Parenting Children

I know that many parents are feeding their children, and themselves a healthier diet these days. If there is any booty in your house, you better get rid of it quickly. The FDA just recalled Veggie Booty nationwide due to possible contamination with salmonella bacteria.

The FDA has had 52 reports of illness in 17 states, beginning in March. Almost all of the victims have been children under age 10, mostly toddlers, which is very scary.

Throw away all of your booty, mates.

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When you are eating for two, you need to avoid foods for two, anything that could harm you or your baby.
Here is a list of foods to avoid when you are pregnant, and as with anything, consult your doctor if you have questions.

Raw or undercooked meat or fish- Undercooked meats or fish could have bacteria in them that could make you sick. Also? No more cookie dough, raw eggs is a no-no.

Big Fish- Swordfish, shark or tuna. Larger fish carry larger amounts of mercury in them, which is known to cause impairs in a child’s brain and nervous system. Pregnant and nursing women may safely eat up to 6 ounces of albacore tuna fish. Try not to eat more then 12 ounces of seafood, that is low in mercury, a week.

Unpasteurized dairy- like soft cheeses or anything unpasteurized juices like ciders.

High risk food allergy foods- your baby could be at risk for developing food allergies. Avoiding foods including peanuts and peanut products during pregnancy (and nursing) may reduce allergy risk in susceptible children.

Herbal supplements and herbal tea- Herbs are natural, but all herbal products should be given the green light by your doctor before you take them.

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I think I was lucky because I did not head into the “picky eater” phase of parenthood for about 3.5 years. My twins would eat anything handed to them. Fresh fruit, veggies, meat, chicken, grains and pasta, everything was eaten with glee. Now? Not so much.

I have to hide veggies into thing they like and serve veggies with dip (that also has veggies hidden) and give them ketchup to dip any form of protein in. Kids eat with their eyes, just like we do, so we do a lot of different shaped sandwiches. These sandwich molds are perfect for our family. they come in four shapes: a heart, a circle and small and large triangles. It removes the bane of every child’s existence- crusts!
It is cute for children’s parties and they are dishwasher safe.

Fresh finds also has ice cream sandwich molds, if you need another reason for your child to want ice cream!

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Women who have morning sickness will tell you it is horrible to experience queasiness and nausea all day and night for weeks or even months. There may be a silver lining though, women who have morning sickness may have a 30 percent less chance of developing breast cancer then the women who didn’t experience any morning sickness.

The study was conducted in women 35-79 from two Western New York counties between 1996 and 2001. The hormones that make a woman sick also may protect the woman against cancer cells.

Obviously more research is needed but it can be somewhat reassuring for a woman who is dealing with morning sickness at any point in their pregnancy.

breast cancer, morning sickness, moms, pregnancy

A Newark NJ school district has apologized to a student and issued new yearbooks after they blacked out a picture of two boys kissing in all of the yearbooks.

In the photo, a student Andre Jackson is seen turning his head back over his right shoulder and kissing his boy friend who does not attend that school. It was blacked out after the district’s assistant superintendent who oversees the city’s high schools, was concerned that the photo could upset parents.

The photo was on a personal tribute page, that Andre Jackson paid for himself. Apparently the yearbook had pictures of heterosexual couples kissing throughout the book that were not blacked out.

I am not sure I would want my child’s yearbook to have any pictures of couples kissing, I don’t really think it is necessary. I guess if it were a personal page, which was paid for by the student, censoring it is not right. I personally have no problem. with same sex couples, or anyone showing affection in public, to a degree. I know that I would not like a picture blacked out of my yearbook, that I paid for, if it was an issue of a suggestive picture, it should have been brought up before the books went to press. The boy should have had the option to swap out the picture for one that was less “suggestive” if that was the problem.

What do you think about what the school district did? Do they owe the student a public apology?

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When we had kids we decided that we didn’t want a house full of stuffed animals. They are dust collectors and unless it was so sweet and adorable and soft we didn’t want it. So we never bought stuffed animals, besides the ones I had from my childhood, the ones my daughter wouldn’t let go of in the store and the ones the grandparents and other relatives gave them for gifts.

Now we have a house full of stuffed animals.
I vacuum them and I wash some of them but I know others will not survive a ride in the washing machine but I am disgusted thinking about dust mites living on my children’s best friends.
You can always freeze the bugs right out of them! Place the stuffed animals in a ziplock bag and leave it in the freezer overnight, the cold kills the dust mites and leaves your friends bug free.

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A TWO year old has just become a member of Mensa. This makes her the youngest member of British Mensa. She scored 152 points by answering questions even kids twice her age would have trouble with. This score puts her in the top 0.2 percent, or one in 500, of the population’s most intelligent people.

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I once read that the number one cause of death of pregnant women is murder. I am not sure if that is 100% true but with high profile cases like Laci Peterson, Lori Hacking and now Jessie Davis, it is not hard to believe.

How is it that these women are murdered not only by crazy women that want to steal their babies but by their partners, husbands and fathers of their unborn babies. At one of the happiest times of their lives, they are killed in very horrific ways. I know for me the Laci Peterson case was very emotional and heart wrenching because she went missing when I was pregnant with our twins and she was due just a couple weeks after I was.
Murder of anyone is horrific but to think of a woman who was just starting our her career as a mother and the innocent baby who never had a chance to take one breath, well, it is unimaginable.
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Let your children see how things grow. My children help me with watering and weeding our gardens but I like to do something inside the house that they can watch more closely.

Get a jam jar or glass jar and wet a paper towel until it is damp but not soaking wet and place in glass jar. Add about a dozen lentils or beans and cover jar. Place it in indirect sunlight and watch them grow, you will see shoots in 5-7 days!

