Vaccination pain relief - Emla Patches

Now that I'm going through babydom again I am reminded of helpful tips I got that are not on my blog because I started it a while after CG was born. So now I'm adding those tips.

One of the best tips I got for vaccination day was Emla Patches. They are a topical anaesthetic which you put on the injection site an hour to 2hours before the vaccinations. It numbs the area so its less painful for your baby. I've used them on legs and arms with both my littlies to great effect.

They come in a box of two patches and in 2012 are about R60. 

Best baby saline spray

A while ago I wrote that Sterimar was the best saline for babies. However babies and especially my toddler really hate it. It's got quite a strong spray which is great for moving snot but not much fun for the person having the snot moved from their nose.

Last week a friend from our moms sport group told me about Flo Baby Saline +. It has a gentler spray, can spray at any angle and has some ingredients to stop the nose from drying out.

We tried it and now we don't have to hold down a kicking toddler to get the saline spray into his nose. He hardly complains at all.

So I am rewriting my review.... The best saline is now Flo Baby Saline +.

However if you have a baby with an extremly clogged nose you need to clear and they can't blow their nose yet then Stermar's fiercer spray may well work better.

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Gentle toddler discipline

With all the upheaval of our renovation, a new sister and turning the terrible two our mostly complaint Bruce Banner has recently become The Hulk. As you can imagine this was quite a rude awakening for two parents who had basically only had to say "No don't" to get co-operation in the past. Now most days include anger/jealousy meltdowns, constant moaning, crying when we don't get our way and many of the other toddler greatest hits.

I decided that we were in desperate need of some help so I enlisted the help and advice of our friend who is a child pshycologist. She sent me an email about a talk happening at Ladybird Corner by a psyhcologist friend of hers, Samantha Leader. The topic - Gentle Toddler Discipline - what an answer to prayer (I had prayed for God's help just that morning). I attended the talk and it was so good I wanted to share some of the principles with you. Please understand that this is just an overview of the talk and not a detailed how-to on toddler discipline. If you need more detailed info please feel free to Google some of principles by name.

The talk opened with two statements that have stuck with me:

If we are to 'conquer' the toddler we must think like a toddler

• We need to have an understanding of what developmental milestones they are going through and consider what developmental stage they are in along with having a knowledge of what the common toddler behaviours are. Look at the theory's of Piaget and Erikson

Toddlerhood can be compared to adolescence.

• Now I don't remember being a toddler but I definitely remember being a teenager. I also remember what it was like living in a house with a teenage sibling. The emotional angst that we feel as teenagers as we try to discover who we are and try to forge our own place in the world as separate entities from our parents is comparable to what toddlers (on a lesser scale with less hormones) are going through.  This comparison has really helped me to have more patience with my toddler and his mood swings. 

Samantha showed the two images below which I just loved. 

How true this is.

The whole talk centred around an approach which would help the toddler to deal with  and name their feelings. Toddlers are only just getting to know themselves and they have no frame of reference for their emotional state of being. It is the overwhelming nature of these new emotions which cause many of the problem behaviours we see in toddlers. It is our job as parents to help them understand and name these feelings and to guide them to correct choices and behaviours as they bounce along on their journey of self discovery. If you've noticed that all of a sudden your toddler has suddenly started referring to themselves as me or I and has started saying things like "it's mine" then the voyage on the sea of individualism has begun.

Along with other things Samantha shared the ACT model for dealing toddlers with us. She said that this needs to become the modus operandi in your home if it is to work. You need to be consistent (as with all discipline) and this should then curb the number of meltdowns your toddler experiences. We have tried this with great success in our own home so I can tell you that it does work.  

ACT Model

1. Acknowledge the feeling.
2. Communicate the limit.
3. Target an alternative. 

1. Acknowledge the feeling by becoming attune to your child's emotional state. Encourage the labelling of all emotions, good and bad. For young toddlers stick to a simple set of emotions like happy, sad, mad, glad and add emotions as their emotional vocabulary broadens.  Reflect the feeling and acknowledge it with empathy. There are no bad feelings only incorrect responses. I have been working on this with Curious George so look out for a post coming soon on ideas of how to teach emotions and create an emotional vocabulary for your child.

2. Communicate the limit which you have decided on ahead of time.  When deciding on what limits you will set in your home consider the following things:

• is it necessary
• can you enforce it consistently
• if you don't set this limit can you consistently allow this behaviour to continue

3. Target an alternative by suggesting something else the toddler might do or a way they might behave that is acceptable. For young children give only 1 or 2 alternative and as they get older, 3 or 4 years old, you can give them more alternatives. 

