Archives for category: Parenting

Road Trip Entertainment Tip

August 4, 09 //
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Came across a great tip on Parent Hacks today: using the Redbox DVD rental kiosks during road trips.

Rentals are $0.99 per day and you can return to any Redbox kiosk anywhere… and there are 15,000 of them across the country.

The only downside is the limited selection, but in most cases you’ll only need a few per road trip. And you can even reserve them through Redbox.com.

And, if you are on the super frugal side, there are Redbox promo codes out there to get free rentals, including Redbox’s Free Movie Monday on the first Monday of every month.

Contemplating (baby) food

February 26, 09 //
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With Lucy we bought all of her mushy pureed baby food in neat packages and she gobbled them down.  Very convienient but a new day is dawning in our house with the twins now eating baby food and not just milk.  This time around I am making all the baby veggie/fruit foods and it has given me a lot of time to think about food, where it comes from, where it goes and what’s in it (I feel like I think about food all the time with the 1000 extra calories I have to take in daily to nurse the twins- not at all as easy as I would have expected extra eating to be due to all the kids around here!).  Anyway, its been far much less expensive, not too much extra work at all, much less wasteful and tastes incredible.  I cannot believe we never did this with Lucy.  The proof is in the way these two vacuum it down at dinner time.  If you’re free I could use an extra hand at feeding time, but Zoey might eat it off!  It sure is a sight feeding two this stuff at once.

I am so glad I am making all these baby foods now, but the hidden bonus is all the time I am cooking away I think about how easy it is for us to get food, for example (at least in our very priveledged country and with my fortunate circumstances).  I mean, walk into Wegmans, pick up an apple and put it into a bag.  Half the time I couldn’t even tell you exactly what I paid for that apple, never mind the travels its been on.  Making sweet potatoes  yesterday got me thinking of where they came from and what kinds of resources had to be used to grow, process and get them to that neat pile in Wegmans.  Does the $3 I paid for them really reflect the impact on the soil, cleaning and processing methods and transportation costs and impacts?  I really don’t think we appreciate our food like we would if we farmed it ourselves or could at least see the journey from seed to what we buy on a display in a store.  Things are so disconnected now and there are so many decisions regarding our foods we don’t have control over because of this process now.   It seems kind of scary/overwhelming to think of these things with something as intimate as what you put into your kids’ bodies.  What about where those veggie scraps go?  Lord knows they don’t break down in landfills, where they probably end up.  Being biodegradable means nothing if air never reaches those lonely sweet potato peels.  Nevermind a compost pile when you live in a town with a rat problem.  Geez, what a snowball of worries.  The funny thing is that while this is on my mind, it seems to be other’s too.  I wish I and others thought about it more.

Well, there are costs to living here, on this Earth for sure and I have no answers.  I think though that if we think about what’s on our plate a little more than what kind of dressing will go with the salad sitting there it might bring to light the true cost of our food.  We are trying to make a conscious effort to eat more healthy, fresh and local foods and also organics.  I am thankful that making baby food has become more than just cooking, blending and freezing for me.  At least I can be prepared to talk to my kids about choices they have control over when they are gulping it down.

Links of the Day

January 7, 09 //
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Over the last few days, I’ve stumbled upon a few blog posts that touch on the New Year’s resolutions I posted. All three are from blogs I highly recommend, so please check them out!

  • 9 Methods for Mastering Your Money in 2009 from Get Rich Slowly.  A great collection of tips, methods and tools for you to use to get your finances in order this year.
  • Do Children Really Cause Financial Burdens? from The Simple Dollar. This post focuses on a common misconception that having kids is extremely expensive. Trent says yes, the outlays are numerous and costly, but when you factor in tax deductions, credits, and how children change the way we spend money (less entertainment, luxury, and frivolous expenditures, etc), the cost per child (over 18 years) goes from the original estimate of $200k to around $52k using some quick math. Even if you double that figure, it still comes out to about $5700 per year, compared to the original $11k. Not nearly as bad as many experts will lead you to believe.
  • Instead of New Year’s Resolutions, Set More Manageable Goals from Parent Hacks. The gist of this post is using an alternative mindset when thinking about our resolutions through setting daily, weekly and monthly goals each month. Doing this makes these tasks and projects more manageable and actionable as they tend to be easier to wrap your head around than the usual big picture goals we tend to set on January 1st.  I like the idea!

Safe Words

December 26, 08 //
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Nick Nolte on the set of Simpatico 1999

One of the tools Melisa and I have used since pretty much Day One of parenting our three young hooligans is using a safe word to signal each other when we are in need. Not just in need, but in desperate need of help. Like, drop-everything-and-get-here-NOW help. Luckily we really haven’t used it more than once or twice, but it is a reassuring tool that is very easy to communicate.

What word or phrase did we choose? Nick Nolte, of course! It was a simple decision, because at the time of creation we felt a lot like some of his bat-shit crazy photos, like the one above and his infamous mug shot.

We got the idea from our good friends and neighbors, the Creeds, who thought of it while watching the Will Farrell/bear fighting scene in Semi-Pro. So a big thanks to them.

Anyway, I thought I’d pass the idea on to new parents or other families who are as crazy as us (three under two years old.)

