The Mom Crowd

I have heard of many schools here in San Antonio, Austin, and Houston that are closed, because of the swine flu. Are you at home with kids, because their school is closed?

Check out these posts about what to do with your kids while they are at home:

• Entertaining Your Pre-Schooler
• Bringing Outdoor Play Inside
• A Fun Craft or Gift with Magnets, Pictures, and Glass Pebbles
• Making the Most Out of Play Time with Your Baby

Yesterday my friend, Natalie, took her 3 year old son and 8 month old girl to the doctor’s office. They started taking the toys out of the waiting room just as her son was playing with them. When they spoke with the doctor they found out that there had been a confirmed case of Swine Flu in their office that morning. Natalie and her kids have been exposed to the virus.  You should check out Natalie’s husband’s political take on the virus here.

Are you afraid of the virus? Is it really a pandemic if only 50 people in the US are infected? Are you washing your hands more often?

This week Compassion International sent a team of 5 bloggers, 3 leaders, and 1 photographer to Kolkata, India (used be called Calcutta) to write about their experiences at Compassion International projects. These bloggers are witnessing extreme poverty, unclothed children and what the face of hunger looks like.

It is easy for us to look away or count the poor as a statistic. We feel helpless to cure poverty and to fill a little belly on the other side of the world. I would like to challenge you to follow and read the words of these bloggers everyday this week.

You may not be able to go to India yourself right now, but you can experience this amazing trip through their eyes. Mission trips to serve the poor change your life forever. Let the words of these bloggers change your world view. You may come to be thankful for all that you do have, you may feel compelled to support a child, or you may see miracles this week.

Click here to follow every post of each blogger here on the Compassion International website. Check it every day and walk with them on this incredible journey in India.

I don’t normally watch the morning news shows.  But yesterday, I was doing my routine search for the day’s weather and I saw a segment on the Today show about a New York mother who was arrested for endangering the welfare of her daughter.  Did you see that?

Madlyn Primoff, a lawyer from Scarsdale, NY, reportedly got so fed up with her two bickering daughters (ages 12 and 10) while driving that she booted them from the family car at an intersection 3 miles from home.  Primoff then drove off.  She stopped and allowed her older daughter to get back in when the girl ran after her.  But the younger daughter was left alone to fend for herself.

What astounds me most about this incident is what happened next: Primoff went home and reported her younger daughter missing.

That is when she learned the girl was already in police custody, thanks to a responsible citizen who took her in.  Mom was then arrested for endangering the welfare of a minor.

Today hosted a psychologist and a parenting expert from Momlogic.com to discuss this matter, and they acknowledged that all parents have high-stress moments, and that handling bickering children is inevitable.  They also agreed that this was not a good method for dealing with anger.  Instead of totally losing it and doing something reckless, parents should

• take deep breaths/count to ten
• stop the car to take a “mommy time out”
• have a plan in advance for how you will handle those high-tension, breaking-point moments with your children

Primoff made a mistake, no question about it.  My goal in this post is not to judge her harshly, but to elicit suggestions and techniques that have worked for you.  This is a cautionary tale.    Let’s take advantage of it.

The floor is yours, mom crowd!  What do you think?  How do you keep your anger in check when dealing with unruly kids?

Happy Earth Week!

Cloth diapering keeps disposable diapers out of landfills and it can save money, so I decided to cloth diaper my second child. Amelia has written about the benefits of cloth diapers before and I always wanted to try it. My problem with getting started cloth diapering was spending the time researching what to buy and spending the money on them. You can’t exactly just walk into a Babies R Us and buy everything you need.

Getting the Supplies

I spent a lot of time figuring out the different types of diapers and where to buy them. There are prefolds and covers, all-in-ones, fitteds with covers, pocket diapers, and so much more. I made my list and added up how much everything was going to cost and put it in our budget. However, every month something would come up and it got moved the bottom of the priority list. Then a lady at church heard I wanted to cloth diaper and very generously gave me a gift of prefolds, fitteds, Thirsties covers, Y-straps, and two wet bags. I also gave her forty bucks to “round out my stash.” She used diaperswappers.com to buy everything I needed. I am very thankful that I didn’t have to spend the time and energy to get everything while I was more focused on having my baby.

Using Cloth Diapers

After getting breastfeeding established with my son I decided to tackle cloth diapering and learn this new skill. We quickly learned that you need to be sure to tuck the all of the prefold diaper under the cover, so they won’t wick out on to his clothes. Also, it is helpful to be organized and set up a station. I bought two dollar store trash cans. One is for the cloth diapers and the other is for wipes and other trash. I only had a few blow outs of poo or sometimes the pee would seep through the cover onto his onesie. I am not very good at changing his diaper very often so I use 2 prefolds inside the cover.

Traveling with cloth diapers is fine as long I am sure to bring everything I need – extra diaper cover, extra prefolds, and my wet bag for dirty diapers. They take up more room in a diaper bag than disposables.

