Carseat Issues!

Any moms out there have any thoughts on this issue.....My 2 year old needs a new car-seat (hers expired), I bought a nice one at Babies R Us this weekend....it is a convertible car seat, it says it goes up to a child who is 47"....my daughter is 36" (not overly tall).....but the straps are below her shoulders and they are suppose to be above her shoulders. What do I do? What options do I have?

Did you know car seats expire?  It is printed on the back of them.  Do you follow the expiration date? Suppose the plastic gets flexible the older it gets and less safe for the child to be in.

What has your child taught you?

President Boyd K. Packer said, “One of the great discoveries of parenthood is that we learn far more about what really matters from our children than we ever did from our parents”

• I thought about the question it asked and the four things that came to me right away that my children have taught me are:

1. Patience......I have never been more patient with anyone else besides my kids
2. Forgiveness.....My kids always forgive me no matter how cranky I am, tired, sick, or not myself.  They never stay mad at me.
3. Love....I have never felt unconditional love until I had my kids.
4. Sacrifice....I would literally do anything for my kids and sacrifice anything for them

What have your children taught you?

Summer Time!

I like to keep the kids busy during the summer so no one fights and makes life stressful.  Since I am trying to make plans for a wide range of children 2years-8 years old it can difficult.  I like to teach the kids about Service and do a service project once a week with the kids.  I can never figure out what to do especially with a 2 year old, it hit me today!  I decided there has to be something we can do at the Humane Society, so I gave our local humane society a call, a sure enough!  Once a week we can go play, walk, feed, and wash the animals!  How perfect!  Teach my children about service, loving animals, and being kind.  Just pray we do not end up with any animals by the end of the summer!  Here is our other ideas for summer activities:

Work on School in morning….letters and numbers (for my 5 year old getting ready for Kindergarten)

Military letters (men and women serving over seas)

Animal shelter

Elderly home (craft project with them)

Movies (rent movies or dollar theater has kids movies once a week for 1.00)

Library

Play dough day

Paint (outside in the side walk, or on a twister game board)

Chalk (outside and in our HAIR)

Tye Dye (socks, shirts, and underwear)

Clean house day (once a week, teach the children the values of a clean house and helping out in our home)

Water (slip and slide, water balloons, lake, pool.....)

Service (taking homemade treats to Elderly from church and in our neighborhood)

Cooking (cupcakes, cookies, etc)

Park (visit a different park once a week, feed the ducks)

Butterfly house (love this place)

Do you have any ideas?

Connecting with Your School Age Child at School!

This topic is going to be broken up into a couple of posts.  It could range from working in the classroom, being part of the PTA, field trips, etc.  But today I wanted to focus on how you remind your child durring the day while they are at school that you love them, miss them, and to remain true to their values and morals.
How do you do this?  What do you do?

Here are a few things I do:

1. When my daughter gets out of the car every day I tell her 4 things:

• Choose The Right
• Be a Good Friend
• Be a Missionary
• We love you and Christ Loves You 

What do you tell your children when they get out of the car?  What are the last things you want them to remember as they leave you for the rest of that day?

2. At the beginning of the year when we buy all the back to school supplies, i.e. folders, notebooks, pencils, crayons, markers, etc......I write on all of them like crazy!  Her pencils say things like: We miss you, We love you, Have a great day, Smile, You are beautiful, You are Smart!  Then on her folders and notebooks I make picture collages of family pictures and activites we have done together so she will have a moment to look at them at school and feel our love.  His sisters, dad, and I write little pesonal notes to her about things we love about her.

3. Her lunch box always has a napkin in it with either a funny joke (She loves jokes), quotes from church like: Families Are Forever, funny pictures I draw, or notes from a family member.  So she has a moment at lunch time to know we are thinking about her. (pinterest has lots of lunch box jokes you can print and put in their lunch box)

I am not sure these 3 simple things I do make a difference or not but she loves feeling our love for her and it helps her feel closer to us when she is at school ALL DAY LONG!

How do you help your school age child feel loved at school?

Cloth Diapering!