Remember to:

• focus on the do's and not the don'ts.
• separate the deed from the child
• keep your instructions short and at the child's level of understanding
• give only one instruction at a time
• lead by example by naming and acknowledging your own feelings
• be consistent.

Remember that a toddler tantrum is usually an overflow of emotions. Sometime toddlers literally cannot contain their emotions any longer. If we can understand this then dealing with that meltdown in the supermarket might be easier,  but no less embarrassing, to deal with. Keep following me on my journey towards discipline as I post more ideas (feeling games) and thoughts on growing a great child of God and a responsible member of society

A book that I have found very helpful with getting to grips with naming emotions is How to talk so your kids will Listen and Listen so your kids will talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

Best breast pump

Absolutely loving my new Medela Swing electric pump. It's expensive but my parent's in-law bought it for me as a gift. Wish I'd bought one the first time around instead of buying the Harmony hand pump. That thing will give you an RSI. However I did once express on a hike in the berg with the Harmony and I could never have done that with an electric pump. We were camping and CG was refusing to breast feed. Take a look at the photo of me pumping beside a tranquil berg river - oh the things you will do for your children. I'm very blessed to have both pumps.

When daddy is away

At the moment my husband is away for two weeks on business overseas. These trips are hard on the whole family but we've discovered that they are particularly hard on our very perceptive little boy. The first long trip my husband did was when CG was around 13mnths old and all sorts of odd things happened. He was very grumpy, he struggled to sleep at night and during the day and he freaked out whenever I was out of sight.

It was around this time that a friend to try role playing with him. So we used Duplo men and played games about the daddy flying away on an airplane and the mommy and baby staying behind. Then the daddy would come back. This he led quite a bit but the time period of two weeks is interminable to a little one. This is when I hit on two other ideas. I'm really mot sure how I came up with them but they work really well in helping CG understand that daddy is coming home and when he will be back. They also help him deal with some of his separation anxiety.

I make a simple calendar (table in Word) with a block for each day daddy is away. Then every morning we stick a sticker on the day that has passed. There is a picture of daddy printed on the day he is due to come home.

We have a big world map stuck up in his bedroom with id size photos of CG and daddy. We stick daddy's photo on the map in the country he's in and we stick CG's photo in south Africa where we are. I started this just as a way to show him where daddy is and that the hasn't just disappeared but it ended up becoming CG's bedtime ritual which he invented. Each night score pray time he goes to the map and kisses the photo of daddy and then gives his own photo a kiss just like he's saying good night when daddy is here. This is very sweet with the added bonus that he seems to sleep better.

So although we hate the times when daddy is away we are finding ways to cope.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Feeling our way onto formula

This post was started at the beginning of August 2011 and finished at the end of Septemeber 2011. Some things take a long time to write when you have a small one.

I am still breast feeding curious George once or twice a day (he's 15 months now) but we are very blessed that he is slowly weaning himself. I guess it’s true what they say, if you leave them to it they'll decide when they're done with breast feeding. On that note though some gentle persuasion never hurt anyone and so although we have not gone cold turkey from breast to bottle we have steered CG in the bottle direction from around 1 year.

First let me say that I have exclusively breast fed for the whole of CGs first year. I am assured that from a year toddlers do not need milk for its nutrients, in fact, they need to get their nutrients from solid food and too much milk can hinder their appetite. The main thing they are getting from the milk is calcium. So you need to make sure they are getting their daily requirement of that.

As I said earlier on we are now down to 1 feed some time during the night, which is very small, and/or 1 feed on waking, these are both what I call tandem feeds (I'll explain this later). He also has between 150 and 300 mls of formula at bedtime.

So how did we get from 4 or 5 breast feeds a day at about 10mnths to this point?

The feed after his first sleep was where we first tried to introduce formula. This was a disaster and almost put him off bottles all together. We tried mixing formula and breast milk but that did not work either. So after a few days we went back to breast feeding. It was then that a friend suggested I just try substituting the breast feed for a snack and some water. So instead of offering breast I slyly offered the snack holding thumbs that he would not ask for breast. He didn't and with that the 10am feed was gone. There were a few hiccups like we needed to get that milk or liquid in somewhere else in the day and for the first little while that milk was needed in the night but the kinks worked themselves out and we were down to 3 or 4 feeds a day.