The Fascinating First Three Years

October 9, 08 //
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Today at work I listened to an episode of This American Life while working. The episode was #364 – Going Big and the first act was called Harlem Renaissance. A very fascinating story, especially given that we have three kids under two years old right now.

From the This American Life site:

Paul Tough reports on the Harlem Children’s Zone, and its CEO and president, Geoffrey Canada. Among the project’s many facets is Baby College, an 8-week program where young parents and parents-to-be learn how to help their children get the education they need to be successful. Tough’s just-published book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem’s Children Zone is called Whatever It Takes.

The biggest takeaways from the study they mention:

  • Kids in ‘professional’ families hear 20 million more words than kids living in poverty during their first three years.
  • The kids in the professional group hear 500,000 words of encouragement during this time and 80,000 words of discouragement. The poverty group was pretty much the opposite: 80,000 words of encouragement and 200,000 words of discouragement.
  • The role of language in the first three years is more important than race, parent’s education, and economic factors in how kids develop and gain skills to be successful in the future. And those skills get increasingly more difficult to obtain as kids get older. So much so that job training classes (usually thought of as the way out of welfare for adults) has very little impact, if they don’t have the skills normally gained during their youth.

Really underscores the importance of reading and talking to your kids. And gives us hope that the cycle of poverty can be broken for many kids in the future. A lot of focus has been on pulling the parents out of poverty, but in reality it’s much simpler: it’s all about language.

Toddler milestones!

July 17, 08 //
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Hey, how’s Lucy doing?  Lots of people have been asking so I thought I would update you on her latest accomplishments (which as her parents of course simply amaze us!)

  • Sniffing the toes on pictures of baby feet in books just like Daddy does after her bath!  She is also building talent in the area of lifting her toes to your nose so you can sniff them.  I don’t know how many other kids have this, but our kid’s toes actually smell bad!
  • Eating all kinds of foods now that are not related to the general “noodle” category with her newly mastered pincher grasp.  Yay- no baby food!
  • We knew she already had many dance moves up her sleeves usually arranged in random 2 second stints and repeated, but now she has added a spin around.  She loves spinning around in a circle while adding various dance moves!
  • Putting feet on the table while eating and trying to grab food with her toes.  That one is hard to keep a straight face for when saying no.
  • Screaming in delight when Daddy opens the cabinet to get snacks for her causing Daddy to break things because of being startled.
  • Dramatically banging her body against baby gates that block her from going outside when the doors are open.  That kid just can’t get enough fresh air.
  • Learning to run in random directions and generally delighting in her own independence (which is so wonderful to watch).  She is also remembering things she sees one time and doing them again- which is amazing.  Sponge!

I could go on and on…..what a ham!

32 weeks down!

June 30, 08 //
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I’m getting there and getting bigger and bigger and bigger.  I’m 32 weeks now and marching on to 33.  The Dr. said by 34, whatever happens, happens and by 38 weeks, they won’t let me go any farther.  I’d love to make it as far as possible of course, but at the most, its 6 more weeks.  My next goal is to get to 34 weeks (around July 12th).  Not that the inability to breathe or numb arms when I wake up aren’t so glamorous, but really, now I know what it means to be pregnant and uncomfortable.  I never got to this point with Lucy because she was so small and early.  I actually woke up from a dream the other day where I was wearing my favorite normal jeans- yeah, not maternity stretchy ones.  So nice.  I won’t go on and on about these things because I feel lucky to be this far and look forward to going farther.  My BPP and NST tests at the hospital this morning were again great.  So we wait, patientlyand take in as much ice cream as humanly possible.

In other news, while shopping on Sat. at Wegmans, Lucy was getting kind of antsy so I took out the savior of ants in the pants, none other than the snack container.  My girl can hunt down a goldfish like no ones business, even when buried in numerous other crackers.  Anyway, she shoved another of her favorites, a pretzel, into her mouth.  Kinda a big piece I thought, but I weighed that against getting my finger bitten off with her surprisingly sharp baby teeth (which after nearly happening once before seemed pretty scary) so I kept a watchful eye.  Wouldn’t you know 30 sec. later she started choking.  I mean the no sound coming out, eyes watering, struggling for breath choking.  Terrified I tried to remember what to do and tried to pry her out of the seatbelt thingy on the cart to no avail so I tried to do the infamous finger sweep.  This DID NOT work.  It pushed the pretzel back farther and I started to freak a little.  By the time I called JD over, I had finger swept her like 3 more times, more forcefully (which I wasn’t sure I should have done) and it was all over and I flung that pretzel piece 1/2 way to Japan.  Anyway, we finally freed her from the belt and picked her up and she was surprisingly calm, with tears down her cheeks, but not crying freaking out or anything.  I thought I would have a break down, but we made it through a couple of more aisles and I was much more calm and she was back to her normal pointing and asking what everything is self.  Anyway, how scary.  It reminds you that you do what you can in an instant, right or wrong and try to remember how to do all this lifesaving stuff (we even took a baby CPR and First Aid class before she was born) but sometimes its sheer luck.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like if it’d been a worse situation.  Needless to say all the big pretzel pieces around our house are hidden now.  For a while.