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Austin Baby shutting its doors
Natural baby supply boutique Austin Baby (701 S. Lamar Blvd, 448-0118) is shutting its doors, according to a post this week on the store’s Facebook page.
“Dear Friends of Austin Baby, We are sorry to announce that we are closing our store. We appreciate all your love and support and will miss all our Austin Baby friends. We will miss watching your little babies grow up as fast as they have.”
The source for cloth diaper supplies, slings, BPA-free feeding items and other goodies started the business out of owner Erin Sheppard’s home. Sheppard opened a store in North Austin in 2007 and later partnered with Angela Colbert, moving to South Austin. That success led them to move again to the space on South Lamar in February 2009. The current incarnation included a sizable room for classes on babywearing, cloth diapering and meetings for other Central Texas mom and baby groups.
I visited the place a couple of times, even though we use disposables. Their sling selection was one of the best in town and the store floor was a comfortable place to try on several models to figure out what worked best with your own kid rather than try to guess from online descriptions.
I’ve tried to reach the owners, but no word yet on what will become of the diaper service or the online store. We’ll keep you posted.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Toys and gear
A mom’s hunt for toddler underwear
Add this to the ever-growing list of things that I never thought I’d be spending my time on. Kids underwear.
We have successfully potty trained our 2 year old, and it is time for Ayanna to move on from her padded cotton training panties. This should not be hard. After all, when I was a kid, underwear just sort of appeared in my drawers until I was high school aged — cotton briefs in beige, white and, if they were on sale, pink.
Oh, but things are not that simple.
First, Ayanna has apparently trained earlier than many kids, so finding panties in the smallest size is not an easy thing. Combine that with the fact that my little girl, though tall for her age frankly does not has much of a butt (not from my side of the family.) Her pants and even her current training underwear are forever sliding downhill. (Fruit of the Loom and Hanes start at Size 4. She is more like Size 2-3)
Everything at Target and WalMart looks like Dora the Explorer threw up on it. I like Dora. We have Dora flannel pajamas. We have a Dora action figurine. I intend to draw the line at Dora underwear (and that goes for any of her licensed character friends from Nickelodeon and Disney.) I’ve just had enough.
So then I wandered into GapKids, willing to pay a little more, if I could find something that A) fit well and B) had some innocuous design. I was elated to find not only basic white, but some cute designs without any cartoon characters in size XXS.
I skipped the “low-rise” cut and just got some bikini briefs, not thinking that they meant adult-cut bikinis. I though I had perhaps paid too much ($22.50 for a pack of 7), but these should work. After all, I skipped the lowrise cut.
Oh, but I was mistaken. I pulled them out of the package at home and let’s just say the lack of front coverage was startling for a product aimed at little kids. When they say bikini cut, they mean bikini cut.
So then I hunted online and there is as vast selection of girls underwear that appears to meet my criteria on screen at least, but they start at $8 a pair. Not an acceptable option since my daycare tosses underwear if the occasional accident is more than just urine.
I may have to order some from Swedish company Hanna Andersson, which offers 3-packs in for $14. Still not cheap, but they have sizes that fit even 10-24 month old babies in classic styles.
I’m sensing that as the girls get older this is going to be an ongoing problem. Finding age-appropriate clothing should not be this hard or expensive.
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Talking to toddlers about race
This weekend I ran a small social experiment, mostly just to see what my daughter’s responses would be.
Ayanna has had colors nailed pretty solidly since she was about 18 months old. We’ve discussed the color of the sky, bugs, bibs, food, shirts, pants and flowers. We have never talked about the color of people’s skin.
So I asked Ayanna, now 2 1/2, what color is her sister? Brown. What color is she? Brown. OK. What color is Mommy? Brown. And then the clincher, what color is Daddy? Yellow.
Personally I thought she would say pink, but who am I to question how she categorizes hues in the literal sense. Peach isn’t part of her vocabulary, yet.
In a multiracial household, we haven’t really talked about race with the kids. I suppose I’m waiting for them to bring it up.
I’ve questioned this approach internally since hearing this piece on NPR this fall shortly after the birth of my second daughter.
Headlined “Can babies be racist?” the interviewer talks to researchers who have found that kids make associations based on race much earlier than we thought — as early as six months old.
Professor Professor Briggite Vittrup from Texas Woman’s University talked about a 2006 study where parents started dropping out as subjects, even though they knew the subject matter going in, when they were asked to talk about race with their kids. The reason: It was just too uncomfortable.
The non-discussion of race, even if there is no malice behind can have consequences she says.
