Posts from — October 2008

Ok, I know it’s a little late to be sharing these ideas with you, but I saw this in my Dr. Sears newsletter yesterday.  If you’re looking for some healthier options for your trick or treaters, or party, here are some ideas:

· Small boxes of cereal
· Cheese and crackers (the little packages)
· Sugar-free gum (I’d choose Trident or another brand that is sweetened with Xylitol.)
· 100% Juice boxes
· Small packages of nuts or raisins, trail mix
· instant cocoa mix
· Or you could do non-food treats, with kids also love!  Stickers, toys, crayons, pencils, colored chalk, erasers, baseball cards, rubber spiders, temporary tattoos, false teeth, little bottles of bubbles and small games, or even little books if you could find a good deal on some.

Maybe some of you are very last minute and still need to run to the store today to pick something up.  Hope this gave you some more options!

Here are some very helpful checklists if you’re thinking about or already trying to get pregnant.

Preconception Checklist:

• Make sure you’re not taking any medications that aren’t okay for pregnancy
• Start taking prenatal vitamins 3-6 months before you plan to conceive
• Start eating healthy, if you don’t already
• Cut back on fats and sweets (you’ll be glad you did, trust me)
• Cut back on caffeine
• Make sure you’re exercising, and that it’s a safe routine for pregnancy
• Say good-bye to drugs, alcohol, and nicotine
• Sleep, sleep, sleep
• Minimize stress

Ways to Boost Fertility:

• Watch your weight.  Too much fat, or too little, can make it harder to conceive.
• Make sure to get enough protein, iron, zinc, and vitamin C.  Deficiencies in these have been linked to early miscarriage
• Stop smoking
• Watch your cycle (I highly recommend Taking Charge of Your Fertility, if you want to learn how to do this.  Plus, it is just great to know how your body works.)
• Stress and depression can make it harder to conceive.
• Research has linked alcohol consumption with a decreased ability to get pregnant. (Who knew!)
• Make sure hubby has a good diet and cuts out cigarettes, alcohol, etc.

A personal suggestion of mine would also to be to avoid products with BPA or phthalates in them.  If you can’t remember why, please read these posts.

Also, after you do get pregnant, I suggest getting this pregnancy journal, and signing up for BabyCenter newsletters.  It is just SO amazing to see how life begins at conception and how your baby is growing from the very moment he or she is conceived!  Either of these, the journal or the newsletter, will help you appreciate this new life even more!

Sources: www.Parents.com

Since Nathaniel has had fever lately with his Roseola, I’ve been doing some reading on how to treat fever in children.  I always wonder if I should break out the Tylenol, or let him sweat it out?  Call the doctor or treat him at home?  Worry, not worry?  And a whole host of other questions.  Well, let me tell you what I found out.

Fever is a symptom of an underlying illness.  It’s a backup immune system, according to Dr. Mercola, and it shouldn’t be suppressed unless absolutely necessary.  Infections are the most common cause of fever. Let’s look at how fevers are rated:

• low-grade fever – temperature between 100.4 F and 100.9 F (37.2 C to 38.3 C)
• moderate fever – temperature between 101 F and 102.9 F (38.4 C to 39.4 C)
• high fever – temperature higher than 103 F (39.5 C)

Dr. Sears recommends taking your baby’s temperature when they are well, once in the morning, and once in the late afternoon, so you’ll know what your baby’s average temperatures are.  Any temperature above that average indicates a fever.  Dr. Mercola advises us to avoid using most of the anti-fever meds unless your child is absolutely miserable, or the fever is over 105 F.  WOW!  I would probably freak out before it got to 105 and break out the Tylenol.  He does say however, that he would be concerned if the temperature was above 102 F.  There is no risk of brain damage until the temp gets higher than 105 or so.  The reason to avoid taking Tylenol, or something similar is that this actually prolongs the illness since it inhibits the body’s immune response.

So are you wondering when you should worry and when you shouldn’t?

When to worry less:

• Baby not acting worse.
• Active, playing, responds normally to interaction.
• No difference in skin color other than flushed cheeks at height of fever.
• Smiling, alert, interested in surroundings, eyes wide open.
• Baby “back to normal self” when fever breaks.
• Cries vigorously but can be consoled.

When to worry more:

• Baby acting sicker by the hour or day.
• Increasingly lethargic, drowsy, less responsive.
• Pale or ashen skin color.
• Dull, anxious facial expressions.
• Baby seems no better when fever subsides.
• Cries inconsolably or moans and cry becoming weaker.