My friend Leah from high school perked my curiosity on cloth diapering.  She cloth diapers and loves it.  I think she is the only person I know personally who cloth diapers.  I looked into it before we had our last baby. 
I would not do cloth diapers to save the Earth, that sounds bad I know, but I am not a save the Earth type of girl.  (Though my 8 year old did learn about recycle, reuse, and some other  "r" in school last week and wanted to know why we did not have recycling bins.  I told her we do not have any cans or bottles to recycle, what would we recycle?  She now informs me everything I throw away, such as a cereal box or milk jug, it can be recycled! All right I am getting recyling bins! I use to go recycle cans with my grandfather when I was a little girl and I thought it was such a great deal because he would give me $50.00.  I thought that's what he made from recycling but as I became an adult and tried to recycle cans once for an old lady and got like 8.00 bucks, I realized my grandfather was just giving me 50.00 because he loved spending time with me.  When I realized this it made my heart break, I sure do miss him!)
But that's not what this is about, recycling, it is about cloth diapers!  So if I am not doing it to save the world, why would I do it?  To save money! Oh yes, we are a 1 income family with 3.5 kids, saving money is very important to me.  So I decided if I could save money I would do it.  But I would need a diaper service that washed the diapers, I was not going to do that part!  When I looked into a diaper service and compared it to the cost of disposable diapers I was not saving any money.  So I decided not too do it with baby #3.  Now I am thinking about doing it again with baby #4 and this is what my friend Leah told me:  

  
"Sarah, do it .. it's wonderful for baby & the environment .. but the #1 reason I started was to save $! It costs a lil more up front, but diapers quickly pay for themselves. Washing really isn't a big deal- especially for exclusively breastfed babies (their poo is water soluble , so there's no need to rinse it away before doing a wash). Once baby starts solids, we use (& LOVE) our diaper sprayer that attaches to the toilet (no dunking & swishing here!). There's SOOOO many options out there! what you see above on the right are one style of fitted diapers that you snap around baby & then you put a waterproof cover over that. We used fitted diapers on Sarah when she was a newborn & then started using pocket diapers .. a little simpler for Daddy :......

Well now she has perked my interest!  So I ask my hubby last night what he thought about the idea and he laughed at me and said, "You know you have to wash them!  You hate doing laundry!  That will be an extra load a week!  You can't even keep up with laundry the way it is!"  HA HA HA!  You are so funny hunny!  I could do the extra laundry!  It is really the spraying it down in the toilet that has me grossed out!  Poop is so gross let alone scrubbing it in the toilet! So on to more research and pricing to see if it is worth it or not.

Any moms cloth diaper out there and has pros and cons for me?

Mama Llama

I should mention where I got the name, Mama Llama from.  My youngest loves the Llama Llama series of books http://www.llamallamabook.com/. They are her favorite in the whole world.  Ever since we started reading them to her when she was younger she would call me Mama Llama.  It was so cute, and the name stuck! 
Thinking of reading with your children, does everyone out there do the 20 minutes a day recommendation?  I think I fail at a parent in this aspect!  By the time we get home from school at 4:15pm, do homework, cook dinner, play outside, take a bath, brush teeth, say prayers, read scriptures........book reading is usually 20 seconds not 20 minutes! What are your favorite books to read to your children?  Goodnight Moon is another favorite in our home.  My oldest is currently into Junie B. Jones books (though I think Junie B. is a little too sassy for my liking)!

Baby Wearing

I saw you left a comment Marcy about Baby Wearing but I can not find it.  So here is my thoughts on baby wearing and I would love input.  I do not know anything about baby wearing! I know it is where you wear your baby on you in a sling.  I know one of my best friends in California who had a baby around the same time I had my last baby did this and she loved it. So this is what I got when I googled it (the pros for baby wearing):

This is from Wikipedia:

Dr. William Sears, a pediatrician, coined the phrase attachment parenting. One of Sears' principles of attachment parenting is babywearing and he attributes many benefits to babywearing and the in-arms style of parenting.

Benefits of babywearing include:

• Mothers' oxytocin is increased through physical contact with the infant, leading to a more intimate maternal bond, easier breastfeeding and better care, thus lowering the incidence of postpartum depression and psychosomatic illness in the mother.^[2]
• Infants who are carried are calmer because all of their primal/survival needs are met. The caregiver can be seen, heard, smelled, touched, tasted, provide feeding and the motion necessary for continuing neural development, gastrointestinal and respiratory health and to establish balance (inner ear development) and muscle tone is constant.^[3]
• Infants are more organized. Parental rhythms (walking, heartbeat, etc.) have balancing and soothing effects on infants.
• Infants are "humanized" earlier by developing socially. Babies are closer to people and can study facial expressions, learn languages faster and be familiar with body language.^[4]
• Independence is established earlier.^[3]
• Attachment between child and caregiver is more secure.^[5]
• Decreases risk of positional plagiocephaly ("flat head syndrome") caused by extended time spent in a car seat and by sleeping on the back. Sleeping on the back is recommended to decrease the risk of SIDS. Cranial distortion resulting from non-vehicular time in car seats has shown to be more severe than in children who develop plagiocephaly from back-lying on a mattress.^[6] Concern over plagiocephaly has also led the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend that infants “should spend minimal time in car seats (when not a passenger in a vehicle) or other seating that maintains supine positioning."^[7] None of the babywearing positions require infants to lie supine while being carried. Infants can even be worn while they sleep, also decreasing sleeping time spent in a supine position.