Children are exposed to so much - whether it’s from television which contains a lot of stereotypes, especially racial stereotypes. They hear things at school, from their peers. And then if there are no conversations at home, they form their own opinions. And I think that became very clear when we looked at their perceptions of their parents racial attitudes, where a lot of children just said they didn’t know or they thought that their parents - their white parents didn’t like blacks, even though when we looked at the parents racial attitudes measures, these parents had no problems with black people.
At Ayanna’s age, it isn’t so much that I’m uncomfortable with the subject. I just don’t want her to contribute to her starting to sort people the way she sorts her shirts. She just doesn’t have the vocabulary to talk about sameness and difference, or really express what she thinks about those things, or even answer the question why she thinks something is the way it is.
I’m hoping we are transmitting some lessons about race in other ways, though.
One of the reasons we picked her daycare was because of the diversity of kids and teachers. Before settling on her current center, I visited one where all the administrative employees were white and all the care takers were African American. That was a message I was worried about.
Her current classroom has an diverse staff in the classroom and outside — Asian, African American, Hispanic, Caucasian. Same goes for her classmates.
After our little question and answer session this weekend, I paused to see if any other questions arose. Nope. She just wanted to watch her cartoons about spiders.
How have you broached the subject of race with your kids and at what age?
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Olympic watching with kids
The Vancouver Olympic Games are the first ones that I’ve had the chance to watch through the eyes of a little person — or at least the first ones in 30 years .
I had forgotten how watching the atheletes jump, kick and slide makes you feel — for an evening — what it might be like to be able to do the same thing.
As I expected, I missed the opening ceremonies. Ayanna is too young for that to hold her attention for long and bed time called. On Saturday we caught some of the luge which held her interest, but she had a hard time following the camera angles and didn’t quite get the concept that it is a race of sorts. Explaining the sled and the ice to a two year old is hard work.
But last night watching the mens moguls and the figure skating we hit pay dirt. She ooohed and aaaahed over the jumps and spins. All the female skaters were “princesses.” And before long she was spinning herself off our couch. “I’m jumping, mommy!”
It’s going to be a fun couple of weeks. Now if I can just not get teary every time I see the Proctor & Gamble commercial that’s been running about the Olympic moms. If you haven’t seen it, here it is. If you are prone to tears and have kids, have a tissue handy.
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The first year of sleep-away camp
Last summer we sent our son Ben for nine days of fun at a Jewish camp near Waco. It brought out interesting emotions in all of us.
Ben, who was 8, became more self-sufficient in many ways. He had counselors but no Mom. Of course, I realized there are gaps in learning, particularly when it comes to dressing himself. In 100-degree heat, he wore sweatshirts and long pants fairly regularly. He missed both laundry days, which lead to the saddest — and only — note from camp: “Dear Mom, I have no clothes. Can you send some?” Of course, this came on the day before we were going to pick him up.
His sister Ava, then 5, thought this was the best nine days of her life… but she got lonely and ended up sleeping in my bed most of the nights.
My husband was down right weepy and made proclamations like: “We are never letting him go away again.”
But the most surprising reaction was mine. I don’t consider myself a helicopter parent at all, but with my child far away, I felt a complete lack of control over his life. I obsessed over weird things such as had I remembered to tell him where his hat is. And every day, I became obsessed with looking at pictures online of the day before. I searched crowds looking for my son to make sure he was participating and not standing in the corner. I freaked out over the sweatshirt wearing. I send him e-mails several times a day and wondered why he never wrote me back. I was the type of parent I vowed to never be.
Then he came home. And he was happy. And we were all happy to see him. And he was happy for clean clothes. And he made new friends that will be with him when he returns to camp this July.
And isn’t all of this — the adventure, the learning to make new friends, the learning to let go, the learning to be self-sufficient — the point of sleep-away camp after all?
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The looming camp years
If you haven’t checked out our camp guide, take a look — even if your kids aren’t of camp age yet.
I was floored at the options in town for summer camps, which can start at age three. There are computer camps, horse camps, tennis camps, film camps, nature camps and film camps. And then there’s just plain old camp.
It is a boon for working parents and stay at home parents alike. For working parents it addresses the immediate need for child care in the non-school months and for all parents its a chance for kids to hone in on interests that might not be developed during the school year because of a lack of time, space or access.
My mom was a stay at home mom and she made the most of free museum days and cheap summer activities. But my most memorable summer was the one when I got to go to music day camp for five weeks at a local community college.
As much as I enjoyed the laziness of summer and the endless days at the neighborhood pool, being surrounded by kids my age who shared my interests was an experience that is tough to replicate.
