Baby carriers for mom's little baby

I love finding new, interesting blogs and it turns out my latest find is a fellow Clever Girls Collective member. Thanks, Mail Carrier is by a mom of two who writes:

about the love that my daughters and I have for receiving mail and how happy the mail carrier makes us when he comes driving down our street.

She does reviews and giveaways of mom- and kid-friendly products. One of her November posts made me smile: an Ergo baby carrier for kids! Or more specifically, for their dolls.

Courtesy of ErgoBaby

I have loved my Ergo baby carrier and extol its virtues to every new parent who asks about carrier options. But I had to introduce my mom to the benefits of babywearing back when Ava was an infant.

While I was busy reading reams of pregnancy and child development magazines about new research in baby development, attachment parenting and the nurturing needs of newborns, my mom and aunts were convinced that the long-since debunked advice they'd been given 30+ years ago was all that was needed to whip this new, needy (in their eyes) family member into shape.

Case in point: Ava preferred to be carried a lot as an infant (still does) and would cry a lot with my mom initially, who split caregiver duties with J. for most of the day when I went back to work after three months maternity leave.

My aunts, calling from across the country to check in on the new grandmother and new great-niece, could hear all the crying in the background, and told my mom that holding the baby would spoil her and to feed her rice cereal from birth (!) to make her sleep longer and cry less. "That's what the baby nurse told me when your cousin was born," she explained. Said cousin now being in his mid-30s.

Ahem. I was SO not cool with that and explained (diplomatically) what doctors have learned about the immaturity of the infant digestive system and I trusted my gut, which told me that Ava just needed to be held and interacted with, not left in a swing or crib for hours on end, which was the norm back in the day.

So I took a sling infant carrier I'd been using at home to my mom and had her try it. She called me at work hours later to say, "I've had her in this thing all morning and she hasn't said a peep! She's just as quiet and content, hanging here on my hip just looking around." Oh really. Imagine that. :-)

Ava - 10 months

As an older new mom friend of mine told her skeptical mother who pooh-poohed her swaddling and babywearing techniques as 'Not what we did when you were a baby': "Yeah, it's amazing what can change in 40 years!"

We tried out several carriers after the Bjorn and the sling, finally discovering the Ergo. Ava at 10 months in the Ergo weighed much less than 20 pounds. J. and I loved that we could each use it it with minimal adjustment for each of us, rather than having to use separate carriers as we'd done up until then: one for his large frame and one for my smaller one.

Dylan - 9 months, Ava - 3 years

Fast forward three years and Dylan, at nine months, weighed about 25 pounds - just a couple pounds less than his three year old sister. But he still rode (and currently rides) comfortably in the same Ergo. He's 11 months and 27 pounds pounds now and though I still carry him for short trips out and about, afterwards, it feels like I've done a major buns and thigh workout, sans elliptical.

With Christmas just around the corner and Ava in need of a doll to replace one left somewhere while spending the weekend with my folks, I may spring for the Ergo Baby Carrier and a new doll for her. After all, it's never too early to teach kids how to be loving parents to their babies.

Thanksgiving visuals

Since we didn't host Thanksgiving dinner this year, or the cleaning and entertaining hullaballoo that goes with it, I was free to grab a few shots on the big day.

My mother-in-law working her hostessing magic. Yes, those are three stacked pies, next to another pie and a cake. Altogether, there were at least nine different desserts, including bar cookies, a red velvet cake, and a 7-Up cake (so light and tasty).

Mac and cheese and green bean casserole.

Clockwise: hot croissants in the bowl, roast turkey, baked turkey, J.'s salmon, more mac and cheese, and ham. No deep fried turkey this year. :-( My arteries will probably thank me later.

A beautiful table for the grown folks.

The kids table with Ava in the back with two of her more than a dozen cousins who came.

Jones family: poorly cropped, but happy, healthy, and thankful in 2010.

Sprinting to Christmas

For the first time ever, we have our tree up more than a week or two before Christmas. Maybe it's a harbinger of a good year ahead that we're starting off ahead of the game on this annual task.

While the kids napped in the back, we took turns scouring the rows of trees at a nearby nursery. Our main criteria? One that smells good and was full. As if reading our minds, there was a section labeled "very fragrant" and therein we found a lovely Noble fir. Fortunately for me, a guy who worked there told me, because despite a lifetime in the tree-loving Pacific Northwest, I only know a handful of tree types by name. Usually I just call them what they look like. As in, big tree, skinny tree, tree blocking my view, etc.

 After loading it up and tying it securely...

we made the short trek home and had it up decorated within a few hours, after stopping to eat dinner, get ready for work and school tomorrow, and finally getting the kids bathed, read to, and put to bed. And let me tell you: it smells like we're just a present and a reindeer short of Christmas in this camp!

City-centric toddler books and other good kid reads

Nearly a year ago, I came across this useful post by a local mom about good city-centric books for toddlers. They provide a nice contrast to the typical farm and country life themes that seem to dominate a lot of kids books, and which I realized are only relevant for us when we take Ava and Dylan to fairs, petting zoos and harvest festivals around the region.