After his 1st birthday we decided to give the formula another bash but he still did not take to it. This time I tried some myself. Yuck. We were trying the hypoallergenic NAN 2 and no wonder he didn't want it, he probably didn't like the taste. So I asked the same friend who had given me the snack substitute advice if she would give me a few scoops of the formula she was using so we could try it. She gave us some S26 Gold 3 to try which he is still using. Its expensive and now we are trying to slowly move him to another formula by sneaking small scoops into the s26.

My best friend had been giving her little one milky tea and I decided to try this disguise approach. So we made rooibos and added a half teaspoon of formula to 150 ml of tea and offered it as a drink with breakfast. He drank it and we stood back in excited amazement. Could this be the answer? Slowly we increased the formula in the tea and offered it as a drink at breakfast and dinner.
Finally he was taking to the formula. At one point when we were close to giving the right amount of formula powder in the tea, he stopped eating dinner and I realised he was filling up on milk. So we started only giving the milky tea at bedtime.

So at this point he was having one sippy cup (150 ml) of milky tea in tandem with his breastfeed before bed.

Around 13mnths I went to the clinic sister and we discussed the need for breast milk or formula, as I talked about earlier at this stage it’s really the calcium and other supplements in formula that they need.
It also seemed that the afternoon feed (before the sleep) was affecting dinner. One day when we were out CG was to distracted to breastfeed and its then I realised he didn't really need the feed in the afternoon. So we dropped that feed as well by offering a snack and water after the sleep and distracting him with a story before the sleep.

Now we were down to 2 feeds, 1 before bed and 1 during the night. In an attempt to train the night feed out I started to offer a breast feed on waking. So now we were having 3 feeds. It didn't work in getting rid of the night feed and he never really took to it. He always just had a tiny bit but was very impatient to get up and get moving for the day.

Then on day when he was 14mnths old we went to a wedding. That night my mom used the last of the breast milk from the freezer and as usual the sippy cup with formula.

At this point I should also say that expressing has become near impossible as the milk only seems to arrive when CG is drinking. When I try to express I get just about nothing, maybe 30ml or so. Not enough for a feed.

So I thought 'well that's is now, no more going out at night until he's weaned because I won't be able to build up another feed it will be too frustrating. However the next evening he happily took his sippy cup, we read stories and he never asked for breast milk, so I didn’t offer and he went off to sleep quite happily. That was it for him, no more breast feeding before bed.

He was still having a feed in the night and some on waking but we were making progress. The next thing that happened purely by accident is that we discovered if he got 300ml of formula at bedtime he slept a lot better. He even slept through a couple of times.

This was also around the time that he started to drop down to one sleep a day. I was pulling my hair out because he was only sleeping for an hour but then would not sleep again during the day. This just meant that I had a tired grumpy child all afternoon. I was chatting to my friend and she suggested I tried giving him some formula at this sleep. The sleep was is over lunch time and his little body was still programmed to wake up at 12 o' clock wanting food. The milk made all the difference and he started sleeping for around 2hrs at a time.

This gave me the confidence to try and subsitute a formula feed during the night instead of the breastfeed. Oh boy no wonder people give bottles at bedtime, it makes life so easy. No crying or fussing just pop in the milk and little one goes off to sleep. I know the issues with teeth and allowing a bottle in the cot however the NUK sippy cup we use is a different story. It has a one way valve in the teat which only allows liquid out of if is bitten or sucked on hard and the cup has big heavy handles. There is no possibility of him falling asleep with it in his mouth and the milk pooling and rotting his teeth.

So now at 16mnths he has a 150ml sippy cup at nap time, a 300ml cup at bedtime and another 150ml during the night (we stand the cup in the corner of the cot when we got to bed and he finds it in the night). What bliss. I am by no means sorry that I breast fed for so long, I know the benefits for my child far outweigh the sleep depravation for mommy and daddy but I am certainly enjoying this new stage.

Don't touch or you'll get sick

This past week we our whole family has fallen prey to the terrible gastronomic bug that has been going around. Curious George got it first the next day I was down and then dad the next. We are only just coming right now five days later.

On Thursday, while lying on the bathroom floor wishing I was dead, I had an epiphany. With the timing of CG getting sick he must have caught the bug from our doctors office. But where from?

Well, and perhaps you're a more experienced mom than me and you already know this, but don't let your child play with the toys at in a doctors waiting room. One sick child plays with them and the next thing you know you've got a string of infected little ones.

Well we learnt this the hard way but we will never be making that mistake again. My advice - take your own toys to the doctors office and touch as little as humanly possible. After all you don't get more sick people in one place than in a GPs waiting room.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The best formula dispenser

I have no clue about formula seeing as CG was exclusively breastfed until 13mnths and only now at 15 mnths is pretty much weaned (except for the occasional curious mommy milk drink). So I am learning the hard way about what works best.