So, even if your kids are a year or two away from needing or wanting camp, take a look so you can start plotting your strategy. Many of the popular day camps fill up fast, so don’t let this cold snap fool you. It is definitely time to start thinking about summer.
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What if: 52 weeks of maternity leave
So in honor of the start of the Winter Olympics, our travel writer (and grandmother to two) Helen Anders wandered into our work area and reminded three working mothers that in Canada maternity leave is a year long.
And yes, that is almost all paid leave (55 percent of your salary in most provinces, up to $447 a week.) The split works like this: 15 weeks for actual maternity leave and the 35 weeks parental leave that can be split with the father. That’s a grand total of 50 weeks, then you can take two more weeks unpaid.
I wish. Just to be freed from having to pump every day and waiting until the sleep schedule got more sane, I’m totally with the Vancouver plan. The additional baby smiles and giggles are just a huge bonus.
One of the moms, fellow Mama Drama blogger Nicole Villalpando, raising the question: What if you don’t want to stay at home for the year, are you then branded as the ‘bad mom?’
She was ready to come back at the end of her leave (14 weeks and 15 weeks, respectively) with both kids, and even now, thinking about staying home with two kids full time seems a bit overwhelming.
“I would have liked to have had to the option to go part-time,” she said. “But I missed adults. I wanted to be here.”
I don’t know what the mommy wars are like in Canada, or if they are just an American affliction. But it is unfortunate that the debate in these parts is an all or nothing proposition. When I told people that I was going back to work after my first kid, I was met with pity and the refrain “Too bad you have to go back. But if you have to, you do what you gotta do.”
I know if was an attempt to empathize, but I’m one of the conflicted ones. I adore my babies, but there are a lot of positives that come from me working that go far beyond keeping our bank account out of the red.
Working motherhood is hard. And yes, there are those who have to, but there are also those who WANT to for various reasons. And that doesn’t make them bad mothers. Just like being at stay-at -home mom doesn’t make you an under-achiever or anti-feminist, or whatever negative adjective people like to throw in there.
In my case, even in my daydreams about winning the lottery and not having to worry about my paycheck, the daydream includes me doing something else (blogging part time, taking classes, doing contract work from home or volunteering) — just not on my current zany schedule. And I would still, probably miss this place.
My friend Jennifer, who is stay-at home mother of five and home schools, cautions anyone thinking about quitting full-time work to make sure you’ve got back up care for a few hours a week. “Or else you will go bonkers. It is really intense.”
So my question is (and please don’t let this get ugly, kind readers) if you had the option of Canada’s parental leave program, would you take the whole thing? If not, how much would you take?
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Britax recalls Blink stroller
The folks at Britax have apparently decided to try to get ahead of the recall curve and are voluntarily recalling their Blink stroller.
I got this in my email this morning:
“Because we’re committed to creating the safest products for children, Britax is conducting a voluntary safety recall on its Blink stroller. The recall is in response to a potential risk of harm when a consumer opens or closes the stroller. No injuries have been reported, but as an extra precaution Britax will provide free remedy kits to all registered Blink owners. We encourage all Blink owners to visit www.BlinkRecall.com or call the Britax information line at 888-427-4829 for further instructions.” —Jon Chamberlain, president of Britax
The Blink, like most strollers have hinges similar to the ones responsible for the Maclaren recall in November. Those hinges were involved in about a dozen cases of fingertip amputation.
Since then several companies have recalled their strollers, including Graco and Regal. Keep an eye out, I expect more companies will offer hinge covers for their customers.
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Green family guide from National Geographic
Having a family has forced me to confront just how much trash we generate. There are of course diapers, but then everything for kids comes in seemingly 10 layers of packaging.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about our foray into having a paperless kitchen. So far, Dave and I haven’t really missed the paper towels I hid out of reach.
The only part we’re struggling with is drying meat for cooking. The meat juices stain the cloths, which while they are still usable, look a bit unsanitary. We’re trying to remember to quickly rinse those out before throwing them into the laundry bin, so I’m hoping for better results in coming weeks.
My husband also has pulled a few sheets of paper towels to steam some broccoli in the microwave, but other than that we seem to be on track.
The funny part is that I think we’ve confused our 2-year-old since I’ll ask Dave for a paper towel, when I mean on the the white cloth diapers we’ve been using. Ayanna now calls these “paper towels.”
For more tips on how to green your household, check out National Geographic’s new “Green Guide for Families.” It has nearly 400 pages of tips for parents looking to be more environmentally conscious.
It answers questions such as “Are cloth diapers really better for the planet?” (Answer: Depends on how you wash and dry them.) and “Are there eco-friendly and less toxic sunscreen for kids.”
