Category Archives: Parenting

“Food Glorious Food”-Children in the Kitchen,Kid’s Snacks,The Obesity Challenge

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IMG_4848I loved cooking since I can remember.

Admittedly,over the years my style has changed, given what we now know about foods, GMO’s, saturated fats and so much more.

What has not changed is my desire to involve my family in what I choose to serve them.

Now with a grandchild to consider, I am enjoying the time that I can include her in my cooking.

How do you include your family in the kitchen…is the kitchen the center of your home?

What have you done to get your children more involved in the kitchen?

via Home-Cooked Challenge: Kids in the Kitchen – NYTimes.com.

 

For me snacks are an absolute dilemma, I love to snack, but choose to munch protein bars when I am on the go…they give me the energy I need in between my breakfast, small lunch and dinner.

However, when it comes to children and grandchildren, I sometimes find myself at a loss and turn to graham crackers, fishy crackers, or cereal in a bag as a quick fix…along with some fresh fruit or carrots…yogurt is always a go to in our house as well.

I was particularly interested in this post at Toddler Approved…it is sponsored post. I was tempted to try the subscription that is offered at $7/month to have tasty snacks delivered to my door, but reconsidered this choice since then they do not allow for food allergies.

What do you do when it comes to snacks for your kids and grandkids?

Toddler Approved!: Trying New Snacks With Your Kids.

 

Some of my tips include…

1. Have kids go on a rainbow grocery shopping hunt with me and help them select a few foods for us to buy for snacks and meals. Choosing the snack themselves means the likelihood that they will eat it again is much higher.

2. Have kids make the snacks and create something fun. Last week we made an ant snack with carrots and apples and peanut butter. Even though my son hates carrots, he was more willing to try a bite because it looked cool. We also made the strawberry mice featured above at our VBC Summer Camp. The kids usually won’t try nuts or string cheese, but they totally did because it was silly to eat when it was a mouse.

3. Spy on other kids and see what they are eating. When I work at preschool or go to the park I love seeing what other moms bring their kids for snack. I always take mental notes (especially if my kids ask to try a taste of a friend’s snack and like something).

What are your tips?

via Toddler Approved!: Trying New Snacks With Your Kids.

 

This week “obesity” was defined as a disease…

As a nurse, I find this an interesting discussion and wonder what others are thinking.

Is this a good definition and will it help with this crisis?

Defining Obesity as a Disease May Do More Harm Than Good | TIME.com.

Parents, Will You Vaccinate Your Child Against “Cancer Causing” HPV?

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vaccinations

New research strongly suggests that the HPV vaccine works.

 

The prevalence of dangerous strains of the human papillomavirus — the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States and a principal cause of cervical cancer — has dropped by half among teenage girls in the last decade, a striking measure of success for a vaccine that was introduced only in 2006, federal health officials said on Wednesday.

 

“These are striking results,” Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Times’s Sabrina Tavernise. “They should be a wake-up call that we need to increase vaccination rates. The bottom line is this: It is possible to protect the next generation from cancer, and we need to do it.”

 

But unless these numbers change a significant number of minds, many parents won’t.

via Will Parents Still Turn Down an ‘Anti-Cancer Vaccine?’ – NYTimes.com.

 

Are you willing to have your child vaccinated to prevent cancer from a sexually transmitted disease? If I had children whose ages fell within this category I would choose to vaccinate.

After all, if my mother had not allowed me to be vaccinated in the 1950’s I might have developed polio and died or become permanently disabled.

During those years prior to the polio vaccine, I lost a friend to polio… literally overnight…he died while his parents were rushing to be by his side at an Adirondack’s hospital near where he was enrolled in summer camp. He was in an “iron lung” machine, which was all too common in those years but he died before his parents arrived.

Something for parents to think about…

the HPV vaccine is proving to be effective.

What will you do?

Accept it or deny it for your child?

How will you explain your decision to your child?

Do Your Kids Eat Everything?…Tell theTruth!

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IMG_4193Cooking for kids…always a challenge

I love to cook…but over the years my “go to meals” have changed…

and

become somewhat boring…

enter

Jennie Perillo, InJenniesKitchen and her book Homemade with Love.

I was losing my edge especially now…

that I very often am cooking for three generations in one house.

This morning, I read this piece from Jennie’s recipes in Relish Magazine

and

I  smiled…as I adore pesto…

I have decided to try using parsley instead of my usual basil, omit the pistachios since….

there is a “nut allergy” in our family

I will add cheese to liven up the flavor.