Although I spent my first couple years and many summers on my grandmother's farm in rural Louisiana and enjoy the open space, fresh food and other benefits of country living, I've grown up in a major metropolitan area and love it here.


The article is linked below and I pulled out summaries of the books mentioned, plus a few others mentioned by parents in Amazon.com reviews as good toddler reads. I’ll be checking the library and now Barnes and Noble NOOKkids online bookstore for them soon.

We’ve pretty much run through the many books in Ava’s library and are searching for new, more “mature” additions. To liven things up last summer, we started leaving off the last word in rhyming favorites like Goodnight Moon so that Ava could fill in the blank or elaborate.

Natasha: “Goodnight comb. And goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody. Goodnight…”
Ava: “Mush! Like oatmeal. I loooove oatmeal.”

Now she's memorized favorites like most of the Ezra Jack Keats books and the Paperback Princess (my personal favorite) and she "reads" them to us, word for word. It's still amazing to me, but not surprising I guess after I read this Wisconsin Council on Children and Families PDF that found:

...advances in neuroscience have helped crystallize earlier findings, bringing new clarity and understanding to the field of early childhood brain development. Children are born ready to learn. They cultivate 85 percent of their intellect, personality and skills by age five. The first months and years of life set the stage for lifelong development...

Research shows that the richness of a young child’s verbal interactions has a dramatic effect on vocabulary and school readiness, with differences correlated to socio-economic status. A watershed study on the topic found that by age 3, the observed cumulative vocabulary for children in professional families was 1,116 words; for working class families it was about 740, and for welfare families 525.

Fascinating. And no parental pressure, right? ;-) But it just reinforces the approach I gravitated to with Ava and Dylan from the start: I talk to them using big words and concepts, even if they don't understand them now. It introduces them to new words, and in some cases, provides an opportunity to explain more advanced concepts in kid-friendly language.

Which is why Ava was using the word "awesome" in the proper context at 18 months, and now describes her brother as "mischievous," and tells us when she's "frustrated." Sure, she also asked when we would see "Appetizer" again. "Do you mean 'Avatar'?" I asked. "Oh, right," she said with a smile. But she's clearly absorbing many of the words we use with her every day.

11 month old Dylan, who is not as engaged by books at this stage as Ava was, simply sits still for four to five pages before doing his baby Hulk impersonation: "Hulk no like book! Hulk throw book, find noise. Hulk like noise!"

I'm looking for more tactile titles for him. He's clearly absorbing the torrent of words too, focusing intently as we say the word for each facial feature he points to. But he is much more physically adept than Ava was at the same age. The following titles look promising for him and Ava.

City-centric reads: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005735.html


Also, Max Makes a Million by Maira Kalman

Max is a New York dog, but his dream is to live in Paris and be a poet.

"More More More," Said the Baby by Vera B. Williams

A trio of multigenerational, multiracial "love stories" about three pairs of babies and their grown-ups.

Ten, Nine, Eight by Molly Bang

It's sort of a "Goodnight Moon" tale, but interesting. The book combines your average counting book (or, in this case, counting backwards book) with a bedtime sleepy story as an African-American girl and her father count down to bedtime.

Can you recommend any that have become favorites for toddlers and preschoolers you know?

Post-Thanksgiving thanks

Thanksgiving itself was fairly low-key since we didn't host this year. J. did do his usual bang-up job of cooking several salmon fillets to accompany the turkeys, ham, mac and cheese, green bean casserole, stuffing, yams, potatoes, and copious desserts his mom provided. It was a lot of food but still scaled back from previous years, mainly due to my mother-in-law realizing that doling out or storing the leftovers was becoming as much of a chore as cooking it all.

So this year, the word of the day was moderation. For the first time in many years, my eyes were not bigger than my stomach and I did not over-indulge. It made for a much more enjoyable evening to not have to lay on the couch moaning with a Pepto-Bismal-stained upper lip. I simply had two plates of small samples of everything I wanted and didn't eat any dessert since I was already full. Then I packed leftovers and the desserts to take home for the next day.

My parents and I made the rounds to different relatives, so I didn't see them on the actual day. But I did see my mom's brother and sister and my cousin, as well as my husband's family, where Ava and Dylan spent hours playing with a passel of cousins, leaving them giggly and worn out by the end of the night.

Altogether, despite the cold snap we are recovering from, it was a lovely day. So I am thankful for moderation and health for myself, for family and friends, for a happy, healthy husband and kids, for a job, especially one that I enjoy and that allows us to have food in our stomachs, clothes on our back, and a roof over our heads. Which is what I give thanks for every night.

I am well-educated, self-sufficient, healthy, and I live in a developed country, so there are innumerable things for which I'm thankful and I often preface some minor annoyance with "Caution: first world whine ahead..." to make clear that I know I've got a lot working in my favor when I wake up every day (waking up: something else to be thankful for!).

But I will be striving in the coming weeks to keep that 'attitude of gratitude' as some say, as we head into the next year.