The volume is a little overwhelming to read from cover to cover, but can be a handy reference guide when you are thinking about your next baby step in converting to a greener life. There are also multiple entries ear-marked for families on a budget (Isn’t that all of us?)
For other National Geographic green books, go to www.preserveourplanet.com/books.
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New PBS science show targets girls
Next week PBS will roll out its newest science programming for kids, this time targeting girls.
SciGirls, a weekly show featuring real girls (not actors) solving their own scientific problems. The live action is interspersed with animated characters Izzie and Jake, who attempt to tie the series together with their own adventures.
The goal, according to the creators, is to get girls thinking about science, technology, engineering and math. And to that end, the show has funding from Exxon Mobil and the National Science Foundation.
The show is an outgrowth of a nationwide network of science clubs that share the same name. I wasn’t able to find any SciGirl clubs in Austin, but the national group just launched a bilingual initiative in South Texas last year.
The show itself, targeted for girls ages 11-14, is pretty cool. Although I wonder if they overshot their age range. We showed the series premiere to my co-worker’s six-year-old daughter who loved the show, but hated the animation. Even so, she asked to see the second episode on the preview DVD.
The best thing about the show? The girls do all the work, including mucking around in a pond emptying turtle traps and sawing boards and PVC pipe. Adults are around as consultants, but the ideas and effort are all girl power.
The show also illustrates why single gender science clubs are valuable. The girls are more likely to show some trepidation about power tools and dirt. Hesitation in a mixed group usually means that the boys wind up doing the yucky business, while the girls sit on the sidelines.
Girls clubs force girls to step up and tackle their fears. In the episode about the turtles, even the girl who is a little freaked out about snapping turtles, winds up holding one.
Another nice touch is the mini-bios of the girls who are solving the problems. The segments portray them as multi-dimensional people who dance, love horses and draw. It’s a nice contrast to the “nerd” characters in a lot of kids programming, where the girl science geek is also a social outcast.
Girls are tricky audiences, and if I had to guess, this audience will skew younger than the creators have pegged, more in the range of 8 to 10. Even though the girls in the show are 11 to 14, young girls tend to look up to older girls. You know — little girls want to be tweens, tweens want to be in high school, and high school girls want to be in college.
If our six-year-old tester hated the animation, I can’t imagine that tween set will be enthralled.
But even if the show misses its target audience, it still might net its desired result — getting girls to think early about math and science. Why let boys have all the fun?
Locally, SciGirls will air twice a week (same episode) on KLRU at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursday, starting Feb. 16.
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Jenny Sanford and love — actually
On Saturday we actually got the kids to bed in enough time for Dave and I to pop in a movie.
Coming off a discussion about chick flicks and which ones hold up over time, we settled on re-watching “Love Actually,” which we both agree that seven years later it is one of the best chick flicks that appeals to both genders.
For me, some parts are harder to watch than they used to be, especially the mom confronting evidence on Christmas Eve that her husband’s eyes have strayed. The kids are giddy and bouncing, so she can only take just a few solitary minutes in her room to cry and then put on her happy face again. Then off to the kids’ Christmas play.
With the kids around there just isn’t time to have the nervous breakdown she so justly deserves. I can’t — and don’t want to — imagine how that feels.
It is the type of thing that parents have to do with unfortunate regularity. As part of the parenting gig, it is our job to hold it together in front of our children for divorce, death and all other calamities that come with living.
Which brings me to Jenny Sanford, ex-wife of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. (Yes, the one who disappeared to visit his mistress in Argentina.)
Jenny Sanford was on NPR this morning, in part to promote her new book “Staying True.” And if the first pages are any indication (see the NPR website for a sneak preview) it offers a glimpse of a woman in the public eye keeping it together for her family, but refusing to do the traditional “stand by your man” routine that political wives often find themselves subject to when their men stray.
Divorce is ugly, and Jenny Sanford doesn’t glamorize the truth in these pages. But it appears she has found a way to take the high road without becoming road kill herself.
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Bridging the day care communication gap
The New York Times had an intriguing article today about the communication gap that often exists between moms and their nannies.
Many mothers who employ nannies are actually overstretched working women, a number of whom (contrary to their professional personas) suffer from an inability to clearly express their expectations and demands to the people they pay to care for their children. The result is a peculiar passive-aggressive form of communication, a less-than-ideal dynamic between worker and boss. The mother, at times beset by guilt, a touch of intimidation or feelings of her own maternal inadequacy, fails to articulate what she wants from the nanny — and then complains to friends, her spouse or an Internet message board when she doesn’t get it. (The father in many cases steers clear of the whole relationship.)