 

I’ll be the first to admit that when I think about cooking for kids, pesto isn’t the first recipe that comes to mind. Yes, there are adventurous eaters out there, you know, those kids whose parents’ claim they eat everything. To that, I say spill the beans. No one likes everything, including myself, a professional food writer and recipe developer—and that’s okay. This is perhaps the most important tidbit of advice to remember when you approach feeding your children.

via

Relish Blogs – Fresh Homemade Summer Pesto.

Tantrums, Infant Sleep, Baby Gifts-Weekend Reading

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child playing on the beach

Tantrums…meltdowns…I don’t know anyone who hasn’t witnessed this behavior. Many of us can even remember losing control as a child.

For me, one of my most memorable meltdowns was when I was staying at my grandparents house with my dad (my parents were divorced)…my dad left for work and I was screaming for him not to go and leave me. I was about 5 years old.

While still out of control, my aunt appeared and yelled “shut up” at me. I had never heard those words and I had no memory of ever being yelled at…it was scary.

I remember feeling very alone, abandoned…no one came to comfort me. From that moment on, I never liked my aunt. This dislike carried through adulthood. She abandoned me when I needed a loving person most.

If we can recall our own meltdowns, perhaps we can more easily empathize with our children’s frustrating moments.

Hugs, understanding and help to put words together to describe emotions are ways we can help little ones navigate these “scary” moments.

 

Yes, thankfully. And it’s not only normal, but reasonable. As five experts on child psychology recently explained to me, toddlers’ irrational behaviors are a totally understandable reflection of their inner turmoil and frustrations. In sum, their world is turning upside down and they don’t yet have the skills to handle it. Tantrums don’t mean your kid is a spoiled brat or needs therapy; tantrums mean he is normal.

 

Do you crave sleep or do you remember craving sleep when your baby was a newborn? Did you turn to a baby sleep “expert”, who wasn’t really an expert?

How do parents find help ?  What books or websites did you find helpful when you have questions about parenting?

 

 

Enter the ‘baby sleep expert’. An entirely unregulated occupation that requires no qualifications, no experience and no code of ethics. In any other field we would run a mile, but we’re tired – oh so very tired – so tired we can’t think with our usual logic and reason, they dangle the golden carrot of ‘sleeping through the night’ in such a way that we repress any doubts we do have and naively believe their claims and trust their respectability and thus blindly trust their instructions.

 

What a wonderful simple little gift for new parents in Finland. Interesting how it affected the infant mortality rate in Finland.

 

Expectant parents often get plenty of presents from friends and family members, but in Finland even the government sends a gift.

The Finnish government regularly distributes maternity grants to help expectant parents care for a fussy newborn. Parents can pick between the maternity package, a colorful box that is filled with baby-related goodies such as reusable diapers  and colorful onesies, or a cash grant of 140 euros.

The  maternity package wasn’t designed just to be a fun gift, it started as a way to help promote healthy habits for new parents. The grants started in 1937, when the Finnish government passed the Maternity Grants Act to help counteract a high infant mortality rate. Before the act was passed the infant mortality rate was extremely high with 65 deaths  for every 1,000 births, according to the BBC.

Today it is 3.38 for every 1,000 births, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Did you have a Difficult Parent or Narcissist for a Parent?

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Narcisstic

Did you have a “difficult mother”

or

was she really a Narcissist

and

you didn’t really know it?

Henriette does a wonderful job describing the differences between the two in her post,

The Narcissist and the Difficult Mother.

Fortunately, I had a marvelous mother…she would give until it hurt and it sometimes did…although not always around because she worked, when she was present, she seemed beautiful inside and out.

Now…my father was a completely different story…he was a Narcissist and I never realized it until a few years before he died, but by that time the damage had long been done.

In his eyes, I simply did not exist apart from him.

In many ways, it was lucky for me that my parents were divorced when I was very young, so my exposure to him was limited but still very confusing.

It is even too emotionally painful to record here. He was not physically abusive but emotionally, I remember always being on a roller coaster, wondering, “how do I please you”…never realizing that this was an impossibility.

Simply put, I always wished and was full of hope that when we got together even for the very last time when he was quite old and I was an adult and a mother myself, that he would be Robert Young, in “Father Knows Best” and call me “Princess”.

He never did…

The narcissist is clothed in a kind of emotional Teflon….

 

Her fury at my ideas was so intense and so pure that I saw it was fueled by more than a simple disagreement with my point of view. This was rage at the notion that I could have a point of view. I didn’t exist apart from her, so I couldn’t think anything she didn’t think. I saw then that I didn’t really exist except as part of her identity.