Studies of parent-child attachment, parental satisfaction and infant crying all point to babywearing as an ideal solution for most parents to provide an optimum environment for attachment between parent and child. Baby carriers and slings help increase the number of hours of day an infant is held, and there is an inverse relationship between the number of hours spend crying and the number of hours a child is held in a given day. Even 3 hours per day of babywearing reduces infant crying significantly, and at 13 months, babies who have been in soft carriers regularly are significantly more likely to be securely attached than babies who are carried in hard carriers.

I have never done baby wearing with my other children, but it is something I have told my hubby I would like to do with the next baby.  I have no clue what kind of sling to use or how the slings work, I guess I will need to google some more information.

I would say that though I have never done baby wearing with my other children, I also never did the SWING with my other children.  You know those parents who have a swing in the front room and they put the baby in it while they cook, clean, or take a shower.  I always had my children in the kitchen with me in some sort of seat on the table talking with me as I cooked, or laying on my bed as I folded laundry, (I do not recall showering the first 6 months of having a child, ha ha ha).  I became anti-swing when I worked at a daycare when I was 20 years old that was anti-swing.  I also am not a mom who goes to church for 3 hours with the infant car-seat or stroller and puts my child in it.  Therefore I have never done "baby wearing", I would have consider my parenting style "baby wearing".  My baby is in my arms as much as possible and I think that is what is important about baby wearing.

I remember my parents use to tell me my oldest daughter would never walk because I held her ALL the TIME!  They were kinda right she did not walk until 15 months, but now she is all most 8 years old and a smart, happy, all around perfect child!  Wish she was still small enough to hold ALL the time!  

Whats your thoughts on baby wearing? 

Topics

All kinds of ideas have come in my mind today about parenting topics to blog about!  I am so excited, here are a few, any thoughts on more:

-carseats....the new rules that came out
-vaccines
-lunch box notes
-bus vs driving your child to school
-extra activities.....swimming, dance, gymnastics, music, etc
-eating healthy for kids.....is it that important?
-summer activities.....movies, swimming, library, park
-how to teach our children about service
-reading at bed time
-picking out their own clothes
-time out
-modesty
-teaching the way Christ would teach
-circumcision
-co-sleeping...is it really ruining your sex life?
-family dinner time
-family night once a week
-breast feeding
-potty training


The list could go on forever!  I am so excited about this new blog!

Involved Parenting

I guess I will start off with how this blog got started. It started with this time magazine picture:

I can NOT stand this picture!  Drives me crazy!  So many things are wrong with this picture but I am sure you have heard all about it!  Who hasn't?  The article is about attachment parenting which follows these 7 "B"'s:

7 ATTACHMENT TOOLS: THE BABY B'S

 

1. Birth bonding

2. Breastfeeding

3. Babywearing

4. Bedding close to baby

5. Belief in the language value of your baby's cry

6. Beware of baby trainers

7. Balance

 

If you are not sure what any of these 7 "B"'s stand for you can easily google them.  I believe these 7 steps can be followed to a certain degree in any situation, a single mom, a single dad (Breastfeeding simple means that when he feeds the baby he holds him close to his chest not in a baby swing propped up with a bottle.....pet peeve of mine), or a working parent.  

 

Number 5 and 6 drive me up the wall the most, I recently was talking to a friend who said someone taught her the "cry it out method" I thought I was going to lose it :)  I came home and called my husband I was so disguised!  Who lets their baby cry it out, how sad! I hate when my baby's cry let alone on purpose!  While my husband and I lay on the sofa and watch a movie!  Sorry.....this drives me nuts!

 

I do not understand why everyone is all upset about attachment parenting it is a loving style of parenting and if a family chose to do this style of parenting we should be supportive, loving and respectful.

I think these tools are great for when the baby is young but lets carry this on to older years.  What about involved parenting when you have a school age child.  How many of us parents are excited or feel done when school starts?  Well I don't!  I do not like when school starts, sure homeschool is an option but I personally do not feel it is right for my child currently, but maybe someday.  Time and Place for everything in life.

Though I choose to send my daughter to school (way to go homeschooling moms, huge credit to all you out there!) I stay involved with her education and work with the teacher and school to help her learn the best she can.  I am involoved in the school PTO, I go have lunch with her regularly, I know who her friends are, I ask all about her day, what made her happy or sad, I write her noted in her folders, and lunch box, I have open communication with her teacher if I have a problem, I do not put her on a bus so we can talk to and from school, I work in the office (with my 2 other kids on my hip) making copies, I go on field trips, and award assemblys.  I am INVOLVED!  

The key to parenting is INVOLVEMENT at all levels and stages!  Let your kids know you LOVE them!