The whole thing (including the bit about the husbands) is a huge over-generalization, but bear with me here.
Now, I do not have a nanny. But I don’t think the communication difficulty is exclusive to the nanny-parent relationship. There’s an element of difficulty in any relationship with a child care provider.
I can’t ask my daughter’s teacher to do her laundry, but I did take offense when it was obvious they didn’t think Ayanna was ready to be potty trained and I was confident that she was.
I admit I wasn’t exactly direct with my instructions, after all the teacher had been instrumental in training dozens of kids and I had never so much as had a test run. But, then again, I know my daughter best of all and in retrospect I should have been more firm. (That first day was a disaster. The teachers kept sending her to the bathroom every 20 minutes, resulting in crying and several accidents when she decided to resist.)
Why wasn’t I more forceful? I’m not exactly a shrinking violet in the office, so why would it be any different here?
It’s not mommy guilt as the New York Times article would suggest. In our case it is the recognition that one-plus-one doesn’t always equal two with little kids. There are multiple ways to get to a destination and day care providers know most of the routes.
Maybe I’m wrong, but treating the folks who take care of your kids like “just an employee” would seem to be as much as recipe for disaster as not conveying your expectations. It’s a difficult dance.
How have you navigated the relationship with your child care provider?
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Scary spray — priceless
Regular readers know that the fear factor in my house has been growing exponentially. What started as my 2-year-old’s fear of the ceiling fan months ago has escalated in to full blown nighttime terror and has made bedtime a miserable experience for us all.
Some night were better than others: The crying wouldn’t start until after we left the room. Other nights Ayanna would plead and resist even getting into bed because she knew we were headed out the door.
We tried consoling her. We tried not responding under the assumption it was a stall tactic and not real fear. We tried a night light, and then even started just leaving the lights on. It was hardest on my husband, since our four-month-old generally want to nurse after Ayanna goes down for the night. A chorus of a hungry infant, plus a terrified toddler is not music to anyone’s ears.
But this week we discovered “Scary Spray.”
I’d read about parents who would spray the monsters away with pretty squirt bottles. There are even products called Monster Spray that you can buy. I was not convinced that this was the route we should take, especially since we could never get Ayanna to tell us exactly what was scaring her. All she’d say was “Scary! Scary!”
But Wednesday night was the worst yet. I could hear Ayanna crying and screaming on the other side of the house, inconsolable because she didn’t want to be left in her bedroom. Forty minutes of Dave trying to hold her, telling her that she was safe, telling her that there was nothing to be afraid of and that we loved her had no effect on calming her.
When I walked into the room, I saw that he had covered her fish music box that she’s listened to every night since she was 5 months old. This time she didn’t even want that turned on because that was “scary” and still they were at an impasse.
So, I took a turn too and then had a moment of inspiration. I said, “I’ll be back. I’m going to get something to make the scaries go away.”
I grabbed the pink spray water bottle we use for her hair and told her that I had put something special in there. I told her that I would use it, if she lay down in her bed and I reminded her that she would have to go to sleep afterward.
She calmed down and agreed (A good first sign.) Then I stood in the middle of the room and sprayed in all directions. “Bye, bye, scaries.”
I kissed her and walked out of the room. Silence. Blessed, silence.
It’s been three nights since we discovered scary spray and bedtime has been drama free. I am stunned that it was that easy and am still holding my breath at night anticipating the return of the screaming.
I prefer to tell my kid the truth. But at 2 1/2 years old lots of things seem magical and unpredictable — the furnace the roars to life at will, the fish mobile that stops without anyone pressing a button, the humidifier that bubbles unexpectedly. No amount of rational explaining is going to make those things any less scary right now.
By the time she figures out it’s just tap water with no magical properties, she’ll likely be old enough to understand that those noises can’t hurt her.
Until then, scary spray is my ticket to the return of a peaceful house, and if anyone tries to tell the kid there’s no such thing as “scary spray” they will have to spend the next week trying to put her to bed.
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Trying out the paperless kitchen
At night, after the kids are asleep and if I can keep my eyes open for another hour, my husband and I pop in a video from “Blue Planet” or “Planet Earth.”
We got the both BBC nature series as a Christmas gift and are working our way through them. The videos are amazing, a quantum leap forward from “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” of my youth.
The show always ends pointing out how rare various species are becoming and the effect that global warming is having on habitats. Then we go to sleep a little depressed.
“It’s so big,” says my husband Dave. “Really, what can we do?”