Why I’m Putting Down My iPhone

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iPhone

There are so many reasons to put down my iPhone but when I am in the company of my children and grandchildren.

How do you feel when you are talking to someone and they are not looking at you… not only are they scanning the surroundings but they are eyeing their phone for messages?

I feel diminished when this happens but I have to assume some guilt here because I love scanning my surroundings and am addicted to my cellphone. There is a professional term for these addictions…”soft addictions”. There are professionals, who deal with these addictions…so if you cannot deal with these “soft addictions”…help is available!

But I digress…

I am particularly concerned with what children are learning and experiencing. Given the fact that they imitate what they see and hear…it is important to model behavior that we want our children to copy.

If we want our kids to be empathic they need to learn to look at us when we are talking to them so they can see our facial expressions. This helps them to interpret feelings by what they see on our face.

It helps children begin to integrate tone of voice, facial expression and the words coming out of our mouths.

I agree with Dr. Smock and am trying very hard to limit my use of electronic devices when around my grandchild and anyone else with whom I am spending time.

AMEN…

For me, I needed the reminder that my son is a little sponge, soaking in how the adults around him interact with the world.  Children learn by imitating their role models, and if we — as the adults closest to them — show them that electronic devices are what’s most important, this may have a significant impact on their later attention and empathy skills.

 

When is baby too fat?

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Bottle Feeding Baby

Welcome back from a 3 day weekend…

This morning, the first thing that hit me is yet another commentary on parents overfeeding their baby and the fact that it may lead to obesity later in childhood.

It seems there is a fixation on fat and now it is concerning parents of infants. The problem with this is, calorie restriction in infancy can have serious issues associated with it.

If you are a parent of a “chubby” baby and you are worried, please consult your pediatrician before changing your child’s feeding schedule or decreasing their calorie intake.

 

When parents ask about overfeeding their newborns, she tells them, “The only way to overfeed a baby is to use feeding as the only solution to comfort him or her.” While some babies will need a little help unwinding, providing a bottle every time they’re fussy or having trouble sleeping isn’t the answer— and could potentially lead to unnecessary calories over the long term.

What to tell children about tragedy…

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8764648965_43b57f5bbf

I hate having to write another post about yet another

tragedy…

but yesterday…

Oklahoma experienced a natural disaster

that took the lives of many,

among them innocent children

at school where they thought…

they were safe

Making sense out of senselessness…what to tell your children about yet another tragedy?

Everyday heroes!

 

Postpartum Depression & Breast Feeding, Infant Sleep, Children & Allergies….

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 heart drops

Sleep is so important and so many of us crave it…makes me wonder if it doesn’t start right at the beginning of our lives when we are infants. After all it is one of the topics so hotly discussed among parenting experts.

So how do we manage to get our newborns to sleep thus giving ourselves much needed time to sleep?

 

Nothing can prepare you for the changes in your sleep when you welcome a newborn baby into your family. Experienced parents will issue dire warnings and tell you to sleep while you can during the last few weeks of pregnancy. (And you will think, yeah right, there’s a large boulder resting on my bladder, and sometimes it kicks for good measure.)

 

 

If you breast feed do you have less of a chance of developing PPD (Postpartum Depression)? Here is some interesting facts from FFF (Fearless Formula Feeder) that questions this premise.

The same question holds for the connection between breastfeeding and postpartum depression. Some researchers have found a correlation between lack of breastfeeding and higher incidence of depression; however, the majority of these studies don’t factor in why the mother isn’t breastfeeding in the first place. A 2009 study found that women who exhibited pregnancy-related anxiety or prenatal depressive symptoms were roughly two times more likely than women without these mood disorders to plan to formula feed. (12) “Prenatal mood disorders may affect a woman’s plans to breastfeed and may be early risk factors for failure to breastfeed,” the researchers point out. And even if the intention to breastfeed is there, multiple factors inform infant-feeding choices once a woman leaves the hospital.

Feeling like a failure, dealing with pain, frustration, and exhaustion, and having a baby who screams at the sight of her, could make any mother feel overwhelmed, let alone one who’s already on the brink of actual PPD. Maybe for those of us more prone to anxiety or depression, the stress of breastfeeding struggles is just the camel’s dreaded straw.

 

Are there allergies in your family, if so, there is a community online for Moms of Allergic Children.  I have also included a link to a mom’s story of her son who has asthma.

 

Moms of kids with allergies have to do double duty to keep their bundles of joy safe, happy, and healthy. In the Moms of Allergic Children community, moms are sharing their concerns and questions about allergies. Here are some quick tips from Dr. Oz for them and others on how to treat — and prevent — some common allergies.