Do not buy the Pigeon formula dispenser it is tiny and does not fit much formula at all. I exchanged it for the Munchin dispenser (looks very similar to the Avent dispenser but is half the price) however this has not been great. It tends to leak from one compartment into the other, it doesn't seal well either and we have had formula all over the floor. The pouring hole is just a hole and not a funnel shape and you always end up making a mess when trying to get it into the bottle. So I'd say do not buy any of the big round dispensers with a rotating lid (with a hole in it) and compartments.

My best friend turned me onto the best dispenser. Do buy this one, it works, its cute and best of all its cheap. The Disney dispenser can be found at Checkers and is three circular tubs which screw into one another with a funnel shaped pourer and a Pooh Bear head shaped lid. It's around R20. You can buy more than one set and screw as many tubs together as you like. What a pleasure. 

Starting Solids - this mom's story

Yesterday I was asked to a question about starting solids on our Fb page. As my response would have been too long to write in the comment box I have decided to write a short post about it.

Question:
I need some advice when is it the best to give your baby food?! My boy is now 5 months old and drinks Lactogen?! What is the best age to start and is it better at night? when do I start with vegetables? I need some advice please mom's?!

To being this is a tough one as it’s a very important decision to make but everyone has to do what's best for them and their little one. At one point I even started a detailed post about this on my Blog and then decided not to finish it. I am just a first time mom and not a professional by any means. I can suggest some websites to look at (which is how I made the decision) and tell you what we did. But in the end you have to trust your own instincts and make the decision based on what is best for you little one.*


When Curious George was around 4.5mnths old we were really struggling with night-wakings. He was exclusively breast fed. We had ruled out any other causes and it was definitely hunger. He was thriving and healthy and was a sizable baby of around 7kgs. 

What made me decide to start solids earlier than the recommended age of 6mnths was that he was fussing at the breast, almost like he was no longer happy with what he was getting and he was waking more frequently at night. We had managed to decrease the number of feeds at night before this but all of a sudden then number of night-wakings to be fed was on the rise. He was able to hold his own head and grasp a spoon.

To be honest I think it was out of pure desperation and sleeplessness (sleep deprivation has made a lot of my parenting decisions for me) that I decided to start some solids around the end of his 4th month. I started very slowly with just a tablespoon of rice cereal mixed with breast milk in the late afternoon.

I kept him on Ollie (it has no other additives) rice cereal with breast milk and later boiled water until he was 6mnths old. I have heard of mom's who start with pure homemade veggie purees but I was very worried about causing any kind of allergy (CG is now 15mnths, eating everything and no food allergies so far) because I know that a babies intestine cells are not closed until 6mnths old. Any food protein that gets through can be seen as an enemy by the body which then creates antibodies to get rid of the stuff. This can cause an allergy. This is a very simple explanation so please read the websites below for more info on allergies.

From 6mnths I began introducing the other foods slowly. I made all my own foods and stuck closely to the list of what to introduce when based on Partick Holdford's advice. You can read all about this in my Making homemade food for your baby post.

Before you start on solids I suggest you chat to the nurse at your local clinic. I am a great believer in books and the net. You can find a list of books that helped me in my Making homemade food for your baby. I also recommend the following websites:

Dr Sears

WHO

Kellymom.com

Mayo Clinic


*Please also remeber that Curious George was exclusively breastfed until around 13mnths and is still not comepletly weaned although he now drinks 99% S26 Gold (no 3) formula. So it is impossible to me to give an opnion on how being a formula fed baby might make a difference as to when to start solids.

Secret Service French toast

We've been struggling to get Curious George to eat veggies, so I've had to get super sneaky just like the CIA.

Make the French Toast egg and milk mixture as usual (I just use one egg). Add three (or more if you're feeling brave) teaspoons of a premade veggie puree to the mix. I used Ollie butternut and baby marrow puree in a jar. I used to be a purest and made my own purees but now I'm a timest and do what's fastest. Using Ollie makes me feel better than using Purity as there's no 'other stuff' in it.

Then just fry it up as usual. So that's it, keep it simple and sneaky. Curious George played with it at first but then ate it. Yayayayayay I got some veggies into him and he didn't even know.

Oh yes and I've discovered that if I use a cookie cutter to make shapes out of the bread, that are mini sized, then the food is suddenly more appealing to my toddler. Oh my what a fickle stage this is.