We are not hippies. I drive a small SUV and we use disposable diapers. We do use the blue bins the city gives us to recycle and have a set of reusable grocery bags. We’ve recently switched to buying as much local produce as possible from the fine folks at Johnson’s Backyard Garden.
But after reading this post by Simple Mom, I got inspired to cut down on our household paper output. A paperless kitchen.
In her post, I recognized two of her obstacles to making it happen. A) Paper towels are far too convenient and cloths are impossible to find. B) How do I know which cloth to use?
So, I put the roll of paper towels under the cabinet. And placed a bin on the counter and filled it with two dozen cloth diapers (very absorbent, relatively cheap, bleachable and I already have about a dozen that I’ve been using as burp cloths anyway).
The paper napkins will be the next to go. First, I must find outstanding white sale and load up on cloth napkins.
With two kids, I have to do the laundry non-stop anyway. We also have a drying rack in our garage to air dry a good portion of the grown ups’ laundry. And we already have a hamper in the garage which is where our dirty linens go, so we don’t have to dig and sort them out from the clothes.
We’ll see how this experiment goes. I’m pretty optimistic that it will make a sizable dent in our garbage output, maybe even allow us to move to the city’s smallest bin (saving money there too).
Composting will be next, but we have to clear out the backyard and plant a garden first — and that’s likely to be a while. We barely got around to pruning and mulching what little landscaping we have.
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How old for high heels?
In today’s Life & Style section there’s an article about how experts are worried about young girls wearing high heels.
I was pretty stunned to find out there are 2-inch heels out there in sizes for my 2 1/2 year old. Insanity.
Of course, heels were a subject of much consternation when I was growing up. At age 10, I was wearing an adult size 9 shoe. Finding flats that my mother approved of in that size was hard, especially when it came to dress shoes. But she didn’t give an inch on the subject. (We also battled over strapless dresses, bikinis, panty hose and makeup. I usually lost and now, at age 35, I rarely wear any of those items, except for some lipstick. I’ve also mostly given up heels, except for weddings, anniversary dinners and other special occaisions.)
Aside from the propriety of it all (and volumes can be written about letting little girls dress older than their years), there is a safety question when it comes to toddlers wear elevated shoewear — everything from altering their growth plate to injuries from trips and falls. For kids under the age of six, the ligaments and bones in their feet are so pliable that it doesn’t take much to push them out of shape.
So at what age did you start letting your girls add a little height to their shoes and were there rules about when and where they could wear them?
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Babies and solid food
The baby food making machinery has started up at our house. With Ayanna we did the frozen food cubes and never looked back.
In the end I think she wound up having two jars of commercial baby food (prunes for the obvious reasons) and even those she didn’t finish.
We started her on solids at four months — earlier than the current recommendation of six months. Our pediatrician was fine with it and other doctors have told me that lots of first time moms like to push the envelop with solids, not realizing what a pain it is once they’ve started.
It is a pain. Transporting bottles is easier and less messy than worrying about solid food. And of course breast feeding is the most portable of all.
But I have these babies that yell at meal time starting at about 3.5 months. They want in on the action. I remember that Ayanna would yell every time I took a bite of a sandwich. Elizabeth has turned out to be exactly the same.
We sit her in the high chair at meal time so she can watch us and I can shovel my own food before nursing her. As soon as I put mouth to fork the grunting and yelling starts. So I broke down two weekends ago and gave her some infant cereal. The first time I mixed it with formula to try and conserve my breast milk supply for drinking — not very successful. Most of it dribbled down her front.
I assumed that her tongue thrust reflex hadn’t disappeared yet. Nope, turns out she just hated the formula taste. (She barely tolerates the stuff when the breast milk bottles at day care run out.) So last weekend we tried the cereal with breast milk.
I was met with baby euphoria. We couldn’t get it in her fast enough. Last night I mixed the cereal with a little warm water. Turns out that’s baby bliss too — just no formula please.
And so at 4.5 months old we are back on the solids wagon again. I already have some sweet potato cubes in the freezer ready to go, and this weekend I will probably stew some pears.
I’ve found if I do one batch of food each weekend, I usually have enough variety when the baby works up to multiple meals. The only glitch I ran into with Ayanna was that suddenly she wanted more textured, less liquid food. I wound up stuck with a freezer full of purees that ultimately got pitched, if I couldn’t mix it with her breakfast cereal.
My co-worker tells me that my kids are strange. Her son took months of coaxing before he would even really eat solid food. All kids are different, but mine seem to be hardwired to eat early and often.
So, when did you start your kids on solids?