When to call the doctor:

• Any rectal temp above 100.4 or higher in an infant less than 3 months or for that persists more than 8 hours.
• If your baby is becoming increasingly drowsy, pale, and lethargic and doesn’t respond to fever-lowering methods.
• If your baby has obvious signs of a bacterial infection such as ear pain, severe cough, sore throat, or painful urination.

Make sure to give you child plenty to drink, if chilled – bundle in light breathable fabrics, if fever is low – dress snuggly and give warm liquids to assist fever production, don’t push food.  They’ll let you know when they’re hungry and what they’re hungry for.  This is a really great article that I recommend Fever in Children – A Blessing in Disguise.

Sources:  The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two (Revised and Updated Edition) and Dr. Mercola

Do Babies Exposed to Phthalates Have Smaller Penises?
Um, this is interesting, and scary.

What Is An Endocrine Disruptor?
A good read if you’re wondering about endocrine disruptors, since that’s one of the side effects of both BPA and phthlates.

Crib Recalls
Check to make sure it’s not the one you own.

Peeling Scotch Tape Emits X-Rays, Startling Study Finds
This is just weird!

I don’t know about your house, but at our house, you can hear someone whispering in another room.  I’m serious!  When our first son was born I noticed that during nap time he always slept great until I would get on the phone.  After I realized why he was waking up, we decided we needed to do something.

We tried the ceiling fan, and that worked great.  But then during the winter time we had to come up with an alternative, or freeze the kid out.  I did some research and found sound machines, and I have friends that use them, but they’re a bit pricey.  We finally decided to buy a $20 CD player at Wal-Mart and a white noise CD.  We went with the Soothing Air Conditioner CD, and it’s been a really good choice.  We can also use the CD player to listen to music, which you wouldn’t be able to do with a sound machine.  And I also take it to Grandma’s house for nap time there.

After our second son was born, we bought another CD player and another CD.   The only problem we have now is that our two boys bedrooms are right next to each other.  If Nathaniel cries, it almost always wakes up Gabriel.  That is really frustrating, but I have no solution right now.  In our next house, I hope the baby’s room can be further away from the other children’s bedroom, or at least have a bathroom or closet in between them.

As you may recall from my last post about the FDA finding lead in women’s and children’s vitamins, I found my very own prenatal on the FDA list.  Since then I’ve been on a search to decide if I should go ahead and switch to another prenatal or if lead is pretty much unavoidable.  I’ve found some interesting things.

It seems like every brand I decided to look into cost much more than my Rainbow Light Just Once Prenatal.  I looked at Megafood Baby & Me, New Chapter, Synergy Group, Juice Plus, and Garden of Life.  Some of these companies don’t make prenatals, but I thought I could add in more of whatever I needed.  Anyway, they were all much more expensive.  But while searching for these brands, which are all very high quality, I found a few of them on the FDA list.  WHAT?!  This made me start to question the whole lead thing even more.  I was especially surprised to see a Garden of Life product, so I emailed them to find out why.  Here is what they said.

Thank you for your email and interest in Garden of Life’s products.
Garden of Life has been a recognized leader in innovative, whole food
supplementation.  We firmly believe that this approach is best for our
bodies and our customers’ have come to depend on us for these quality
nutrients.

Among the challenges we face when sourcing the raw materials for our
products, though, is that they originate in natural and organic
ingredients.  It’s not uncommon when dealing with natural or organic
products and foods, derived most frequently from organic soils, to see
traces of all kinds of elemental ingredients.  Lead is a natural
component of the soil that the plant materials are grown in.  No lead is
added to the soil or to the products during manufacture; rather, the
lead is taken up by the plants from what is already in the soil.  The
amount of trace minerals and variable content from lot to lot are beyond
our control and are just part of the nature of the product.

With regard to Living Multi, the FDA clearly noted that the trace
amounts of lead found in the lot it tested did not present a safety
issue.  The Living Multi product line is another way that we, at Garden
of Life, endeavor to deliver quality supplements to our customers.

Now, to me this really makes it seem like lead is unavoidable.  I mean, if it’s even in soil, then it’s in our fruits and veggies, right??

From there, I moved on to this post at Treehugger, and I read the comments.  These two really stood out to me:

Baah, as a chemist, this article makes me want to smack some people upside the noggin’.

A pill contains something like a few billions of trillions of molecules. That is a lot. A big number with lots of zeros. Lead is a naturally occurring element. It is in everywhere, in everything, simply because it has billions of trillions of chances in each pill or apple or piece of pumpkin pie.