Grazing Platter - Getting my toddler to eat

I have been really struggling to get Curious George to eat recently. He has always had a great appetite but toddlerdom has brought on the fussies and now he's very picky, particular and difficult. Often after searching through things he'll ask for something which I diligently put together only to have him shake his head and bat my hand away. Obviously what I am doing is not working. My child cannot just live on pasta and blocks of cheese (insert laugh here for all those family members who remember that that was all I would eat as a small child) can he?

So on my best friends advice I had a look at what Dr Sears.com had to say on feeding toddlers. His ideas were novel and not something I had thought of so I decided to give it a try. It has to work better than what I have been doing. So I put together what I am calling a Grazing Platter and it worked even though CG is sick today. So from now onward bring on the grazing.

On the grazing platter today: Marmite toast sqaures, banana, oatees, dried apple rings. 

Oh yes and he specially signed teddy bear who was then invited to join in the eating fun.

Make you banana pancakes pretend that there's no world outside.....

Inspired by the Jack Johnson song Banana Pancakes and depressed by the freezing cold and rain I decided to make some comfort food for lunch for mom and tot. These are so good I had to share it with all you other cold Joburgers out there.

Banana, Apple, Cinnamon, Sugar pancakes (crepes)

Ingredients
1 Cup milk
2 eggs
3/4 cup of flour
1.5 tbs butter/marg melted
1/2 banana mashed
2tbs apple purees
1 tsp sugar
good old shake of cinnamon

Method
Beat the eggs well
Add Milk and mix
Add flour and beat till no lumps
Melt butter and then add and beat
Add banana and apple and mix
Add sugar and cinnamon

Cover the bottom of a fying pan with a ligth coating of oil
Pour in enough batter to cover the bottom of the pan with a thin layer.
Fry till the top side is dry and has small bubbles in it
Flip over and fry the other side till browned.

Eat up. Yum Yum. Perfect for a cold day.

For Curious George I used eqaul pars rice, potato and maizena and half the quatity of milk and the rest water.

Make cheap great big bibs

We were struggling to find nice big bibs that would cover Curious George's front and also make a scoop in his lap to collect food and stop it from mucking up his pants. The really nice ones I found in the shops were too hard (he hates being pricked and pinched in the neck area) or were fabric and so were too expensive to have one for each day.

So I decided to use our old drying up dish towels. With the help of my mom, who did the sewing (I can sew but I never find time to set the machine up), and a bit of creativity I now have 7 bibs which can be used and thrown in the washing machine. I generally use them for breakfast because porridge is particularly messy.

Method:
Take an ordinary dish towel and cut a whole just bigger than the diameter of your baby's head.
Cut the whole 2/3s of the way along in the longest side.
Make a band out of rib trim (found at any fabric store, it’s the stuff they use around t-shirt neck holes).
make the band slightly smaller than the hole you cut as rib trim stretches and you want the hole to sit nicely around baby's neck and not gape too much. 
Attach the band to the hole you've just cut. 

Guilt Free Tamato Sauce

Woolies makes an Italian Tamato Paste in a metal tube (find it in the sauce aisle, its around R18 a tube). Its only tamatoes, no other stuff, and they don't use the seeds so its not bitter, infact its really sweet. My little one loves to use it to dip things into. It makes a great cheat substitute for tamato sauce and there's no preservatives so I don't feel guilty that I'm letting him eat junk.

Getting a little one to have nose drops and spray.

Recently we have been through a spell of Curious George needing nose drops or spray four or five times a day. It was a complete fight and we ended up needing two people just get the stuff up his nose while he screamed. Then one day I developed a trick that worked so well I had to share it.

I pretended to spray my nose first and then made a funny face and laughed. He thought this was great. Then when I went to spray his nose he didn't complain at all. After each spray I laughed like I had done when I sprayed my own nose. In the end it turns out that the spray is not so bad if you know it’s not scary.

Coloured Face Cloths for dirty faces

Buy brightly coloured face clothes for wiping little arms and faces after meals that way you won't see the food stains to badly after they've been washed and reused a million times. Pick n Pay sell great 5 packs for around R20.

The best saline solution for nose clearing.

Curious George has trouble with post nasal drip and he definitely has some form of hayfever so we often have to deal with a stuffy nose. We've found that the best saline solution is Sterimar Bebe, not to be confused with the ordinary Sterimar which is for adults and older children ( the bebe one is yellow, blue and white not just blue and white). This stuff is pricy but worth every cent. The spray is much easier to use than drops and the special nozzle fits well into small nostrils.