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Clowns: Not all fun and games
The world can be a very scary place to a 2-year-old as I am rapidly discovering.
The problem for parents is that you never know what is going to set them off.
The weekend at the Lakeline Mall is a kid extravaganza. Trampoline rides, miniature carousels and of course, a clown handing out balloon animals.
We rarely venture out to the mall on the weekends, but Stride Rite was having a decent winter shoe sale and Ayanna had clearly outgrown both her dress shoes and her tennis shoes.
I spotted the clown and his balloons first and figured Ayanna would be thrilled. Balloons are very high up on her beloved object list, especially when she gets ones at the grocery store. So I didn’t notice that my toddler had moved behind me.
She wouldn’t even look at him, and the more he talked to her, the more firmly she planted herself behind my legs and the more she concentrated on ignoring the man with the painted face and bizarre hair. I’d never seen her do that before — normally she’s gregarious with strangers and the life of the party.
And then I remembered that I had seen this before, more than 30 years earlier. Only the clown was Ronald McDonald and the toddler was my little brother L.J.
McDonald’s was a treat for us and for some reason Ronald had made an appearance and was trying to make my brother smile. What I remember is that L.J. didn’t cry, but he was intent on not looking Ronald in the eye, and it seemed to go on for ever. The clown just wouldn’t give up.
So I told the poor clown at Lakeline that I didn’t think she was going to bite. He tried again, but I knew that L.J. had outlasted Ronald McDonald and I was pretty sure that Ayanna wasn’t going to change her mind today. Maybe next time, or maybe not ever - one of my best friends is 36 years old and afraid of clowns, too. So Ayanna is in good company.
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Austin milk bank moving offices
After reading that the Mother’s Milk Bank in Denver was suffering a critical shortage of breast-milk, I thought I would check in with the folks here in Austin.
The low in Denver, according to the reporter, is due in part to an increase in H1N1 flu cases and the freezers there are nearly bare.
I’m glad I checked in with Austin’s Mother’s Milk Bank development director Robin Bradford, who says that while Austin is experiencing a normal seasonal lull in donations, we are not in the same straits as Denver.
“Right now Austin is not in the middle of an H1N1 spike, although we do tell moms that if they or their babies are ill, or if the mom is on antibiotics that they put aside that milk for a time,” she said.
Bradford added, that contrary to information in the Denver story, getting the H1N1 nasal mist vaccine does not preclude nursing moms from donating their milk.
But there is news at the Austin Mother’s Milk Bank, which receives and processes milk for use for critically ill premature babies in neonatal intensive care. They are trading their offices at St. David’s for larger digs starting Feb. 5 across the street at 2911 Medical Arts Street, Suite 12.
The new location will have a drive-thru milk drop, so that moms won’t have to lug babies and a cooler of milk to make their donations. The new office will double the number of freezers, from seven to 15, allowing the bank to process 40 percent more milk, Bradford said.
The move is not because of an over abundance of milk, in fact it’s quite the opposite: The need at hospitals far outstrips the actual supply, Bradford said. The folks at the non-profit are hopeful that their new location will give them better visibility and help them reach their goal of 400 donors in 2010 (up from 300 in 2009).
“With 17,000 live births in Central Texas we feel like that is a reasonable goal,” Bradford said. “Right now the only way the public sees us is if they are on their way to see their OB/GYN.”
For more information about how to become a donor, go to http://www.mmbaustin.org/
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Breast feeding
Breaking the code: A toddler says thanks
Talking to a 2-year-old can be tricky business. You ask them a direct question and one of three things will happen:
1) They will not respond and keeping doing whatever it was they were doing, like trying to balance a sippy cup on their head or spinning around in circles.
2) They respond, but not to the question you asked: “What did you do at school today? ” “The puppy is black.”
3) They do answer the question, but you are still unsure if that is the real answer. “Do you like this shirt?” “Yes,” followed by screaming when you try to put it on her.
So when I signed Ayanna up for music enrichment at her day care center, I had to guess whether she really looked forward to it and enjoyed the activity. Was this really worth the extra $10 a week I was paying?
The Kindermusik class lets kids explore music, movement and song. It seemed right up her alley. She will listen to the car radio and inform us when she hears a guitar, and she has started challenging my husband’s musical choices. (She loves old school R&B and Frank Sinatra. Pretty much anything he tries to tune into on the radio results in a demand to “Play another song!”)
Her teachers say that she pretty much starts dancing as soon as the class starts and belts out the words to songs at the top of her lungs. But I’d ask her if she enjoyed it, and I’d get one of the three above responses. So after a month, I quit asking and decided to take her teacher’s word for it.