Washing and Cleaning

Once I figured out how to fold them and use them I had to learn how to wash them. It seems that every cloth diaper user has their own system. I went with the one that seemed the easiest. Amelia told me to run them through a cold wash first, then a second wash with hot water and soap. I use an regular detergent like All’s Free and Clear. Washing them is easy and it isn’t too dirty to touch the diapers, because they have newborn poo which isn’t that gross.

What is gross is leaving them too long before washing them. I got sick one weekend and went a few days without cleaning them. One fitted diaper grew fuzzy mold. After that weekend when I went to wash them I let the diapers soak in the washer over night in cold water. Then I ran them the next morning. When I took them out of the washer a few diapers had black mold spots. Either they grew from the soaking or from me waiting too long to wash them. I tried oxi-clean and even bleach, but the mold spots never came out.

Sometimes the diapers come out stained with yellow spots, so I sun them. All I do is hang them outside in the sun and the stains go away. (Those are my diapers in the photo.) I have no idea how this works, but it does! They come back to being perfectly white.

Is Cloth Diapering Working For Me?

I am currently cloth diapering about 50% of the time. I may not be 100% percent all the time cloth diapering, but I still feel like my 50% makes a difference on the environment. My husband changes my sons diapers during the night and in our sleep deprived state I didn’t want to make him change a cloth diaper. Also, I think I may not have enough cloth diapers, because I need to wash them every other day to keep up. I am not very good at washing them often. Also there are some days where I am super busy and overwhelmed so I don’t want to mess with them. We were given many disposable diapers as gifts as well, so I haven’t had to spend any money in diapers for my 7 week old son yet. I think when I have to spend my own money on diapers I will be more intent on cloth diapering more often.

How about you? Have you tried cloth diapering? What were your first few weeks like? Are you like me and always wanted to, but never wanted to spend the money to start?

Happy Earth Day!

The purpose of Earth Day is to promote awareness about the environment and to inspire people to join in the cause to take care of our planet.  There are so many ways to be involved in taking care of our planet that sometimes it can be overwhelming.  It is important to remember that we can all do our part, start slowly, then keep building on the changes we DO make to help reverse some of the problems we have created by NOT taking care of our planet.

For this Earth Day, I want to highlight a book called Healthy Child Healthy World by Christopher Gavigan.  Healthy Child Healthy World is an organization founded by parents Nancy and James Chuda, who lost their daughter, Colette, to a rare form of cancer when she was 5 years old.  They felt like her cancer was triggered by environmental factors and started to research how toxic substances and environmental exposures have an impact on children.  With the help of some friends and family, they started the organization to help educate the public and be an advocate for children and their environmental health. Christopher Gavigan is the CEO and executive director of Healthy Child Healthy World and is comitted to helping families make their homes safer for children.

The chapters cover just about every aspect of making your home a safer, cleaner, greener place for you and your children–even beginning with pregnancy and what you can do to help prepare your home for the baby. First and foremost, the way you eat during your pregnancy has a big impact on you and the baby’s health.  Avoiding preservatives and additives like MSG and artificial food coloring are a good first place to start.  In my birth classes we have one whole class dedicated to nutrition during pregnancy.  Good nutrition is important for everyone–especially when you are growing a baby!

Avoiding chemicals, like phthalates, in (some) lotions and other cosmetics can also help protect the baby. The book offers itself as a guide as you think about everything from baby showers to products to put (or avoid) in the nursery. Gavigan offers specific recipes for replacing the harsh, store bought cleaners with safe, homemade cleaners.  Store bought cleaners have chemicals in them that can cause problems like poisoning, respitory difficulites, organ damage, and deteriorating the freshwater supply.

The book offers interesting information about the ingredients in our beauty supplies–it is enough to make you consider replacing some of the products you probably use on a daily basis.

The chapter on Child’s Play is helpful and a great place for new parents with young children.  We have all been awakened to the idea that perhaps not everyone has the best interests of our children at heart after all those recalls of toys with high levels of lead in them.  Choosing toys, clothes, and baby products is most helpful early on–and gets more difficult later on if you are trying to avoid large amounts of plastic toys (that is from my own experience).  We have a lot of toys in our house–many of them plastic. If I could start over I would have a lot LESS plastic, and more long-lasting toys.   The chapter even has some recipes in it for safe art supplies!

Pets, pesticides, and indoor air pollution is also covered in the book.  I was surprised at how easy and simple some of the ideas were for minimizing and eliminating pests in the household without resorting to the more toxic chemical solutions.  I’m telling you, this book covers everything!  The back of the book is filledwith TONS of resources of retailers and organizations to help you along in your journey to making your home safer and greener.

If you are interested in having a resource on hand, this is a good one to have.  As you read through it, remember: “No one can do everything. Everyone can do something.”

What “green” things do you already do at your house?  Have you read this book? Heard of it? What did you think?