For vegetables like potatoes, avocado pits or onions, get a jar and fill it 2/3 of the way up with water. Place three toothpicks into the veggie so that the bottom third of it will be underwater. Place in indirect sunlight.
You will see growth in 3-5 days.
This one is cool because you get to see the shoots out of the top of the veggie but also the root system.

You can also grow a small garden with seeds. You a plastic egg carton and fill each section with potting mix 3/4 full. Moisten and press down on soil. Place seeds either in soil or on top (depending on the seed). Close top and place in indirect light.

Happy growing!

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Do you have all of those plastic Easter eggs still hanging around your home? I always do, I want to save them for next year but I end up letting the kids play with them in their kitchen but I end up throwing them away one half at a time.
Don’t throw then away, I have games you can play with those eggs.

-How about hot potato?

-Put names of animals on a little piece of paper and place them in the eggs. Let one kid at a time pick an egg and act out the animal and have the other children guess what it is. My kids love this and they can’t read so I read it and whisper in their ear what animal it is.

-Put a egg on a spoon and have races in the backyard, the person who can keep it on the spoon through the finish line wins!

-Put a coin in one egg and have one other egg that is empty(have as many eggs as you have kids). Have your children chose an egg whoever has the coin gets to keep it and do that “thing” that day, decide where to go to lunch, bake with mom, is first in line etc.

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A couple of months after I found out I was pregnant, I panicked. Not because I was having twins, but because I thought I was not smart enough to have kids.
What if they needed help with their fourth grade math homework? What if I couldn’t find Uganda on a map? When they ask about photosynthesis, will I be able to explain it?
I panicked and I went out to buy presidential flash cards.

During my pregnancy I memorized facts about our presidents, and the order they served in, things I learned in school but I lost when I had to fill my brain with things like “where did I put that dry cleaning” or “what the hell should we have for dinner tonight”. You know, the important stuff.

It is just a matter of time that our kids become smarter then us and the fact that my 4 year old daughter just came in the office and declared ” I know how to spell bear, B-E-A-R”, I am betting it is sooner then later. That is why I never watch the show “Are you smarter then a 5th grader”. I don’t want to know.

If you have to know if you could pass a fifth grade test, you can go over to Fox’s web site and take a quiz.
I am not going to, instead I will just be here studying to try to delay the inevitable. When my kids find out they are indeed way smarter then their mother.
I am just hoping they don’t realize that until they are at least in double digits! A girl can hope.

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I am trying to get my kids to drink more water. As it is, their “juice” is 90% water and 10% juice. When we go to a restaurant I still water down their juice and if they ever get a sip before I can water it down, their eyes go as wide as saucers. “So this is what juice really tastes like”, I am sure they say to themselves.

I love water and I drink it every day, all day. My kids would rather drink juice, of course, but I was encouraged that those days would be over when the nice ladies of Hint sent me some water to try.

Voted best flavored water by Health magazine, hint is a water that is different from everything else you have tried. It has no sugar, no preservatives, no artificial sweeteners and zero calories. What could be better?
It just has a nice, natural, slight flavor to the water that your body needs and loves.

If you are looking for something different to drink for you or your family that is healthy, hint is perfect. Don’t see hint at a store near you? Don’t worry you can even buy it online!
Try all the great flavors, but my favorite is pomegranate-tangerine.

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The last time we went away we took our children to visit their grandparents in Florida and to Disney when they were 35 months old. We had day trips, met Goofy, fed animals, rode on golf carts and swam in pools. We made great memories and had a great time but my kids? They don’t remember anything.

Well, they remember somethings but not everything. I didn’t want that to happen again. Now when we go away on vacations, I try to make the memories easier to recall for my kids. Instead of just walking on the beach, we collect shells to take home and make a necklace with or put into a cute container in their room. Maybe we buy a sweatshirt that has the name of the place we were so they can wear in in the winter and remember where we were when we bought it.
At the end of the vacation we make their own little photo album or scrapbook for them to look back on.
We will have movie night and watch our old home movies with popcorn and lemonade.

How to you remember your family vacations?

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About 1.5 million Thomas & Friends railroad sets, trains and buildings are being recalled the Consumer Product Safety Commission said on Wednesday.

The wooden railway toys, made in China, are being voluntarily recalled because some may contain lead paint. Lead is very dangerous to adults and children but young children under the age of six are especially vulnerable to lead’s harmful health effects, because their brains and central nervous system are still being formed. For them, even very low levels of exposure can result in reduced IQ, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, behavioral problems, stunted growth, impaired hearing, and kidney damage.

You can find out more information on the recall here.

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Looking for some easy, cheap activities to do with youe children this summer? I know I am always looking for something fun for me and the kids.
I have two suggestions for some cool summer fun:

Make a Bird Feeder
you will need pine cones, peanut butter, string and bird seed

-Take a good size pine cone and tine the string onto the end of it making a loop that it can hang from
-Roll the pine cone in peanut butter that you have placed on a plate or bowl
-Then roll the cone onto the seeds
-Hang on a tree branch that you can see from your window, and watch all the birds come to eat.
This is perfect to do in the winter months too when food is hard to find for birds.

Indoor Sandbox
Do your kids want a sandbox but you don’t want the mess? Or maybe you are looking for an indoor idea like a sandbox on rainy days?
Why not make your own?
I purchased a large clear container with a lid from a discount store and then I purchased a large bag of white rice from a bulk store. Total cost was about $9.00

Then I put the rice in the container and let them play in it on the kitchen floor. We had some sand toys to play with along with some old plastic cups and they had a ball. You can even keep this outside if you didn’t have a big yard for a traditional sandbox.
Just as much fun but not nearly as messy.

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