So, imagine my pleasure, when a few nights ago, while we were saying prayers, the music class came up unsolicited.
Our night routine includes an “Our Father,” a “Hail, Mary,” and then a prayer asking God to bless our family and thanking him for various parts of our day. A few months ago, Ayanna started adding her own item and it is a huge insight for what means the most to her in her day.
For example, she routinely gives thanks for using the potty at restaurants (she loves ‘foreign’ bathrooms) and more than once she has thanked him for mom and dad not making her eat something. Playing with her friends makes the cut almost every night. But on Tuesday night, the first thing out of her mouth was music class.
I’ll take it where I can get it.
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Nick trots out new series for preschool math
Nick Jr. fans look out for Team Umizoomi.
The folks at Nickelodeon are branching out with a preschool series devoted to math, starting Jan. 25. According to the New York Times:
Cyma Zarghami, Nickelodeon’s president, said that the network saw an opening and took it. “Everybody’s trying to teach preschoolers how to read and nobody is trying to teach them how to do math,” she said.Currently the only major kids program that incorporate math concepts for small children is Sesame Street. The timing is interesting. The series has been in development since 2005, but its debut comes on the heels of a series of studies suggesting that preschoolers might be more ready for math than researchers thought. The research is so convincing that a number of school systems are re-evaluating their curriculums and looking for more opportunities to incorporate math for preschool-age children. From a story in last month’s New York Times:
For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.But recent research has turned that assumption on its head — that, and a host of other conventional wisdom about geometry, reading, language and self-control in class. The findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts.
In one recent study, for instance, researchers found that most entering preschoolers could perform rudimentary division, by distributing candies among two or three play animals. In another, scientists found that the brain’s ability to link letter combinations with sounds may not be fully developed until age 11 — much later than many have assumed.
My two year old has been able to count to 10 for quite a while and Dave and I have been struggling to find age appropriate ways to build on that. After a good bit of hunting I was able to find some simple 3-D puzzles at Terra Toys, which will not directly associated with math are the first steps in the spatial thinking required for geometry and other math concepts.
She loves it and it’s something we can do together. (I start the puzzle and she completes the missing blocks.)
So, I’ll be curious to see if Team Umizoomi catches on at our house.
Image: Nickelodeon
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: TV
The Internet: A mom’s best friend
For Christmas I got a Kindle and I have to say that while I do miss the tactile pleasure of books and magazines, the gadget has more than made up for that deficit in sheer volume of material read.
I can read the New York Times and the Statesman one-handed while I feed Elizabeth, which means that for the first time in many weeks I was able to get through both the New York Times magazine and the Week in Review on Sunday.
Which brings me to one piece from his week’s magazine “Medium: Home Tool,” which puts forth the argument that women may have benefited the most from the arrival of the Internet and it accompanying hardware.
Brushing aside the article’s unnecessary digs at stay-at-home moms, I think writer Virginia Heffernan has a great point:
For real. The dishwasher, the washing machine and the pill were supposed to liberate us from something, but the superduper Internet, alone among the great 20th-century technologies, has really nailed it.
Being able to work from home on occasion has been a lifeline for me and a boon to my employer. After all, someone has to stay home with the sick kid, but the ability to stay connected means that work at the office doesn’t have to come to a halt while it waits for my child’s immune system to kick into gear. (Works great for dads, too, of course.)
It also allows me to order the diapers we’re almost out of on Amazon, rather than try to make a quick break to the store. I can make doctor’s appointment for the whole family via the Web, and as this blog proves, I can come up with reasonable blog items while nursing my four-month-old.
The Internet isn’t perfect, but I’d be even more exhausted without it.
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You should try JcPenny’s I have found cute (flowers, stripes, and plain) panties there for my now 3 year old daughter. I am very disappointed in the clothing choices for little girls jut wait until summer rolls around and you are trying to find
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Tara - the Hanna Andersson underwear are worth every penny, especially as you have another daughter. They really do last forever, they fit comfortably, and you can pass them on, if you so choose. LOVE them.
... read the full comment by Sinda | Comment on A mom's hunt for toddler underwear Read A mom's hunt for toddler underwear
I feel your pain, and ended up just buying the 2T-3T underwear at Wal-Mart in cartoony characters. I sort of adopted the opinion that I’d rather they wear the Star Wars underwear and feel like they got something special instead of me purchasing any
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I intentionally bought the Sesame Street and Disney underwear in an effort to get my toddler boy more interested in potty training. (Not as successful as I’d hoped.) But even willing to go that route, I too noticed that there were very few options
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