You know what? Pretty much everything you touch, eat, or drink has ~1 parts per billion lead. It would have lead on this order of magnitude if no person besides you had ever existed. Get over it.

The only thing this article demonstrates is how powerful our analytical techniques have become…detecting ppb levels is quite a trick.

And this one…

Any lead level safe? Like it or not treehuggersville, there will NEVER be a case where there is not trace amounts of lead in materials, especially those containing other metals. It isn’t like picking bad seeds out of your pot. We go through great lengths trying to eliminate certain metals from semiconductor materials and packaging – and trust me, there’s big money in doing it, and can’t get rid of it all. It isn’t possible. So, less is better, but if you are looking for none, you’ll never see it, and the more you want out, the more it’ll cost you, because purification to parts-per-million (ppm) or ppb is very very expensive.

So there you have it.  I feel much better after digging a little deeper into the “lead in my vitamins” issue.  I’m not worried anymore, and once again, for now I’m sticking with my Just Once-Rainbow Light Prenatals; at least until I can afford something better.  If I don’t get lead from my vitamins, I’ll just get it from my food anyway.

Yes, I’m here to tell you about some more of the bad stuff that’s found in your home.  It’s depressing that we just can’t seem to escape all the junk in this world.  But, don’t despair.  We can at least try to better our environment inside and out, which helps a lot!

I wanted to talk about fire retardants, (PBDEs and Deca), since we’ve already covered phthlates, BPA, and other ways to go green.  PBDEs are a type of flame retardant found in electronics, furniture, mattresses, futons, foam carpet padding, children’s car seats, automobile interiors, foam pillows, and other foam items.  According to a new EWG study, toddlers and preschoolers have three times the level of toxic fire retardants in their bloodstream as their mothers.  It’s very sad to me that children in the US have the heaviest burden of Deca pollution in the world.  Deca is a neurological and hormone disruptor and children are more susceptible to it’s effects. All of these different things leach chemicals into the air and onto your skin, where they get in your blood stream and even your breast milk.

Here are a few ways to avoid PBDE’s in foam according to EWG:

1. Inspect foam items.  Replace anything with a ripped cover or foam that is breaking down.
2. Use a vacuum fitted with a HEPA filter.  These type of vacuums are more efficient at trapping small particles and will likely remove more contaminants and other allergens from your home.
3. Do not reupholster foam furniture.
4. Be careful when removing old carpet.  The padding may contain PBDEs.
5. When purchasing new products ask the manufacturer what type of fire retardants they use.  Avoid products with brominated fire retardants, and choose less flammable options like leather, wool, and cotton.
6. Buy furniture from Ikea!  Theirs is PBDE free!

And, ways to avoid PBDEs and Deca in electronics:

• purchase brands which have publicly committed to phasing out all brominated fire retardants, such as:  Acer, Apple, Eizo Nanao, LG Electronics, Lenovo, Matsushita, Microsoft, Nokia, Phillips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony-Ericsson, and Toshiba

Now I want to tell you a few more ways to help clean up your indoor environment.  Johnny and I have this great book, How to Grow Fresh Air: 50 House Plants that Purify Your Home or Office.  I think that title is pretty self explanatory, but I’ll name a few plants mentioned in the book.  If you’d like to add some of these great plants to you home or office to purify your air, think about rubber plant, bamboo palm, or peace lily.  I think that seems like a pretty easy (and a great looking) solution!

I don’t want to weigh you down with one more thing to worry about.  I just want to try and help you be informed on ways you can change your envirnoment for the better.

Dr. Sears Newsletter
Boost your kids immune system with these tips!

EWG’s Guide to Safe Drinking Water

University Study – BPA May Disrupt Cancer Treatments
One more reason to stay away from BPA.

ZRecs Guide to safer children’s products
Really cool guide they’ve put together to search by product or brand.

In the pre-children days I was a full fledged Creative Memories girl.  I even sold the stuff for a short amount of time.  I had the albums, pages, colored paper, stickers, scissors, markers, stencils, die cuts, adhesive, and along with all of this scrapbook stuff I had storage bags and containers.  Yes, when you scrapbook like that, you’d better have a big closet for storage.  Not only do the supplies take up room, but the albums are HUGE when completed.  You had better also have some substantial shelf space somewhere.

