'. Up until that point he believed pull-ups to be different than diapers. From that night on he would only wear underwear to bed.
Well, one does not stay dry instantaneously. As I began to do a lot more laundry, I figured there had to be a better way. So I did some reading. It relaxed me a lot. It told me that boys were harder to night train than girls. Most boys aren't night trained competely until they are 6 (if they are still not by then you need to talk to your doctor). My son was 4 so I felt he wasn't so far behind. There are few things that we do now to guarantee that he will be dry all night.
1st - his last drink of the day is 6pm. Nothing after. He hates this, but knows that until he wakes himself up to pee he has to stick by it.
2nd - We both (my husband & I) wake him and take him to the toilet in the night. Our son is a pretty deep sleeper so he needs this help. I go to bed somewhere around 10-11 at night and make sure to get him up at this time. My husband usually turns in around 1 and he gets up him up then too. So far it works. I really don't know how long we'll have to keep getting him up like this but you can't argue with success. The happiness in his face when he first started waking up dry was priceless. He was so excited and so proud! "I'm dry!" he declared.