It didn’t take me long after Gabriel was born to realize that I was not going to have the time to scrapbook in this way any longer.  I was getting sick of spending 30 minutes of my scrapbook time getting out all of my stuff and arranging it on the table.  Then you’ve got to clean up all this stuff too!  So I started doing a little research.  It was 2006 and photo books were becoming popular; they seemed like a great alternative.  I can’t remember how I exactly stumbled upon digital scrapbooking, but I loved the look of the books!

After a little research, digital scrapbooking seemed to be the way to go.  It was cheaper than traditional scrapbooking and didn’t require a large amount of storage space (physical storage space, that is)!  Here is a picture showing the differences in size.  A traditional scrapbook album on the left vs. a digital photo book on the right, each with 24 pages.

I found some great digital scrapbooking sites where I could buy scrapbook supplies on-line and download them.  And you can use digital supplies again and again!  Yes, it’s not only cheaper than traditional scrapbooking, but you can reuse the stuff forever!!!  Several different sites offer photo books, but so far I’ve found that Shutterfly is the only one who will allow you to upload your own digital scrapbook and print it for you.  So, I made the move.  I sold all of my Creative Memories stuff on eBay for a nice chunk of change and started digital scrapbooking.

First I went to the scrapbooking sites I liked. Here are some that have really cute stuff, and offer freebies too!

• Scrap Girls
• Two Peas in a Bucket
• Shabby Princess

I love that you can buy kits where all of the paper, alphabet, ribbons, paper clips, buttons, everything, coordinates!  You’d be surprised at the cute stuff you can find and how 3D it all looks!

You need some sort of image editing software to make your page layouts.  I bought Microsoft Digital Image Suite at eBay and taught myself to use it.  (This program is included with Vista.) I like it, but it doesn’t have all of the professional capabilities of Adobe Photoshop or something similar.  But, it’s easy to use.  Take a look at some of my page layouts.

When I’m ready to scrapbook I don’t have to get anything out!  I just sit down at my computer and open up my Digital Image Suite and go! I always try to scrapbook in chronological order because it’s just easier for me.  So after I complete a page I save it as the page 1, and then I start working on page 2, and so on.  I even design my covers! When I’m done with an album I just upload it to Shutterfly.  (TIP: Wait until there is a discount or coupon code on photo books.) Then Shutterfly prints it for me as a hard bound book and ships it to my door.  Let me tell you, these books look great and I’ve gotten lots of compliments!  And, they don’t take up much room on your bookshelf at all!

If this all seems way more involved or overwhelming for you, then choose from the albums at Shutterfly that already have page designs and you just pop in your pictures.  They have some really great new ones that I’m thinking about trying out.

If you’ve been thinking about going the digital route, I say go for it!  It’s really fun and is much less time-consuming than traditional scrapbooking.  I’m no pro, but if you have any questions, please ask away.

We had another birthday at our house this weekend.  My oldest, Gabriel, turned 3.  He is REALLY into cars and trucks.  As in, that is just about the only type of toy he plays with.  Seriously.  He might play with something else about 1 hour per week.  The rest of his play time is spent with his cars and trucks.  (Or looking at books.)  So I felt it was only appropriate to have a trucks birthday party theme!  They were actually construction trucks, and we had the cups, plates, and napkins to match.

Back in August I bought a couple of large Tonka sandbox toys at the Amazon clearance sale for $5 each.  I bought a big front loader and a big dump truck.  My Mom usually makes our birthday cakes, but since she didn’t have a truck-shaped cake pan, I decided to get creative.  Since we already had the front loader and the dump truck, I wondered if they could play an important role at the party.  Initially I thought of putting them outside in the sandbox for play during the party.  But after I found out I needed to come up with a different cake idea, I decided these two toys were going to play a more important role.  I put them on the table and served “Dirt Cake” out of them!!  Don’t even ask me what I made that dirt cake out of.  It goes against every healthy-eating instinct I have.  At least Gabriel didn’t eat hardly any of it.  (You know why, don’t you?  The Dr. Sears sweet foods theory is at work.)  Here’s a view of the table.

Anyway, it was a great birthday party.  I don’t go for those “all out” parties with 20 friends and a bounce house in the front yard.  They totally stress me out, and my rule of thumb for the guest list is, the number of friends invited = birthday boy’s age +1.  He was three this year, and I actually only invited 3 friends.  His little brother Nathaniel counted as the fourth guest.  Unfortunatly two of the guests couldn’t make it, so he actually only had 1 friend at the party.  Of course grandparents and other adult family and friends were here.  I think it all turned out pretty well.  We had another birthday party to attend that afternoon, so it was a busy day filled with too much sugar.  But hey, it was fun.